The rise in cases helps explain why the nation continues to record more than 20,000 new cases a day even as some of the original hot spots, including New York, have seen dramatic declines. While some officials in states seeing increases attribute the rise to increased testing, and the number of cases per capita in Texas and Florida remains low, some health experts see worrying signs that the virus continues to make inroads.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said that in some parts of the country the rising number of new cases reflected more testing, but that in other areas, the increasing number of hospitalizations suggested a disturbing uptick in new infections.
“Whenever you loosen mitigation, you can expect you’ll see new infections, I think it would be unrealistic to think that you won’t,” he said in an interview on ABC News’s “Powerhouse Politics” podcast. “The critical issue is how do you prevent those new infections that you see from all of a sudden emerging into something that is a spike, and that’s the thing that we hope we will be able to contain.”
Texas, which avoided the worst of the virus in the early spring and was one of the first states to make moves to reopen its economy, identified more than 2,000 new cases on both Wednesday and Thursday, the highest daily totals yet. The counties that include Houston and Dallas are reporting some of the nation’s largest single-day rises. Cases are also trending upward around Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Lubbock, McAllen and Midland.
“To be quite frank, I have not been thrilled with what I’m seeing in terms of folks not wearing masks at a high enough rate,” said Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, who attributed the increased caseload to an expansion of testing and the reopening of the economy.
Harris County, which includes Houston, created a new color-coded system this week to gauge the virus and said that the current threat level was orange, the second-most severe, meaning that there was a “significant and uncontrolled” level of Covid-19.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio said he was concerned about the pace of the state’s phased reopening plan. “We’re kind of blowing through phases before we have an understanding of the impact of that decision,” he said.
