A surge in coronavirus circumstances in and round Tulsa, Okla., might be related to the marketing campaign rally President Trump held there final m
A surge in coronavirus circumstances in and round Tulsa, Okla., might be related to the marketing campaign rally President Trump held there final month, town’s high well being official stated on Wednesday.
Tulsa County reported 206 new confirmed circumstances on Tuesday and 261 — a file excessive — on Monday, and Dr. Bruce Dart, the director of the Tulsa Well being Division, stated at a information convention that it was cheap to hyperlink the spike to the rally and associated occasions.
“The previous two days we’ve had nearly 500 circumstances, and we all know we had a number of giant occasions just a little over two weeks in the past, which is about proper,” Dr. Dart stated. “So I assume we simply join the dots.”
The county has extra infections proper now than every other in Oklahoma, and “we’ve had some vital occasions previously few weeks that greater than seemingly contributed to that,” he added.
Dr. Dart spent a lot of the information convention pleading with Tulsans to put on face masks — which most attendees at Mr. Trump’s rally didn’t — and stated the division would advocate requiring masks “if we proceed to see an exponential rise in circumstances, which frankly we anticipate over the following few days.”
Requested whether or not contact tracing had confirmed a hyperlink between the rally and the rise in circumstances, Leanne Stephens, a spokeswoman for the well being division, stated it “won’t publicly establish any particular person or facility liable to publicity, or the place transmission occurred.”
The county’s seven-day rolling common of latest circumstances dipped briefly on the finish of June earlier than rising once more, and has been rising pretty steadily since July 2. Mr. Trump held his rally on June 20, and due to the incubation interval between when persons are contaminated and once they begin displaying signs, it will possibly take round two weeks for a change in an infection charges to develop into obvious.
Well being officers have been frightened from the beginning about Mr. Trump’s determination to carry a big rally indoors — a a lot riskier surroundings than open air when it comes to coronavirus transmission — in a state the place coronavirus circumstances have been already spiking.
A number of days earlier than the occasion, Dr. Dart urged the president to cancel, calling the rally a “excellent storm of potential over-the-top illness transmission.”
When he stated that, Tulsa County had simply recorded 89 new circumstances in a day, a file excessive on the time. This week, the every day totals have been greater than twice that.