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Coronavirus News: Live Updates - The New York Times

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The outbreak is spreading rapidly in Latin America and the Caribbean, prompting Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, to warn on Tuesday that the unfolding crisis had “pushed our region to the limit.”

Cases are surging in countries that took early isolation measures — like Peru, which is just behind Italy in its case count — and in those that ignored recommendations, like Brazil, which has the second-highest tally worldwide, behind only the United States, according to a New York Times database.

Forced to choose between watching citizens die of the virus or of hunger, governments are loosening lockdowns, even as they watch infections climb.

“We go to bed without eating, giving nothing to our children,” said María Camila Salazar, 22, a mother of two in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. The country has more than 40,000 confirmed cases and 1,300 deaths.

Ms. Salazar and her family, like millions across Latin America, collect cardboard, glass and plastic for a living, selling it by the kilogram. Their buyers closed during the country’s lockdown, just as she gave birth to her second child.

President Iván Duque of Colombia recently relaxed lockdown rules, allowing local officials to make the final call on regulations. The national caseload subsequently surged.

Some countries have also suppressed information about the virus. In Mexico, the government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths in Mexico City. In Brazil, which has confirmed 700,000 cases, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government decided to stop reporting the cumulative toll altogether; late Monday, a Supreme Court justice ordered the government to stop suppressing the data.

New cases reached a new single-day global high on Sunday: 136,000, with three-quarters in just 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia. That adds to a global case tally of more than 7 million people worldwide and more than 400,000 deaths.

Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak

The virus has infected more than 6,600,000 people and has been detected in nearly every country.

Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

Georgia election officials, poll workers and voters reported major trouble with voting in Atlanta and elsewhere in the primaries on Tuesday, a test of the state’s preparations to hold elections during the pandemic.

Elections have emerged as a major point of contention since the outbreak began, with many states moving to embrace voting by mail even as President Trump has objected strenuously with false charges that such voting is riddled with fraud or that it favors Democrats.

In Georgia, there was a meltdown of new voting systems put in place after widespread claims of voter suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s election, with scores of new voting machines reported missing or malfunctioning. Hourslong lines formed at polling places across the state, and some people gave up and left before casting ballots.

The office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, blamed the problems on a variety of factors, including a shortage of experienced poll workers because of virus fears and a learning curve in using the new machines.

More than one million Georgia voters had already cast ballots before Tuesday, most of them by mail, after Mr. Raffensperger sent absentee ballot applications to all active voters.

But those who had voted in person before Tuesday at early-voting sites had already reported long waits — in some cases up to seven hours. New rules for social distancing and disinfecting voting machines had caused many of those delays.

Clarice Kimp, who arrived at her poling place in DeKalb County on Tuesday morning before 7, waited until 9:15 a.m. to vote. “There were supposed to be 12 people working there, and there were only four,” she said. “They could not get the voting machines to register voting cards, and they said they could not reach the technicians.”

Finally, the poll workers handed out provisional ballots, Ms. Kimp said. But those were also in short supply.

By midafternoon, several counties had begun extending voting hours to account for time lost because of the new machines.

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

The top U.S. infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, delivered a grim assessment of the devastation wrought around the world by the coronavirus, describing Covid-19 on Tuesday as his “worst nightmare” — a new, highly contagious respiratory infection that causes a significant rate of illness and death.

“In a period of four months, it has devastated the whole world,” Dr. Fauci told biotech executives during a conference held by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. “And it isn’t over yet.”

His discussion with a moderator was conducted remotely and videotaped for conference participants. Although Dr. Fauci said he had known that an outbreak like this could occur, one aspect surprised him: “how rapidly it just took over the planet.”

An efficiently transmitted disease can spread worldwide in six months or a year, but “this took about a month,” Dr. Fauci said. He attributed the rapid spread to the contagiousness of the virus and extensive world travel by infected people.

Vaccines are widely regarded as the best hope of stopping or at least slowing the pandemic, and Dr. Fauci said he was “almost certain” that more than one would be successful. Several are already being tested in people, and at least one is expected to move into large, Phase 3 trials in July.

But much is still unknown about the disease and how it attacks the body, research that Dr. Fauci described as “a work in progress.” Another looming question, he said, was whether survivors who were seriously ill would fully recover.

Dr. Fauci said that he had spent much of his career studying H.I.V., and that the disease it caused was “really simple compared to what’s going on with Covid-19.”

The differences, he said, included Covid’s broad range of severity: no symptoms at all to critical illness and death, with lung damage, intense immune responses and clotting disorders that have caused strokes even in young people, as well as a separate inflammatory syndrome causing severe illness in some children.

“Oh my goodness,” Dr. Fauci said. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.”

Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

A top expert at the World Health Organization on Tuesday walked back her previous assertion that transmission of the virus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare.”

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who made the original comment at a W.H.O. briefing on Monday, said that it was based on just two or three studies and that it was a “misunderstanding” to say asymptomatic transmission was rare globally.

“I was just responding to a question; I wasn’t stating a policy of W.H.O. or anything like that,” she said.

The backtracking came after strong criticism by scientists, who noted that study after study had shown transmission of the virus from people before they ever felt symptoms. The episode left the W.H.O. open to charges that it had been failing to take stock of rapidly evolving research findings, as well as failing to communicate clearly.

The W.H.O.’s thinking on asymptomatic transmission does not appear to have changed much since February, when the W.H.O. China Joint Mission reported that “the proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear, but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.”

Studies later estimated this number could be as high as 40 percent; the current best estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is 35 percent. The research prompted many countries, including the United States, to endorse mask use for everyone.

A key point of confusion is the difference between people who are “presymptomatic” and will go on to develop symptoms versus those who are “asymptomatic” and never feel sick. Dr. Van Kerkhove suggested that her comments were about people who were truly asymptomatic.

A widely cited paper published in April suggested that people were most infectious up to two days before the onset of symptoms, and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from those who were not yet showing symptoms.

The W.H.O. refers to such people as presymptomatic. “OK, technically fine,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “But for all intents and purposes, they are asymptomatic — they are without symptoms.”

u.s. roundup

Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said on Tuesday that he was lifting the stay-at-home order that he issued in March and increasing the limits on how many people can gather indoors and outdoors.

“With more and more of our businesses reopening, we are no longer requiring you to stay at home, but we are asking you to continue to be responsible and safe,” he said.

The moves are a major milestone for the state, which was among the hardest hit, with more than 164,000 cases and more than 12,000 deaths. After peaking in April with more than 4,000 new daily cases, the number declined gradually and has remained below 1,000 in June.

The governor said indoor gatherings could involve 50 people, up from 10, or 25 percent of a building’s capacity, with face coverings required. That extends to religious institutions but does not include indoor dining or performance venues.

Mr. Murphy also raised the limit on outdoor gatherings from 25 people to 100. The easing of restrictions does not apply to spectators at sporting events.

But Mr. Murphy said state officials might reverse permission for bigger gatherings “should we see any troubling signs in the data indicating a spike in cases.”

Here’s a look at other important developments around the United States:

  • Senators are debating whether to extend a substantial package of unemployment benefits enacted as part of the stimulus bill to help Americans weather the pandemic, after the latest jobs report showed an unexpected rebound in hiring.

  • In Virginia, the governor moved on Tuesday to ease some restrictions in the northern part of the state. Beginning Friday, he said, restaurants in Northern Virginia could offer indoor dining at half capacity, gyms could reopen at 30 percent capacity, and social gatherings of up to 50 people would be allowed. He also outlined a phased approach to reopening schools for in-person instruction.

  • Regular testing of nursing home employees is seen as one of the most important ways to contain outbreaks, and a debate has emerged over who should pay for it. Nursing homes, which have received nearly $5 billion in federal stimulus funding to cover virus expenses — including testing — have asked for more help. Insurers have also said they should not be required to pay.

  • The Defense Department on Monday started lifting travel restrictions. Thirty-nine states and five host nations — Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Japan — were part of the first wave of openings, allowing personnel to travel on business farther than the 100-mile restriction that had been in place if conditions at bases there met specific benchmarks.

  • In a sign of the economic pressure on local newspapers, The Miami Herald announced it would move out of its Doral, Fla., headquarters in August, ending its lease and directing its employees to continue working from home until year’s end. The newspaper’s president, publisher and executive editor wrote that The Herald continued to face “severe financial headwinds.” The newspaper’s parent company, McClatchy, filed for bankruptcy. In 2021, the newspaper will try to find an office better suited for working during the pandemic.

Global Roundup

Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times

Before the pandemic, India’s women were already dropping out of the labor force. Virus restrictions — and one of the worst economic slumps in decades — now threaten even more losses for them.

One national employment study conducted in May found that a higher proportion of women reported losing their jobs than men. Among Indians who remained employed, women were more likely to report anxiety about their futures.

The global slowdown could have especially stark consequences in developing economies, where about 70 percent of working women are employed in the informal economy, with few protections.

Although India recently lifted most of its lockdown measures in an effort to ease pressure on the economy, many women fear that even a limited degree of freedom will be difficult to regain.

Seema Munda, 21, kept refusing her parents’ pleas to get married. She slipped out of her conservative village in northern India and found work stitching shirts at a factory in Bengaluru, 1,000 miles to the south.

“This job liberated me,” she said.

But when the pandemic hit, Ms. Munda’s life of independence shattered as she became one of the 120 million Indians left jobless. After first being forced to take shelter in a school after losing her hostel room, Ms. Munda made a wrenching decision and boarded a train home.

Here are other key developments happening around the world:

  • Moscow’s tough lockdown ended abruptly on Tuesday as a nationwide vote on extending President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule loomed. The Russian capital continues to report more than 1,000 new virus cases a day. Barbershops, beauty parlors, veterinary clinics and photography studios were allowed to reopen, and the city’s intricate system of digital permits for leaving home stopped operating.

  • The president of the United Nations General Assembly said on Monday that world leaders would not come to New York for their annual gathering in September, a first in the organization’s 75-year history.

  • The British government on Tuesday abandoned plans to bring back all primary school students before the summer holidays. The Department of Education had aimed for the pupils to spend four weeks in classes, but many schools have said they are already full and cannot safely accommodate more.

  • The Hong Kong government is bailing out Cathay Pacific Airways by injecting nearly $4 billion and taking a direct stake in its operations.

  • Residents of Spain will have to continue to wear face masks even after the country officially lifts its state of emergency on June 21, the health minister, Salvador Illa, announced on Tuesday as the government presented its “new normalcy” plan. Citizens must “learn to cohabit with the virus” and maintain hygiene rules “until we conclusively defeat the virus,” Mr. Illa told a news conference.

  • In France, where the virus has killed over 29,000 people, the Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation into dozens of complaints over the authorities’ response to the epidemic. The investigation will focus on complaints against officials or institutions on issues like mask shortages to determine whether any crimes were committed. But neither President Emmanuel Macron, who is immune to prosecution, nor his government are targets.

  • Antarctica remains the only continent that has not reported any cases of the virus. In an effort to keep it that way, Antarctica New Zealand, the government agency responsible for carrying out New Zealand’s activities on the continent, said in a statement on Tuesday that it would cut back on research trips.

Harvard said that it would dip into its endowment, the largest university endowment in the world, to avoid furloughing or laying off employees and to cover other costs during the pandemic, which is projected to cost more than $1 billion in revenue.

The university’s governing body voted for a one-time special expenditure from the endowment — valued at $41 billion before the outbreak — to cover immediate virus costs, including room and board rebates to students for the spring semester and their moving costs. The money will also cover an increase in financial aid, enhancements in remote learning and public health improvements on campus, officials said.

Harvard said it had lost $415 million since the spring because of the pandemic and estimated that it would lose another $750 million in the fiscal year that begins in July.

A Harvard spokesman declined to put a dollar amount on extra funds that the university would draw from its endowment or to disclose how much the endowment had shrunk as the pandemic upended the market.

In April, Harvard turned down $8.6 million in taxpayer money from a $14 billion federal emergency relief package for higher education after President Trump attacked the university for receiving federal funds despite its large endowment. “Harvard’s going to pay back the money,” Mr. Trump said.

But Harvard said there was nothing to pay back because it had never applied for or received the money, even though it was included in the federal formula.

Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

Before the lockdowns, Matt Majesky didn’t take much notice of the fees that Grubhub and Uber Eats charged when they processed an order for his restaurant, Pierogi Mountain.

But once restrictions were imposed, the apps became essentially the only source of business for the barroom restaurant he ran with a partner in Columbus, Ohio. That was when the fees to the delivery companies turned into the restaurant’s single largest cost — more than what it paid for food or labor.

Grubhub, Pierogi Mountain’s primary delivery company, took more than 40 percent from the typical order. That flipped Mr. Majesky’s restaurant from almost breaking even to plunging deeply into the red. In late April, Pierogi Mountain shut down.

For many restaurants, the fees have taken on a particularly bitter taste as delivery apps have begun campaigns proclaiming that they will help save them. Some restaurants have closed, while others have cut off the apps and are looking for other ways to take orders.

The delivery services are also facing anger from smaller restaurants for giving restaurant chains priority in the apps because of the volume the chains can bring — unless smaller restaurants pay additional fees. Adding to the discord, chains generally pay the apps lower fees.

Grubhub, Uber Eats and DoorDash have all reduced the fees they charge local restaurants, although some of the companies have put time limits on the discounts.

new york roundup

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A 7 p.m. ritual outside Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene, where crowds have gathered to cheer hospital workers during the virus crisis, ended Monday with a farewell party. Video footage from Kara Baker.

With all of New York State now reopened in some capacity, officials on Tuesday preached caution, warning that as hundreds of thousands of people returned to work, the risk of spreading the virus remained.

“We’re in a new phase,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said. “Reopening resets the whole game.”

The governor unveiled a new online dashboard that he said would show the percentage of positive cases by region and county. The information would signal “tremors of a spike” in infections if one were on the horizon, he said.

In New York City, which began reopening this week, Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a similar message. Based on the timeline outlined by the state, it is technically possible that the city could move into Phase 2 on June 22. But the mayor has targeted early July for that next step, and on Tuesday he continued to emphasize patience.

Any missteps, he added, could lead to a resurgence of the virus that would put the city under “fuller restrictions or worse.” “I do not want to unduly raise expectations,” the mayor said. “We are not like the other regions of state.”

Here’s what else is happening in New York:

  • Statewide, there were an additional 46 virus-related deaths, the governor said.

  • Mr. de Blasio and the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said New York City would expand its mental health services, aiming to support 10,000 more people in the second half of the year.

  • Reports of child abuse cases in the city have dropped 51 percent compared with the same time period a year ago, a concerning trend for child welfare advocates who worry an unseen epidemic of abuse is spreading behind locked doors.

  • Monday was the first day subway ridership reached 800,000 since before the pandemic began, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said in a statement. Officials said subways and buses had 213,548 more riders on Monday compared to the week before.

  • A report released Tuesday by the Food Bank for New York City offered a stark picture of how many people were flooding pantries and soup kitchens at the peak of the pandemic and how operators were struggling to meet demand. By mid-April, closures of those facilities peaked at more than 39 percent citywide, the report said. Since the beginning of the pandemic in New York City, Food Bank has distributed about 21 million meals, a 20 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

Connecticut on Tuesday ordered hospitals that were barring visitors because of the pandemic to make exceptions for patients with disabilities. They must be allowed to have a family member or a care provider accompany them when they need support.

The order assures “vital safeguards for individuals with special needs to ensure proper and safe care is being provided and received in a hospital setting,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement released by the federal health department’s Office of Civil Rights.

The order resolved complaints that disability rights groups had filed with the federal agency.

Roger Severino, who directs the health department’s Office of Civil Rights, said in an interview that Connecticut’s order should be a model for other states trying to balance safety with civil rights during the pandemic.

“People should not be left to fend for themselves when they can be reasonably accommodated,” he said. “The safety of patients with disabilities shouldn’t be pitted, as if it’s a zero-sum game, against the safety of others. Both can be protected.”

Arts and sports roundup

Credit...Nidarosdomens Guttekor

Group singing has gone from being something life-affirming to a potential source of disease, even death. Outbreaks have been linked to choir rehearsals and church services around the world.

The most obvious reason singing is a risk for transmission is that droplets of saliva containing the virus can spray from someone’s mouth. But a potentially bigger issue comes from tiny particles, called aerosols, that are so light that they travel on air currents. There is uncertainty over whether aerosols spread the virus, but some scientists say that outbreaks among choir groups suggest they played a role, especially when singers said they had followed social-distancing rules.

Lucinda Halstead, the president-elect of the Performing Arts Medical Association, said if “it’s a small group and it’s outside and the wind is not at your back,” the risk of catching the virus while singing would be reduced.

But she said that choirs probably cannot return to their past ways without a vaccine or rapid testing. “This is only temporary.” she said. “God understands you can’t sing right now.”

Here are other arts- and sports-related developments:

  • The Salzburg Festival announced on Tuesday that it would go forward in August, but in modified form. The original plan — more than 200 performances over 44 days — will become 90 performances over 30 days. Audiences of up to 1,000, about half the capacity of its main theater, will sit in staggered formation.

  • The first women’s golf major championship of this year, the Evian Championship, was canceled on Tuesday because of travel restrictions and quarantine requirements related to the pandemic. The L.P.G.A. Tour has canceled or postponed nearly two dozen tournaments and has not held an event since the Women’s Australian Open in February.

  • Chicago canceled all arts performances and festivals in parks through Labor Day, including Lollapalooza, Chicago SummerDance and the Chicago Jazz Festival.

  • The N.F.L. has detailed the steps that teams must take before players can return to training facilities, the latest effort by the league to return to business as usual in an off-season that has largely been conducted virtually.

  • A North Carolina auto racing track has been ordered to close after it staged two events with packed stands last month. Ace Speedway held its season opener on May 23, with a near-capacity crowd at the 5,000-seat facility, in defiance of Gov. Roy Cooper’s order banning outdoor public gatherings of more than 25 people. The speedway held another night of racing on May 30.

  • Visitors can once again enter the Pantheon in Rome after the monument joined a growing list of sites that reopened their doors after weeks of lockdown. In Milan, the building housing Leonardo’s “Last Supper” also reopened Tuesday, as did the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

  • While the in-person art world in New York City remains mostly shuttered, some galleries are opening spaces in the Hamptons.

Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Relief workers are broadly restricted from using federal funding to buy surgical masks, gloves and other protective medical gear to confront the virus overseas, in order to keep that equipment available for health providers in the United States, according to regulations issued Tuesday by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The new rules did grant an exception: The money can be used to buy equipment if it is produced in the part of the world where it would be used, a key provision that helps local economies that also are struggling because of the virus.

Humanitarian aid groups have waited for months for the guidance, a topic of intense debate within the Trump administration, as masks, gloves, ventilators and respirators were desperately needed by American health workers to care for U.S. patients.

As they waited, the groups received only a fraction of nearly $1.6 billion that Congress approved in March to send to aid workers in foreign countries.

The new guidance, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, requires that humanitarian aid groups that are distributing support to some of the poorest or most unstable countries seek written approval before using federal funding to buy N95 respirators or other surgical face masks, medical gloves, ventilators, certain air purifiers and filters and American-made testing kits.

The limits on the protective medical gear will remain in place until there is a surplus of supplies in the United States.

Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

The chairman of the Senate health committee, hoping to pass legislation this year to address future pandemics, on Tuesday released a set of proposals for beefing up the U.S. ability to respond to a public health crisis — and is crowdsourcing suggestions from the public.

In a white paper entitled “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, identified five priorities: accelerating research and development of tests, treatments, and vaccines; expanding disease surveillance capability; rebuilding the Strategic National Stockpile; beefing up state and local public health departments; and improving coordination of federal agencies during a public health emergency.

Public health experts have been warning of a deadly pandemic for decades. In 2015, Susan Rice, the national security adviser to President Barack Obama, created a “global health security and biodefense unit” inside the White House. But President Trump disbanded the team.

Mr. Alexander’s white paper steered clear of laying blame for the lack of preparedness. But he said the federal government must play a critical role in preparedness.

Mr. Alexander said he hoped that the paper would lead to discussion among lawmakers and the public. Anyone with ideas may submit them, no later than June 26, to PandemicPreparedness@help.senate.gov.

Reporting was contributed by Ian Austen, Ken Belson, Ronen Bergman, Aurelien Breeden, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Maria Cramer, Abdi Latif Dahir, Reid J. Epstein, Jack Ewing, Richard Fausset, Sheri Fink, Jerry Garrett, Denise Grady, Anemona Hartocollis, Mike Ives, Lara Jakes, David D. Kirkpatrick, Aaron Krolik, John Leland, Iliana Magra, Apoorva Mandavilli, Alex Marshall, Patricia Mazzei, Jesse McKinley, Raphael Minder, Paul Mozur, Aimee Ortiz, Bill Pennington, Elisabetta Povoledo, Suhasini Raj, Scott Reyburn, Rick Rojas, Kai Schultz, Jeanna Smialek, Kaly Soto, Matt Stevens, Alexandra Stevenson, Nikita Stewart, Katie Thomas, Anton Troianovski, Julie Turkewitz, David Waldstein, Edward Wong, Sameer Yasir, Ceylan Yeginsu, Raymond Zhong and Karen Zraick.

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