Coronavirus: Masks in the home next, White House doctor warns

Some Americans ‘may need to wear masks at home to protect their households’ as the nation enters uncharted territory.

Donald Trump looks on Deborah Birx takes the daily briefing in March. Picture: AFP

Some Americans may need to wear masks at home to protect their households as the nation enters uncharted territory in its battle against the coronavirus, the White House said.

Deborah Birx, the US coronavirus task force co-ordinator, warned that steeply rising infections in urban and rural America marked a “new phase” of the pandemic, which is more broadly entrenched than when it took hold in a few large cities in the spring.

“What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Dr Birx told CNN. Rural areas were as much at risk as cities.

The virus has killed more than 150,000 Americans and infected 4.6 million, over a quarter of the reported global caseload.

Americans “definitely need to take more precautions” to slow the spread, she said.

“If you’re in multi-generation households and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming … you have individuals in your house with comorbidities,” Dr Birx said.

A new composite forecast from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention projected that deaths could reach up to 182,000 over the next three weeks, climbing at a rate of more than 1000 per day.

There were almost two million new American cases last month, more than double the number of any previous month. California, which lost control of its reopening procedure after suppressing the virus early on, has since become the first state to pass 500,000 infections and is still straining to flatten its infection curve.

Other serious outbreaks were concentrated in the southern Sun Belt states of Florida, Texas and Arizona.

Officials warn of imminent surges in parts of the Midwest, such as Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois, and, potentially, a resurgence of infections in some of the eastern areas, such as New Jersey and New York, that were hit hardest early on but had driven infections down by the middle of the northern summer.

Alaska and Hawaii, the furthest flung states, are among those with the fastest rising rates of infection.

Amid mounting evidence that President Donald Trump’s inconsistent leadership has failed to check the pandemic’s advance, a growing number of medical experts have urged the administration to change tack.

The Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University, which has been at the forefront of compiling data on the virus, said in a report last week: “Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges offered an equally blunt message in a separate report: “If the nation does not change course, deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands.”

A third study, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued for a national strategy, whether one advanced by the federal government or by states working in concert.

The Times