CDC Halts Some Renter Evictions; Midwest Cases Spike

ACROSS AMERICA — Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have put in place a directive halting the eviction of certain renters though the end of 2020 in order to prevent further spread of coronavirus.

The administration's action stems from an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in early August which instructed federal health officials to consider measures to temporarily halt evictions.

The CDC followed up Tuesday by declaring that any landlord shall not evict any person from any residential property for failure to pay rent, provided they meet certain criteria.

The new order follows earlier federal, state and local government-approved eviction moratoriums for many renters, but those protections are expiring rapidly. A recent report from one think tank, the Aspen Institute, stated that more than 20 million renters live in households that have suffered COVID-19-related job loss and concluded that millions more are at risk of eviction in the next several months.

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the Associated Press the order will provide relief for millions of anxious families, but added that the action delays rather than prevents evictions.

READ MORE: CDC Directs Halt To Renter Evictions To Prevent Virus Spread

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday refuted online misinformation amplified by Trump that the virus’s death toll has been vastly overstated in the United States, the Washington Post reported.

The claim, shared by the far-right website Gateway Pundit and a follower of the baseless QAnon theory in Twitter posts that Trump retweeted Sunday, falsely stated that only 6 percent of the nation’s more than 180,000 reported COVID-19 deaths are legitimate.

“If you look at the people who died of covid disease, the point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just covid,” Fauci said during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did.”

Also, new coronavirus cases have fallen significantly in many U.S. states since July. In fact, cases are now flat in 26 states and falling in 15 others.

But here's the bad news. At least nine states are just now experiencing a surge in cases, including five in the Midwest that, in the last week, added more cases than in any previous week of the pandemic.

Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota together reported 19,133 new cases in the week ending Sunday, according to a New York Times database — 6.4 percent of the national total, although the five states are home to only 4 percent of the population.

In each state, some of the biggest surges in new case numbers have come in college towns, the Times reported.

The Dakotas, which had made it through the summer without suffering the big increases seen in some other parts of the country, have both recently set single-day case records.

New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that among children with COVID-19, children of color are infected and hospitalized at higher rates than white children — five to eight times that of white children, the data shows.

Children of color also make up an overwhelming majority of those who develop a life-threatening complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

Children represent 9.3 percent of all United States cases.

Finally, file this under news that probably shouldn't be real: Businessman Herman Cain spoke from beyond the grave through his Twitter account Monday.

In a now-deleted tweet, someone used Cain's account to claim the coronavirus is “not as deadly” as “mainstream media” made it out to be. The tweet comes despite Cain dying July 30 from COVID-19 weeks after attending a rally for President Trump.

At least 488 new coronavirus deaths and 36,439 new cases were reported in the United States on Monday, according to a New York Times database. Over the past week, there have been an average of 41,492 cases per day, a decrease of 17 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

As of Tuesday, 28 states remained above the positive testing rate recommended by the World Health Organization to safely reopen. To safely reopen, the WHO recommends states remain at 5 percent or lower for at least 14 days.

More than 6.07 million people in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus as of Tuesday evening, and more than 184,400 have died, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Stay current on all the latest U.S. coronavirus news via The New York Times or Washington Post.

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