WASHINGTON — US health authorities cautioned Americans on Thursday against traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday next week, as the coronavirus spreads out of control.

The recommendation was issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the government’s health protection agency.

“CDC is recommending against travel during the Thanksgiving period,” Henry Walke, a CDC doctor in charge of the day to day management of the agency’s pandemic response, told reporters.

“It’s not a requirement. It’s a strong recommendation.”

Walke said the CDC was “alarmed” by the recent surge in new daily cases — up more than 75 percent in 14 days — and hospitalizations and deaths (around 50 percent each).

In the past week alone there have been a million new cases of infection reported.

Thanksgiving is the busiest US holiday in terms of travel. As it falls on a Thursday many Americans take the Friday off work and make a long weekend of it to go see family in other states.

Walke said coronavirus cases rose sharply in the US after long holiday weekends for Memorial Day in May and Labor Day in September.

“We saw these hikes in cases and so we wanted to get out now and talk about the upcoming holidays and warn people to be safe,” he said.

This year the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to stay home and be with the people in your household, said Erin Sauber-Schatz, another CDC official, in charge of making pandemic-related recommendations.

“If people have not been actively living with you for the 14 days before you’re celebrating, they are not considered a member of your household, and therefore you need to take those extra precautions, even wearing masks within your own home,” she said.

That applies to university students coming home for the holiday, Sauber-Schatz said.

“It changes the results of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County,” said Giuliani, who repeatedly wiped sweat from his brow and at one point had a dark liquid which may or may not have been hair dye snaking down the side of his face.

As Giuliani and other Trump lawyers outlined claims that included charges of communist involvement, the president — apparently watching on television — took to Twitter to applaud them for laying out “an open-and-shut case of voter fraud.”

Chris Krebs, the top US election security official who was fired by Trump after calling the election the most secure ever, wrote on Twitter that the news conference was “the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history” and “possibly the craziest.”

Recount ‘did its job’ 

In Georgia, Biden’s original winning margin was just over 14,000 votes.

The hand recount that began last week and concluded late Wednesday narrowed that gap slightly to more than 12,700 as of early Thursday.

Some discrepancies were found in Republican leaning counties, according to Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system manager who helped monitor the so-called risk-level audit.

“The good part was, the audit did its job. It found those tranches of votes,” he told Fox News.

The issues, which were chalked up to human error and not fraud, included memory cards that were not scanned in Douglas and Walton counties, more than 2,700 missing votes in Fayette County, and 2,600 ballots from Floyd County that were not scanned.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who like Sterling is a Republican, said there was no widespread voter fraud.

“I don’t believe at the end of the day it’ll change the total results,” Raffensperger told CNN.

The laser-like focus on Georgia is not just because of the recount. The state’s two US Senate races are going to runoffs on January 5 that will determine control of the chamber and Biden’s ability to push through his agenda.