Strains on show in US as virus discord heats up

As the weather heated up over the weekend in the United States, so did the chafing at the coronavirus-related restrictions and the discord in national politics.

US authorities are not yet seeing a surge in coronavirus cases in places that are reopening, but it was still too early to determine trends, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on Sunday.

"We are seeing that in places that are opening, we're not seeing this spike in cases," Azar said on CNN's State of the Union program. "We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed."

The weekend also produced a verbal exchange between US President Donald Trump and former president Barack Obama over the handling of the pandemic.

"More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain that so many of the folks in charge know what they're doing," Obama, who preceded Trump as president, said in a video commencement speech to graduates of historically black colleges and universities on Saturday. "A lot of them are not even pretending to be in charge."

In response, Trump told reporters at the White House on Sunday: "Look, he was an incompetent president, that's all I can say."

On Sunday, the US recorded its lowest daily death toll in a week, at 820, but the country with the world's highest number of coronavirus fatalities neared 90,000 dead.

A key part of reopening will be watching for flu-like symptoms and hospital admissions data, as well as testing of asymptomatic individuals, Azar said.

He said data will take some time to come in from states that reopened early, such as Georgia and Florida.

Hours before Florida entered its "full phase one" of reopening, the state health department reported 777 new cases coronavirus cases since Saturday. There have been 45,588 confirmed cases in the state since March 1, with 1,973 deaths.

Nearly all 50 US states have begun to allow some businesses to reopen and residents to move more freely, but only 14 states have met the federal government's guidelines for lifting measures.

Azar said it was up to local governments to handle reopening plans, as US citizens show their eagerness to head to bars, beaches and parks.

"These are very localized determinations. There should not be a one size fits all to reopening but reopen we must because it's not health versus the economy. It's health versus healthy," Azar said, adding that there were serious health consequences to not reopening.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took a coronavirus test during his media briefing on Sunday.

"That's it? Told you. That is the whole test. I'm not in pain, I'm not in discomfort," he said. "There is no reason why you should not get the test."

Because of the high infection rate in New York City, the state has accounted for more than one-third of total COVID-19 deaths in the US.

Statewide, the outbreak is relenting, with hospitalizations falling to 6,220, more than a third of the level at the peak one month ago, state data showed.

Fight in Latin America

Elsewhere, the novel coronavirus－which has infected 4.7 million people globally－is still surging. The number of cases in Latin America passed half a million as Chile locked down its capital Santiago following a sharp rise in infections.

Brazil's number of deaths soared past 16,000 with more than 240,000 infections, making it the country with the fourth-highest number of cases. The government of tiny El Salvador on Sunday extended for another month its own lockdown aimed at countering COVID-19.

Agencies via Xinhua contributed to this story.