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Vice President Pence's Team Says COVID Worse In Oklahoma Than Other 'Heartland' States

Twitter / @mikepence
Undated file photo of Vice President Mike Pence posted to his Twitter account on Dec. 3.

The White House coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence continues to issue dire warnings and recommendations to Gov. Kevin Stitt regarding the worsening COVID-19 situation in the state. 

"Unlike other states in the Heartland, cases and new hospital admissions are not plateauing. Virus levels continue to increase and are extremely high," Pence's team writes in their most recent weekly report for Oklahoma, which is dated Sunday but was released publicly by the Oklahoma State Department of Health on Wednesday.

"Despite the severity of this surge and the threat to the hospital systems, many state and local governments are not implementing the same mitigation policies that stemmed the tide of the summer surge; that must happen now," the report reads.

According to the White House, Oklahoma is ranked third-highest in the country for COVID-19 hospital admissions, as well as third-highest test positivity rate.

"Mitigation efforts must increase," the report tells Stitt, "including the implementation of key state and local policies with an additional focus on uniform behavioral change including masking, physical distancing, hand hygiene, no indoor gatherings outside of immediate households, and aggressive testing to find the asymptomatic individuals responsible for the majority of infectious spread.

"Activities that were safe in the summer are not safe now. Reexamine capacity thresholds for all public spaces. Effective practices to decrease transmission in public spaces include limiting restaurant indoor capacity to <25%, closing bars/limiting bar hours until cases and test positivity decrease to the yellow zone, and requiring masks in all public spaces."

Stitt has ignored, rejected or dismissed previous entreaties from the Trump administration for months, even after the White House told him many of the state's COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented.

Chris joined Public Radio Tulsa as a news anchor and reporter in April 2020. He’s a graduate of Hunter College and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, both at the City University of New York.
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