U.S. not seeing spike in COVID-19 in places reopening

U.S. authorities are not seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases in the places that are reopening, but warn that it's still too early to determine such trends.

"We are seeing that in places that are opening, we're not seeing this spike in cases," health secretary Alex Azar said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed."

Azar, however, noted that identifying and reporting new infections takes time. A critical part of reopening will be surveillance of flu-like symptoms in the population and other hospital admissions data, as well as testing of asymptomatic individuals, he said.

"It's still early days," Azar cautioned in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation." He said data will take some time to come in from states that reopened early such as Georgia and Florida.

Nearly all 50 U.S. states have begun to allow some businesses to reopen and residents to move more freely, but only 14 states have met the federal government's guidelines for lifting measures aimed at fighting the pandemic, according to a Reuters analysis.

The U.S. is the world's worst-affected country by the COVID-19 pandemic, having registered more than 1.4 million cases and over 89,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Azar put the onus on local governments to handle reopening plans, as cooped-up Americans begin to flock to bars, beaches, and parks.

"These are very localized determinations. There should not be a one size fits all to reopening but reopen we must because it's not health versus the economy. It's health versus healthy," he said, adding there were serious health consequences to not reopening.

(REUTERS)