Birx warns against COVID ‘myths’ amid third wave

Birx warns against COVID ‘myths’ amid third wave

Individual U.S. states scrambled on Sunday to impose lockdowns to stem coronavirus spikes amid a lack of national leadership on how to curb infections until vaccines are widely available in the spring.

Gavino Garay has more.

As California was set to go into lockdown at midnight on Sunday and other U.S. states scrambled to impose new restrictions, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator said she was concerned that Americans who parrot myths about the deadly disease were undermining the country's response to the worsening health crisis.

Dr. Deborah Birx on NBC's "Meet The Press" Sunday expressed her frustration over the mixed messages coming from the Trump administration that are reflected in some Americans' perceptions about masks, social distancing and super-spreader events.

Only about half of the 50 U.S. states have enacted new restrictions in the last month as cases, deaths and hospitalizations hit record levels across the country, which lacks national leadership on controlling the virus.

Fourteen states do not mandate masks.

Birx said that "across the Sun Belt, we have governors and mayors who have cases equivalent to what they had in the summertime yet aren't putting in the same policies and mitigations that they put in the summer that they know changed the course of this pandemic across the South," adding "This is the worst event that this country will face." While many businesses are shutting down, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, says schools should reopen before bars do.

In New York City, some public schools in the nation's largest school district prepared to reopen for daily in-person classes on Monday after a citywide campus shutdown.

The U.S. remains the leader in global infections and deaths, reporting nearly 190,000 new infections on average each day and accounts for one in every 20 deaths reported worldwide.