Here’s what you need to know:
- With case counts rising, U.S. leaders push stricter measures.
- As the U.S. weighs school reopenings, a study finds that older children spread the virus comparably to adults.
- A Times investigation examines how U.S. leadership broke down in the early stages of the pandemic.
- The F.D.A. signs off on pooled testing, which significantly expands diagnostic capacity.
- Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinistas denied the virus. Now they’re dying by the dozens.
- The U.N. secretary general warns of pandemic fallout: extreme poverty and ‘famines of historic proportions.’
- This U.S.-Canada border town was on the rise — then the border was closed.
With case counts rising, U.S. leaders push stricter measures.
Across the United States, leaders grappling with surging caseloads and a rising death toll have introduced new measures intended to curb the coronavirus outbreak’s severity, some in places where the virus had looked to be in retreat.
At least two states, Arizona and North Carolina, announced single-day records on Saturday. Arizona reported more than 130 new deaths, and North Carolina said it had more than 2,360 new cases.
On Friday, for the second time, more than 70,000 coronavirus cases were announced in the United States, according to a New York Times database. A day earlier, the country set a record with 75,600 new cases, the 11th time in the past month that the daily record had been broken.
The outbreak is so widespread that 18 states have been placed in a so-called red zone because they have more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people per week, according to an unpublished report distributed this week by the White House coronavirus task force, which urged many states to take stricter steps to contain the spread.
The states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — constitute more than a third of the country.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced new rules that would force many of the state’s districts to teach remotely when school starts next month and require most of its more than six million students to wear masks when they do attend class. The state also announced a sweeping rollback this week of plans to reopen businesses.
More than 10,100 cases were announced on Friday in California, the state’s second-highest daily total yet.
In Florida, where more than 11,400 cases and more than 125 deaths were reported on Friday, some localities added curfews. With its hospitals reaching capacity, Broward County imposed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. beginning Friday. Curfews were also imposed in the city of Miami Beach and the rest of Miami-Dade County.
Noting the rise in cases, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told a House committee that he thought Congress should consider automatically forgiving all small loans that had been given to businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program.
The record for U.S. daily cases has more than doubled since June 24, when the country registered 37,014 cases, after a lull in the outbreak that kept the previous record, 36,738, standing for two months. Daily virus fatalities had decreased slightly until last week, when they began rising again.
Some of the states in the red zone are not following the unpublished report’s recommendations for curbing the spread.
With cases rising across Georgia, the report had some clear recommendations, including: “Mandate statewide wearing of cloth face coverings outside the home.”
But while Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, said Friday that he believed that residents should wear face masks, he added that he would not require them to do so. And he is working to prevent local governments from issuing their own mask orders: He filed a lawsuit challenging the authority of leaders in Atlanta to require masks within their city’s limits.
“Now I know that many well-intentioned and well-informed Georgians want a mask mandate, and while we all agree that wearing a mask is effective, I’m confident that Georgians don’t need a mandate to do the right thing,” Mr. Kemp said Friday.
The report on the red zone was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom based in Washington, and was later obtained by The New York Times.
The report called for mask mandates in Alabama and Arkansas, and those states’ governors, who are both Republicans, issued new orders this week. More than half of the United States now has some form of mask requirement in place.
President Trump, for his part, has consistently resisted wearing a mask, though he appeared in one last weekend at Walter Reed. More recently, during an interview to be broadcast on Sunday, he said that he did not plan to issue a nationwide mask mandate. “I want people to have a certain freedom and I don’t believe in that, no,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News. “I don’t believe in the statement that if everyone wore a mask, everything disappears.”
As the U.S. weighs school reopenings, a study finds that older children spread the virus comparably to adults.
As school districts around the United States debate when and how to reopen schools, a large new study from South Korea offers a note of caution. It found that children between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread virus at least as well as adults do, suggesting that middle and high schools in particular may seed new clusters of infection.
Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often, the study found, although the risk is not zero. That is consistent with what many other studies have reported.
Several experts said that the study was carefully done and that the results suggested schools should have concrete plans in place for dealing with outbreaks before reopening.
“I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.
“There will be transmission,” Dr. Osterholm said. “What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans.”
The South Korean researchers identified 5,706 people who were the first to report Covid-19 symptoms in their households from Jan. 20 to March 27, when schools were closed. They then traced the 59,073 contacts of these “index cases.” They tested all of the household contacts of each patient, regardless of symptoms, but only tested symptomatic contacts outside the household.
On Wednesday, a panel from the prestigious National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommended reopening schools wherever possible for disabled children and for those in elementary schools, because those groups have the most trouble learning online. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist on that panel, said the new study did not alter that recommendation.
A Times investigation examines how U.S. leadership broke down in the early stages of the pandemic.
President Trump and his top aides decided to shift responsibility for the coronavirus response to the states during a critical period of weeks in mid-April, focusing on overly optimistic data signals and rushing to reopen the economy, a Times investigation found.
Interviews with more than two dozen senior administration officials, state and local health officials and a review of documents revealed a haphazard response during the initial surge in cases in the United States, characterized by offloading authority and, at times, undercutting public health experts.
A team in the White House led by President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger.
Mayors and governors said that the White House approach was guided by an overarching strategy of reviving the economy, which failed to address how cities and states should respond if cases surged again.
Key elements of the Trump administration’s strategy were drafted privately with comment from aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies. And the president quickly came to feel trapped by the administration’s reopening guidelines, which hinge on declining case counts, leading him to repeatedly rail against increasing testing in the United States.
The investigation found that White House officials failed to acknowledge the scale of the pandemic until early June, and that even now internal divisions remain over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the fallout of the pandemic.
The F.D.A. signs off on pooled testing, which significantly expands diagnostic capacity.
The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday issued its first emergency approval to carry out pooled testing for the coronavirus, a decades-old approach that allows samples from multiple people to be combined for testing, allowing for much faster tracking of new infections.
The agency gave so-called emergency use authorization to Quest Diagnostics to test combined samples from up to four people. If the pooled test is negative, then all four are in the clear. If it’s positive, then each sample would be individually retested to determine who was infected.
This approach expands the number of people who can be tested without requiring the use of additional crucial materials and staffing.
“Sample pooling becomes especially important as infection rates decline and we begin testing larger portions of the population,” the F.D.A. chief, Stephen Hahn, said in a statement.
Other countries, including China, Germany, Israel and Thailand, have been using this strategy, as have a handful of U.S. states and cities. Now that the federal government has formally signed off, the strategy is likelier to be adopted at universities and companies that are beginning to reopen.
Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinistas denied the virus. Now they’re dying by the dozens.
Dozens of fiercely loyal members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party — mayors, judges, police officials, council members and government bureaucrats — have died over the past two months.
All are thought to be victims of the coronavirus, though few have been acknowledged as such, as is the case with most virus fatalities in Nicaragua. Many are officially attributed to “atypical pneumonia.”
The string of fatalities has highlighted the fact that the disease is much more widespread than the government has publicly acknowledged.
And to critics of the government, the deaths underscore the consequences of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic — with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. The government held mass gatherings, including a March rally in support of other stricken countries called “Love in the Time of Covid-19.”
Several young epidemiologists, virologists and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s response “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”
Officially, the government reports that just 99 people have died from the virus, although the Citizens Covid-19 Observatory, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, have registered 2,397 probable deaths.
The government is now taking measures to combat the virus, creating Covid-only hospital units and using the military to organize mass disinfection campaigns. On Sunday, its annual extravaganza celebrating the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, which toppled the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979, will take place virtually for the first time.
But the toll is already high. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of Confidencial, a leading news outlet, said his team has counted some 100 deaths of Sandinistas, including about 10 well-known figures.
“The problem is that here, nobody officially dies of Covid-19,” he said.
Global roundup
The U.N. secretary general warns of pandemic fallout: extreme poverty and ‘famines of historic proportions.’
António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, raised alarms on Saturday about the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the ripple effects it could have on poverty and wealth inequality.
“Covid-19 is shining a spotlight on this injustice,” Mr. Guterres said. “Entire regions that were making progress on eradicating poverty and narrowing inequality have been set back years in a matter of months.”
Striking a sober tone in a speech honoring Nelson Mandela’s legacy, Mr. Guterres stressed that the pandemic was pushing developing countries to the brink of disaster, and that women, migrants, and racial minorities were all likely to suffer disproportionately.
“We face the deepest global recession since World War II, and the broadest collapse in incomes since 1870,” he said. “One hundred million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty and we could see famines of historic proportions.”
His comments came as the president of the World Bank, David Malpass, urged the Group of 20 major economies to take steps to help the world’s poorest countries by extending a freeze in their official debt payments through the end of 2021, Reuters reported. Speaking to G20 finance ministers meeting virtually, Mr. Malpass also recommended talks on reducing the debt of some countries.
Mr. Guterres said the United Nations would continue its mission to assist countries in need, but that the pandemic had demonstrated a severe erosion of social safety nets in countries worldwide.
Reflecting on Mr. Mandela’s work to fight racism, Mr. Guterres also said the recent anti-racism movement born out of the killing of George Floyd had caused rising awareness of racial inequality, and that the pandemic had shed light on systemic racism globally.
“Covid-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built,” he said.
In other news around the world:
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Iran started enforcing new restrictions in Tehran on Saturday, banning large gatherings and closing cafes, gyms and some other facilities, as coronavirus cases surge in what health officials say is even worse than the first wave that hit the capital in March. The country has reported more than 270,000 confirmed cases, the 10th highest in the world, but President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday that 30 million to 35 million people are “likely to be exposed to the disease in the coming months,” the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.
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Chinese officials are battling a growing outbreak in the far western Xinjiang region, the center of the country’s broad crackdown on predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities. Forty cases have been reported in its capital, Urumqi, since Thursday, 23 of them on Saturday. The government flew in 21 lab technicians and their testing equipment from three hospitals in Wuhan, where the virus emerged late last year, and residential compounds were under lockdown.
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Thailand, a rare success story in fighting the virus, has recorded fewer than 3,240 cases and 58 deaths. But its tourism-dependent economy has been ravaged. Some migrant workers from neighboring Myanmar and Cambodia are stuck with no wages from their jobs as hotel cleaners, kitchen hands and food stall operators, and the Thai tourism and sports ministry estimates that 60 percent of hospitality businesses could close by the end of the year.
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The authorities in Britain have temporarily suspended the release of the daily toll of deaths attributed to the coronavirus, in response to a request from the government after it raised concerns about accuracy. The authorities in England had been including all people who tested positive for the virus in their daily count, regardless of the cause of death — one analysis noted that the current standards would have included someone who tested positive for the virus three months ago and then “had a heart attack or were run over by a bus.”
This U.S.-Canada border town was on the rise — then the border was closed.
Over the past couple of years, Mike Hill poured more than $3.5 million into renovating his Chevron gas station Blaine, Wash., and opening a Starbucks next door. People from British Columbia were crossing the border in droves to buy cheap gas and milk in Blaine. It seemed like a slam-dunk investment.
Then the coronavirus arrived. Now almost no one comes to Blaine anymore.
When the border between the United States and Canada closed to nonessential travel on March 21, the southbound traffic into Blaine — the busiest crossing between Washington and British Columbia — slowed to a trickle. In June, just 12,600 people entered the United States from British Columbia, down from 479,600 during the same month last year.
The economic impact on Blaine, a city of about 5,000, has been crippling. Beaches are now largely empty save for the rocks left by the receding tide. More than a dozen gas stations that once bustled with people heading elsewhere are quiet. The stores that handled mail-order goods for Canadians looking to avoid taxes are piled high with packages that their purchasers cannot pick up.
“We all felt like Blaine was finally going to hit its time,” said Mark Seymour, who works with his father, Steve Seymour, at their oyster farm and restaurant. “And then this happened.”
Canada has had about half as many coronavirus deaths per capita as the United States. The number of cases in Canada has been steadily declining since April, while cases in some states are surging.
“I’m not very optimistic at all,” Steve Seymour said during a recent interview at the family business, Drayton Harbor Oysters. “Why would they let us in?”
Outbreaks in Texas highlight the state’s struggle to contain the virus.
As Texas reported single-day records for cases and deaths this week, more than 1,000 of the 1,798 inmates at the Federal Correctional Institute at Seagoville in Texas had tested positive as of Saturday.
In Nueces County, where beach-seeking tourists caused a spike in cases by flocking to Corpus Christi, 85 infants younger than 1 also tested positive, the county’s public health director said.
And in an apparent acknowledgment of the public health risks of holding a large-scale gathering during a pandemic, a federal judge blocked the Texas Republican Party from hosting an in-person convention in Houston, the mayor said on Twitter early Saturday.
As cases in Texas have surged over recent weeks, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has faced mounting criticism for the state’s reopening strategy. On Thursday, the state reached a single-day record in new infections with 15,038 cases.
Early this month, Mr. Abbott announced an executive order requiring masks in public after demurring for months. But in recent days, he has said the state would not consider a second lockdown, even as hospitalizations have surged and deaths from Covid-19 surpassed 100 per day on average over the past seven days.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had 700 people in I.C.U.s fighting the coronavirus, a local news affiliate, citing city health officials, reported on Friday.
Retailers are taking the lead on masks as some states have stalled.
Some of the largest brick-and-mortar retail stores in the United States announced this week that they would enact policies requiring patrons to wear masks while shopping inside their stores.
Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart and Best Buy were among those that joined retailers like Costco and Starbucks in embracing mask requirements. C.V.S. said it would require face coverings in its stores beginning on Monday, and Target will do the same beginning on Aug. 1.
The corporate decisions to establish these rules comes as many states have issued orders requiring masks in public. But several states seeing a heightened spread of the virus have yet to follow.
Utah, Iowa and Nebraska are among the handful of states that have yet to issue statewide policies for masks in public, even as each have seen case counts climbing over recent weeks. On Thursday, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Atlanta, looking to block rules requiring masks in public in the state’s capital.
The companies have said the new policies would apply across all of their locations. But many businesses requiring masks have previously run into problems enforcing the rules, as employees have faced violence while confronting customers refusing to comply.
Throughout the pandemic, videos circulated online have shown retail workers forced to address angry customers that entered without masks or refused to observe social-distancing requirements.
The rush for a vaccine generates a new wave of skeptics.
Almost daily, President Trump and leaders worldwide say they are racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine. But the repeated assurances of near-miraculous speed are exacerbating a problem that has largely been overlooked and one that public health experts say must be addressed now: persuading people to actually get the shot once it’s available.
A growing number of polls finds so many people saying they would not get a coronavirus vaccine that its potential to shut down the pandemic could be in jeopardy. Mistrust of vaccines has been on the rise in the United States in recent years, but the rapid push to develop a coronavirus vaccine has generated a different strain of wariness.
“The bottom line is I have absolutely no faith in the F.D.A. and in the Trump administration,” said Joanne Barnes, a retired fourth-grade teacher from Fairbanks, Alaska, who said she was otherwise scrupulously up-to-date on getting her shots. “I just feel like there’s a rush to get a vaccine out, so I’m very hesitant.”
A poll in May by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about half of Americans said they would be willing to get a coronavirus vaccine. One in five said they would refuse, and 31 percent were uncertain.
E.U. leaders, together in person for the first time in months, make progress toward a stimulus plan.
European Union leaders are locked in a second day of talks, trying to bridge differences over how to distribute and oversee a radical stimulus plan that would send 750 billion euros, about $840 billion, into the bloc’s economies to push them out of the recession the pandemic has sunk them in.
Going into the meeting on Friday — the first in-person gathering of the 27 heads of government since before the pandemic — Germany’s leading efforts to push through a compromise seemed uncertain. The Netherlands and, to a lesser degree, a handful of other wealthy northern nations demanded oversight of southern nations’ spending plans.
But on Saturday, E.U. officials and diplomats from member states said that the leaders had made progress toward an agreement, and that the negotiations were centering around a so-called “emergency brake” mechanism, a way for member nations to defund another member’s spending plan if it is judged to be misguided or badly designed.
The Dutch were gaining ground on demanded concessions, including rebates from the E.U. budget for wealthier nations that are net contributors to the common budget.
The leaders were originally scheduled to conclude their meetings Saturday evening, but officials said it was possible they would break and then reconvene Sunday to continue negotiations, with the hope of concluding talks without needing to meet again.
Leaders in Ohio try a new plea: Take the virus seriously if you want to get sports back.
In Ohio, where case numbers have spiked and some have resisted pleas to wear masks, state officials are using the uncertain future of sports to prod residents to take the virus more seriously.
“If we want Friday night football in the fall,” Gov. Mike DeWine posted Friday on Twitter, “we must all take precautions now.” After urging social distancing, mask wearing and hand-washing, Mr. DeWine added “#IWantASeason,” a hashtag he and others have posted repeatedly in recent days.
Though governors aren’t known as hashtag trendsetters, the #IWantASeason message has resonated in sports-loving Ohio, where more than 1,600 new coronavirus cases were announced Friday, a single-day record. With some states already announcing plans to limit in-person classes this fall, and with college sports stuck in limbo, the governor’s message has taken on urgency over the past week.
Members of the Ohio State University football team have tweeted the hashtag. So has the university’s mascot and marching band. So has the FC Cincinnati soccer team. And so have coaches, players and parents at high schools across the state.
“We practiced our fight song dance this morning,” the cheerleading coach at Lakewood High School in Hebron posted on Twitter. “I put the music on then looked up to see one of my seniors sobbing while dancing. We want a season. We want football Friday nights. We want our band. Please do what we need to do so we can have a season!”
Similar messages have poured in from the Whitmer High girls’ soccer team in Toledo, which posted a socially distanced photo urging mask usage. And from the Upper Arlington High boys’ soccer team, whose “seniors want to play their last season of high school.” And from the Xenia High Buccaneers. And the Middletown High Middies. And the Woodridge High Bulldogs.
“Please wear a mask so we can have a season!” said the account for the Hoover High Vikings football team in North Canton. “It means the world to our guys.”
How to plan a vacation in the midst of a pandemic.
Traveling these days requires lots of research, precision planning and a willingness to play by new and very stringent rules.
Tens of thousands of minks will be culled at a Spanish farm to halt an outbreak.
An order to cull almost 100,000 minks in Spain has put the spotlight on the extent to which farmed animals can infect humans with the coronavirus, or vice versa.
The culling was ordered on Thursday by the regional authorities of Aragón, in northeast Spain, after seven people linked to a local mink farm tested positive for the coronavirus. When minks at the farm were checked for the virus earlier this month, 87 percent of those tested produced positive results.
Joaquín Olona, Aragón’s regional minister of agriculture, told a news conference on Thursday that the authorities were still investigating whether farm workers had transmitted the virus to the minks, or the other way round.
The culling, he said, was in any case needed “to avoid the risk of human transmission.”
Since the start of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of minks have also been culled at farms in the Netherlands, which is one of Europe’s biggest breeding nations for minks and their prized furs. An expert from the World Health Organization highlighted mink farms last month when discussing evidence of mutual transmission between humans and animals.
Reporting was contributed by Rachel Abrams, Hannah Beech, Ginia Bellafante, Keith Bradsher, Farnaz Fassihi, Maggie Haberman, Jan Hoffman, Virginia Hughes, Jodi Kantor, Eric Lipton, Apoorva Mandavilli, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Raphael Minder, Zach Montague, Elian Peltier, Frances Robles, Carol Rosenberg and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, David E. Sanger, Michael D. Shear, Mitch Smith, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Muktita Suhartono, Noah Weiland and Michael Wolgelenter.
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