It’s beginning to look as if a second wave of coronavirus infections is emerging in the US, especially in the southern and western parts of the country. I saw on CBS This Morning yesterday that the rate of new cases is increasing in 19 states, and the number of new cases in three states — South Carolina, Florida and Arizona — have reached record highs.
Here in the vicinity of New York City, which was the epicenter of the epidemic a couple of months ago, serious restrictions have been imposed to limit the spread of the virus even as the economy is poised to open back up. These include social distancing and mask wearing as well as limits on the number of people who can be admitted to indoor and outdoor venues. (My mother’s condo association sent an email to residents this week saying that the community swimming pool would reopen on June 22, but that residents would have to comply with outdoor pool standards imposed by the New Jersey Department of Health that were detailed in 11 single-spaced pages.)
But as onerous as they may seem to some, people in this region appear to be complying with the restrictions. No supermarket around here will admit any customer who isn’t wearing a mask, and no one I know is hosting parties indoors.
But that does not appear to be the case in some parts of the country that were not as hard-hit by the epidemic during the first wave. I gather that many people in the South and West feel their states’ shutdown orders were an over-reaction to an epidemic that had not yet effected anyone they knew. And even now that infection rates are increasing in those areas, neither residents nor government officials are inclined to support a reimplementation of those policies.
It’s anybody’s guess how bad things will get, or whether at some point those same officials will reverse themselves, but for now it looks as if the groundwork is being laid, in the form of lax social distancing measures and a spurning of face masks, for a surge of infections and deaths in parts of the country that had previously been largely spared.