Cases in Florida have climbed by 9,483 in the past seven days, the biggest-ever weekly increase, but Governor Ron DeSantis -- a Republican and staunch Trump ally -- has given no indication he’d be willing to roll back the state’s reopening five weeks after it began. This week, the seven-day average for new hospitalizations was rising again after a steady downward trajectory previously. Most Florida businesses have returned to operations, including bars, movie theaters and some theme parks.

On Thursday, even as the numbers continued to tick up sharply, Florida forged ahead. DeSantis appeared maskless at an event to celebrate bringing the Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic Games to Brevard County this summer. His administration unveiled recommendations for how to reopen schools in August. And, climactically, Trump said he will accept the Republican nomination that month in Jacksonville. The president had been in a feud with North Carolina’s governor over social distancing requirements at the Republican convention in Charlotte.

In Florida, smaller cities and towns that were initially spared by the new virus have seen some of the biggest percentage jumps in the past week, fitting a similar pattern across states.

DeSantis has repeatedly attributed Florida’s uptick to expanded testing and, for weeks, he relied on the low positivity rate to justify his continued rollback. Lately, as the positivity rate rose, he’s begun to acknowledge outbreaks but on Thursday stressed that they were mostly isolated among long-term care facilities, prisons and farmworkers.

“Those tend to be the areas where you see more significant outbreaks,” he said from Melbourne. “General public: You do see cases, but if you do 2,000 tests one day, 4,000 tests the next, you’re going to get more positives when you do the 4,000.”

In Arizona, where virus cases increased in recent weeks, the hospital system Banner Health this week tweeted that the increase in coronavirus is worrisome, “and also correlates with a rise in cases that we are seeing in our hospital ICUs.” The number of Covid-19 patients on ventilators had quadrupled since mid-May, it said.

But on Thursday, Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, said the state has hospital capacity and claimed “misinformation” had been spread on the subject.

Ducey acknowledged that virus cases are increasing and “not the direction we want to go,” but said a new lockdown isn’t under discussion.

Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and a former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said that when the state reopened, it implemented little in the way of public-health requirements, and as a result some businesses like bars have come to look like they did pre-pandemic.

“This all happened after a really successful stay-at-home order,” he said. “Everyone’s sacrificed, everyone got canned, all these people are unemployed, and then when we came out of it, it’s like, ‘Party on, bro.’”