On Friday, four Arizona mayors called on Republican Governor Doug Ducey to take stronger actions to curtail rising cases. The most important measure, they said, is passing a statewide mask mandate to supplement existing local requirements.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat, criticized Ducey for agreeing that masks protect people but nonetheless declining to issue a mandate. “You can’t say you believe in it and not implement the policy,” Gallego said. “It’s like winking and introducing uncertainty.”
Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary, has defended the state’s overnight curfew as a way to prevent the need for later, harsher measures. It also aims to protect hospitals from a sudden flood of Covid patients.
“We want to make sure we protect that hospital capacity, so those who need care can get it,” Ghaly said.
Failed Curfews
Other medical experts, including William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, said partial measures like curfews have often failed in countries such as Israel and the Netherlands. Broader restrictions are necessary, he said, particularly on gatherings involving young people.
State and federal governments then need to provide financial aid to the unemployed and businesses forced to close. “I feel the pain of the people hit economically,” Hanage said. “Those people deserve to be helped.”
What remains noticeably absent is a robust federal response, he said. Preoccupied with trying to change the election’s outcome, Trump hasn’t implemented new policies. President-elect Joe Biden, who promised in the campaign that his response would be tougher, has ruled out national lockdowns.
“Every region, every area, every community can be different,” Biden said Thursday. “So there’s no circumstance that I can see which would require a total national shutdown.”
Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general who’s one of Biden’s top three advisers on the virus, said that based on what the nation has learned about Covid-19 since the spring, the preferred approach to fighting it is “a dial that we turn up and down, depending on severity.”
That has left some governors, including Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, taking more dramatic steps. She’s closing bowling alleys, movie theaters, casinos and other places people gather indoors on Nov. 30. The Democrat said the two-week “pause” was aimed at reducing the spread and preventing harsher restrictions at Christmas.
“I really had hoped to avoid this, because I know the financial pain that’s going on in Rhode Island,” she said. “But I’m in a world of all bad choices, and I’m trying to pick the least bad of the options.”
—With assistance from David R. Baker and Brenna Goth.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.