Parts of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a string of barrier islands whose beaches are popular with tourists, are also moving forward with lifting restrictions for entry, officials said.
Emergency officials from Dare County, N.C., which includes the towns of Nags Head, Kitty Hawk and Southern Shores, said in a statement on Monday that the decision was based on “careful consideration of the science, trends, data and resource availability.” The county has had 15 diagnosed cases, with one death, officials said.
In Ohio, even as plans were being put in place to reopen, a state prison about an hour’s drive north of the capital became the largest-known source of coronavirus infections in the United States, continuing a trend of fast-moving outbreaks in crowded, confined spaces.
Officials said that at least 1,828 inmates — almost three-quarters of the population — had tested positive for the coronavirus at the minimum- and medium-security prison in Marion, Ohio. That is more than the number of known cases from a meatpacking plant in South Dakota and a Navy aircraft carrier docked in Guam.
“Once Covid-19 gets inside the gate, inside the door, it spreads, and it spreads very significantly,” Mr. DeWine, a Republican, said at a news conference on Monday.
Although there have been encouraging signs that the outbreak is beginning to level off in some parts of the country, the threat is continuing to grow in other states and regions.
Even in areas where the number of new cases is beginning to flatten, they remain high: New York, which on Monday reported its fewest positive tests in a month and its lowest one-day death toll in more than two weeks, still had 4,726 new cases and 478 new deaths. And the country has added more than 25,000 new cases a day for the past week.