Texas, Florida among states relaxing COVID-19 shutdown measures. Is that safe to do?
Some states are beginning to relax some coronavirus lockdown measures, media outlets reported.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order on Friday opening some state parks.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order reopening golf courses, public and private marinas, bait shops and outdoor shooting ranges.
Beaches in Jacksonville, Florida, reopened on Friday to restricted hours and prohibiting some activities, including sunbathing, according to a news release.
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have reopened marinas and boatyards for personal use, Business Insider reported.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott announced an executive order on Friday to reopen some businesses.
Ohio, Idaho and North Dakota have said that nonessential businesses can open on May 1, according to NPR.
The White House said during a press briefing on Friday that there were enough tests to begin the first stage of reopening the economy, The Hill reported.
“Our best scientists and health experts assess that states today have enough tests to implement the criteria of phase one if they choose to do so,” Vice President Mike Pence said, according to The Hill.
Health experts say widespread testing should determine whether governors should reopen their states from lockdown but that the country is still behind, CNN reported.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the U.S. currently conducts less than 150,000 tests a day and that’s not enough to reopen states.
“If we were just testing the highest priority people and nobody else, we’d need about three times as many tests,” Frieden told CNN. Because the U.S. is testing “lower priority people,” there needs to be 10 to 20 times more tests, Frieden said.
In order to reopen the U.S. by the middle of May, there needs to be 500,000 to 700,000 tests performed per day, The New York Times reported, citing Harvard University estimates.
“The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, told Vox. “If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”
This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 3:17 PM with the headline "Texas, Florida among states relaxing COVID-19 shutdown measures. Is that safe to do?."