“If the infection really gets out of control, and, if they’re accompanied by rigorous testing, I think China proved that it works. “Once you do something like in New Rochelle and stop people attending gatherings, I think it’s a real possibility,” he told The Daily Beast. William Haseltine, president of the global health think tank ACCESS Health International who recently chaired the U.S.-China Health Summit in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated, said he believed the United States was “close to” authorities implementing such lockdowns. “I would hate to see that repeated in a university dormitory or public housing. “We certainly did do that with the cruise ship, which was a debacle, so we would have to be far more prepared to protect the people that were quarantined,” said Gostin, referring to the Diamond Princess, where hundreds were infected in Japan last month, ultimately leading to at least six deaths. limiting movement in or out of, say, large apartments or dormitories. Gostin added that he believed a mass quarantine wouldn’t even be constitutional in the United States. He called such a plan on American soil “both legally flawed and unethical.” is not China, and our people would not tolerate the kind of social control and intrusive surveillance that we saw in China,” said Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. But given the current trajectory, officials may end up pushing people close to their limit. New York and Washington haven’t imposed restrictions on movement so much as assembly, and the federal government has publicly and controversially struggled to even test enough Americans for the virus. Troops would assist in distributing food and cleaning public spaces, Cuomo explained.Įxperts told The Daily Beast that it was too early to consider an Italy-style lockdown in the United States. Cuomo called in National Guard troops to enact a one-mile containment zone in New Rochelle, which was set to go into effect on Thursday and remain in place for two weeks, through March 25. Andrew Cuomo said the coronavirus had infected at least 121 people in suburban New Rochelle alone by Wednesday evening, putting the nation’s second-largest cluster of the virus about 20 miles north of New York, America’s largest city. Seattle’s public schools will also close. Such events include social, spiritual, recreational, and work activities. Jay Inslee announced Wednesday that he would use emergency powers to prohibit large-scale public gatherings of 250 people or more in three counties through March in Washington state, where at least 29 people have died from the disease.

Oval Office address to announce a confused, partial travel ban between the United States and Europe, along with a variety of measures geared at steadying the economy.īut on Thursday, specifically in the Seattle area and in a suburb of New York City, life was about to get considerably more eerie. President Trump on Wednesday also used a 9 p.m. cases of the new coronavirus had, as of Wednesday, topped 1,000, while Republicans in Congress have been briefed on the likelihood that most Americans will eventually be exposed to the infection, and the World Health Organization finally declared the outbreak a global pandemic. As residents of Washington and New York battled the two largest clusters of the 2019 novel coronavirus in the United States, new restrictions on public assembly meant to ease the deadly crisis raised the question: Just how aggressive might authorities get?

United states total lockdown