Dr. Deborah Birx indicated on Friday that the nation was struggling in its fight against the coronavirus, suggesting that some states had become hotspots like New York previously was.
NBC’s Savannah Guthrie had asked Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, “how much worse” the White House expected the pandemic to get before it improved.
“Well, it really depends on the next set of cities. I mean, we already are starting to see some plateauing in these critically four states that have really suffered under the last four weeks, so Texas, California, Arizona and Florida, those major metros and throughout their counties,” the White House adviser told NBC’s “Today.”
“And I just want to make it clear to the American public – what we have right now are essentially three New Yorks with these three major states.”
Data from Johns Hopkins shows New York still leading in cases per 100,000 in population but, as Birx noted, cases were rising in other states.
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Florida, for example, has continually added thousands of cases throughout the month of July. It recently surpassed 400,000 positive cases from when the pandemic began.
Birx’s comments came amid a broader debate about how individual states were handling the virus. Birx’s fellow coronavirus adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently received a wave of backlash for claiming that New York “correctly” addressed the crisis. States like Texas and Florida have also faced accusations that they reopened too soon during the pandemic.
