Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday that people traveling from the North to vacation in the South might be responsible for the outbreaks of coronavirus on the region – rather than states reopening too soon.
"If you look at the South, everything happened around June 12-June 16; it all simultaneously kind of popped," Redfield told The Journal of the American Medical Association's Dr. Howard Bauchner.
Redfield added, "we're of the view that there was something else that was the driver. Maybe the Memorial Day, not weekend, but the Memorial Day week, where a lot of Northerners decided to go South for vacations."
The South had not yet seen large outbreaks as there had been in the northeast, Redfield noted, so many Southern states and cities allowed bars and gyms to reopen and did not require people to wear masks or take social distancing "that seriously." So when the virus was brought in by vacationers from the North it might have spread more quickly.
"Something happened in mid-June that we're now confronting right now," he said. "And it's not as simple as just saying it was related to timing of reopening or not reopening."
CNBC noted Redfield's comments seemed in contradiction to those of Dr. Anthony Fauci just a day before. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member along with Redfield of the coronavirus task force, said the latest surge in COVID-19 infections is because the country never completely shut down.