With President Donald Trump's rally in Tulsa less than a week away, health experts warned that the indoor venue and potentially large crowd could help spread the coronavirus, putting attendees and others at risk.
"I'm concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event," Bruce Dart, director of the Tulsa city and county health department, told the Tulsa World. "And I'm also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well."
The scheduled rally comes as new infections are trending upward in at least 21 states across the South and the West, prompting some governors to rethink reopening plans and raising new concerns that the country could be a long way from containing the outbreak.
Alabama, Oregon and South Carolina are among the states with the biggest increases. Alabama saw a 92% increase in its seven-day average, while Oregon's seven-day average was up 83.8% and South Carolina's was up 60.3%.
Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, warned that waves of infection could come "back and forth" for months. But Fauci was optimistic about the development of a vaccine that could be ready by the end of the year, with several good candidates already in progress.
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In the meantime, the indoor venues and large crowds anticipated for Trump's rally Saturday in Tulsa and for the Republican National Convention in August could help spread the coronavirus, putting attendees and others at risk, infectious-disease expert Michael Osterholm told Fox News.
Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said on Fox News Sunday that chanting and shouting can help aerosolize the virus, exposing the thousands of people expected to attend both events.
"Would I want my loved ones in a setting like that? Absolutely not," Osterholm said. "And it wouldn't matter about politics; I wouldn't want them there."
The venue for the Tulsa rally, the BOK Center, has the capacity to seat more than 19,000 people, but Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Sunday that 800,000 people have signed up.
When registering for tickets, people were required to acknowledge a disclaimer that they would not hold the Trump campaign or the venue liable if they got sick.
Osterholm said he also thought that the nationwide protests in the past few weeks over police brutality could increase the risk of transmission of the coronavirus, especially with police using tear gas and with detained protesters being held in cramped jails. Several National Guard members in Washington and Nebraska have tested positive, but Osterholm warned that what happens in the next two weeks will be "telling," especially as more states are reopening.
Osterholm added that it is nearly impossible to predict the effects of these large gatherings and reopenings.
"We're not driving this tiger; we're riding it," he said.
Even if cases continue to decline in the summer, Osterholm said, the worry remains: Like influenza, the coronavirus could return with a vengeance in the fall.
Osterholm said the virus won't slow its spread until it has infected 60% to 70% of the country. He estimated that the virus has infected about 5%.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., was asked during a Sunday appearance on CNN whether he would wear a mask to the Trump rally Saturday. He said he "hadn't decided on that."
"You see actually very few masks in Oklahoma now," Lankford said. He added that his state was "far ahead of the rest of the country" in terms of having controlled the threat of the virus, even though cases in Tulsa and across the state have spiked in the past week.
Dart, of the Tulsa health department, said he wished the Trump campaign would postpone the event because of a "significant increase in our case trends."
"I think it's an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic," Dart said.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard's Global Health Institute, called the rally "an extraordinarily dangerous move for the people participating and the people who may know them and love them and see them afterward."
Trump supporters arriving from neighboring cities and states could carry the virus back home, Jha said. "I'd feel the same way if Joe Biden were holding a rally," Jha said.
A YEAR FROM NORMAL
Fauci said in an interview published Sunday that it will be about a year before things return to normal.
He also told the British Telegraph newspaper that it probably will be months before travelers from Britain and the European Union are allowed in the U.S. and that the real end of the crisis will come only with the development of a vaccine.
"I would hope to get to some degree of real normality within a year or so. But I don't think it's this winter or fall; we'll be seeing it for a bit more," he said, expecting the virus to go back and forth in the United States through a few cycles.
Fauci also noted that while the virus has been suppressed in major cities such as New York, Chicago and New Orleans, cases are spreading elsewhere. "We're seeing several states, as they try to reopen and get back to normal, starting to see early indications [that] infections are higher than previously," he said.
"We have potential vaccines making significant progress. We have maybe four or five," he said. "You can never guarantee success with a vaccine, that's foolish to do so, there's so many possibilities of things going wrong. [But] everything we have seen from early results, it's conceivable we get two or three vaccines that are successful."
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The world is seeing more than 100,000 newly confirmed cases every day, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The global case total was about 7.9 million Sunday, with about 433,000 deaths. The United States had about 2.1 million cases and 116,000 deaths.
WARNING FOR N.Y.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday warned New Yorkers against triggering a second wave of the coronavirus, singling out bars and restaurants in Manhattan and the Hamptons as the worst offenders among 25,000 complaints filed to the state.
"We are not going to go back to that dark place," Cuomo said, adding that he would reimpose shutdowns if businesses failed to comply with current restrictions and people didn't socially distance. He also threatened to take away liquor licenses to bars and restaurants.
Cuomo sounded the alarm on one of the better days in the battle against the coronavirus in New York. Once the center of the virus outbreak in the U.S., the state is now faring better than almost two dozen others seeing upticks.
The number of new cases in Arizona has risen to more than 1,000 per day from fewer than 400 when the state's shutdown was lifted in mid-May, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.
Gov. Doug Ducey is not requiring Arizona residents to wear masks in public despite warnings by public health experts outside the government.
Elsewhere, bars in New Orleans are reopening. San Francisco restaurants resumed outdoor seating Friday, and the California government allowed hotels, zoos, museums and aquariums to reopen.
Utah and Oregon suspended further reopening of their economies because of a spike in cases.
EUROPE'S REOPENING
Europe is taking a big step toward a new normality as many countries open borders to fellow Europeans after three months of lockdowns -- but even though Europeans love their summer vacations, it's not clear how many are ready to travel again.
Tourists from the U.S., Asia, Latin America and the Middle East will just have to wait for now. Europe is expected to start opening up to some visitors from elsewhere next month, but details remain unclear.
The European Union's home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, told member nations last week that they "should open up as soon as possible" and suggested that today was a good date.
Many countries are doing just that, allowing travel from the EU, Britain and the rest of Europe's usually passport-free travel area, which includes non-EU countries such as Switzerland.
It's a complicated, shifting patchwork of different rules. And although tourist regions are desperately counting on them, a lot of Europeans may decide to stay close to home this summer.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz are both planning to vacation in their homelands.
"The recommendation is still, if you want to be really safe, a vacation in Austria," Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told ORF television, recalling the scramble in March to bring home thousands of tourists as borders slammed shut. "In Austria, you know that you don't have to cross a border if you want to get home, and you know the infrastructure and the health system well."
The German government, which helped fly 240,000 people home as the pandemic grew, also has no desire to repeat that experience.
"My appeal to all those who travel: Enjoy your summer vacation -- but enjoy it with caution and responsibility," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said. "In the summer holidays, we want to make it as difficult as possible for the virus to spread again in Europe."
CASES IN ASIA
China on Sunday reported its highest daily total of new coronavirus cases in two months, and infections in South Korea rose, showing how the disease can come back as curbs on business and travel are lifted.
South Korea's government reported 34 more cases, adding to an upward trend. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said most were in the greater Seoul area, where half of the country's 51 million people live. New cases have been linked to nightlife establishments, church services, an e-commerce warehouse and door-to-door sellers.
China had 57 new confirmed cases in the 24 hours through midnight Saturday, the National Health Commission reported. That was the highest since mid-April and included 36 in the capital, Beijing -- the first confirmed cases in the city of 20 million people in 50 days.
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Beijing's cases were all linked to its biggest wholesale food market, which was shut down, the official China News Service reported, citing the city's disease control agency.
Information for this article was contributed by Derek Hawkins, Paul Schemm, Meryl Kornfield, Brittany Shammas and Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post; by Geir Moulson, Joe McDonald, Hyung-Jin Kim, Carla K. Johnson, Jill Colvin and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Ian Fisher and Nic Querolo of Bloomberg News.
