Anti-lockdown protests in US may spread Covid-19, says report

President Donald Trump has backed these protests as he continues to press states to reopen, allow businesses to resume operations and let people return to work, arguing the lockdown may be causing more damage to the country than the epidemic.

Anti-lockdown protests taking place around the United States could potentially spread the coronavirus as people are travelling to them far and areas not relatively unaffected by the epidemic, according to an analysis of data gleaned from location tracking of cellphones of the protestors.

A student wearing a protective face mask uses hand sanitizer upon arrival at D. Pedro V High School, as grade 11 and 12 high school students return to schools under strict restrictions, during the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Lisbon, Portugal. (Reuters Photo)

But the analysis, which was reported first by The Guardian news publication, does not directly link the protests to new infections or surges. It only flags the possibility of these protestors carrying back the virus from high-infection areas.

These anonymized location data collected from in-phone apps and analyzed by VoteMap showed people traveling more than 150 miles to these protests, some were seen crossing state lines on their way back. Devices from the armed protests in Madison, Michigan, which caught the world’s attention, were seen returning to remote areas of the state.

Dr Rob Davidson, of the Committee to Protect Medicare that provided the data to the Guardian, told the publication, “it’s hard to draw a straight line between devices, individuals at these protests, and cases.”

President Donald Trump has backed these protests as he continues to press states to reopen, allow businesses to resume operations and let people return to work, arguing the lockdown may be causing more damage to the country than the epidemic. His eyes, here, are on his re-elections prospects in the face record unemployment and a severe downturn.

The White House has sought to shift the blame thus, mostly on to China, through increasing public attacks and on the World Health Organization and, internally, its own federal agencies. Peter Navarro, a senior adviser to the president, said Sunday the country was let down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the premier federal body charged with monitoring and preventing health crises such as the Covid-19 epidemic.

“Early on in this virus, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back,” he told NBC news.

Testing has continued to be an issues. The federal government says every American who needs to be tested, according to CDC checklist of symptoms, can be tested and critics say more kits are needed to scale up surveillance in view of the reopening. New governor Andrew Cuomo took Covid-19 test at his daily briefing on Sunday to make the point. “This is a very big advantage for us, because testing originally was used to control the virus,” Cuomo said. “Now testing is going to be helpful in monitoring the virus.”

The number of US fatalities from Covid-19 went up by 808 over the past 24 hours to 89,567 and reported infections went up by 18,937 to 1.48 million.