Here’s what you need to know:
- Weighing the risks as cases spike, more major school districts decide to go online.
- Local officials across the U.S. reimpose restrictions or adopt them for the first time.
- After attacks by Trump aides, Fauci says focus should be on the virus rather than ‘games people are playing.’
- In the shadow of the pandemic, overdose deaths in the U.S. have soared.
- Black business owners had a harder time getting federal coronavirus aid, a study finds.
- Racial disparities worsen the toll of the lockdown for women in the U.K.
- The Philippines is sending the police to search for those with the virus.
Weighing the risks as cases spike, more major school districts decide to go online.
As the U.S. outbreak increased in 41 states over the past two weeks and reached 3.5 million total infections on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, governors and mayors across the nation have scrambled to respond, issuing new mask orders, limiting the size of gatherings and preparing for things to get much worse in the coming weeks.
In another cautionary effort, several large school districts said Wednesday that they would open the school year with online classes, bucking pressure from President Trump and his administration to get students back into classrooms as quickly as possible.
By late evening, more than 66,000 new infections had been reported nationally, the second-highest single-day total, behind the 68,241 reported on Friday.
The Houston Independent School District, the seventh largest in the country, said it would start the school year virtually on Sept. 8. Students will have at least six weeks of online instruction, with a tentative plan to start in-person classes on Oct. 19.
In San Francisco, school officials announced that the upcoming school year would start with distance learning and that the district would “gradually phase in a staggered return” to the classroom. In a message to parents, the superintendent, Dr. Vincent Matthews, wrote that “we hope to provide a gradual hybrid approach (a combination of in-person and distance learning) for some students when science and data suggest it is safe to do so.”
Officials in Prince George’s County, Md., announced that students would be distance-learning through at least February.
The announcements came a week after Mr. Trump threatened to cut federal funding for school systems that defied his demand to reopen classrooms, and pressured the government’s top public health experts to water down recommendations for how schools could reopen safely.
Los Angeles and San Diego, the two largest public school districts in California, announced earlier this week that they would be online-only in the fall. Now 11 of the 15 largest districts in California have said that they will reopen with 100 percent remote instruction. New York City, which has the largest school district in the nation, is planning a mix of in-person and remote learning, with students expected to return to classrooms from one to three days a week.
Some governors and school districts are pressing ahead with plans to reopen classrooms. Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, is urging school districts to give parents the option of sending their children to school five days a week.
In Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, announced that she would delay the opening of schools by several weeks, until after Labor Day, saying that schools need time to get masks, thermometers, hand sanitizer and other supplies. “I can’t in good conscience open schools when Kansas has numerous hot spots where cases are at an all-time high & continuing to rapidly rise,” she wrote on Twitter.
Local officials across the U.S. reimpose restrictions or adopt them for the first time.
State officials are warily eyeing the recent explosion of infections across the Sun Belt — where some hard-hit cities were putting refrigerated trucks on standby — and preparing for the worst.
In Alabama, which broke the record Wednesday for the most deaths it has reported in a single day, 47, Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, issued an order requiring people to wear masks in public. In Montana, Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, said that he was also issuing a mask order.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, extended a coronavirus-focused order that was set to expire at midnight. The order limits gatherings to 50 people, restricts business capacity and recommends, but does not mandate, face masks.
The state’s seven-day average of new cases jumped from 1,900 on July 1 to nearly 3,000 on Tuesday.
“To flatten the curve, I urge all local elected officials to enforce the terms of this order,” Governor Kemp said in a Facebook post Wednesday night.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, issued an order mandating that most people wear face masks in public, and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, also a Republican, made a plea to residents: “Arm yourself with a mask.”
The private sector took steps as well: Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, said it would require all customers to wear masks, beginning Monday. The grocery chain Kroger also said its customers had to to wear masks starting July 22.
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, warning of “an unsettling climb” in new cases, moved to reduce seating capacity in restaurants and limit the size of gatherings. And in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, said that she was willing to reverse course and tighten restrictions again. “I won’t just turn the car around,” she said. “I’m going to shut it off, I’m going to kick you out and I’m going to make you walk home.”
Oklahoma hit a single-day record for cases on Wednesday, with 1,075, and its governor, Kevin Stitt, announced that he had tested positive, becoming the first governor known to become infected. Mr. Stitt has attended many public events and has often been photographed in public while not wearing a mask, including at an indoor rally for President Trump that was held in Tulsa on June 20.
He said he did not know where, when or how he had become infected, and that his own infection had not prompted him to second-guess his response to the virus.
More than 65,000 U.S. cases were announced Tuesday, the nation’s second-highest daily total, and the seven-day average of new cases rose to 61,896, a new high. “We don’t want to become Florida, we don’t want to become Texas, we don’t want to become Arizona,” Mr. Wolf, of Pennsylvania, said.
On Wednesday Florida became the third state — after New York and California — to surpass 300,000 cases. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said the state would deploy 1,000 medical workers to hospitals that have beds for coronavirus patients but not enough doctors and nurses to treat them.
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, gave an evening address on the virus in which he warned Ohioans that if they do not act to curb the recent uptick in cases, “Florida and Arizona will be our future.”
“Now let’s be honest, all of us — all of us — have started to let our guard down,” he said. “I know I have. We’re tired. We want to go back to the way things were, and that’s very, very understandable. But when we do we’re literally playing a Russian roulette game with our own lives, and our families’, and our neighbors.’”
California and Texas each set daily records Tuesday with more than 10,000 new cases. With many Floridians waiting seven to 10 days to receive test results, Florida plans to designate lanes at its drive-through testing sites for symptomatic patients, to segregate their samples in an attempt to get their results back more quickly.
After attacks by Trump aides, Fauci says focus should be on the virus rather than ‘games people are playing.’
As Trump administration officials have increasingly sought to undermine him in recent days, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and one of the most trusted federal officials working on the pandemic, made his most pointed remarks yet on Wednesday addressing tensions with the White House.
“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with The Atlantic on Wednesday. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”
He spoke as Trump administration officials have sought to undermine his credibility — first anonymously, over the weekend, and then out in the open. A short op-ed by Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, published in USA Today on Tuesday evening was headlined “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, posted a cartoon Sunday evening mocking Dr. Fauci.
In the interview Wednesday, Dr. Fauci called the partisan environment around the virus disturbing.
“It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control, rather than this back-and-forth distraction, which just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Asked to review the government’s response to the pandemic, he said: “We’ve got to almost reset this and say, OK, let’s stop this nonsense and figure out how can we get our control over this now, and looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, because those are the hot zones now, and I’m looking at the map, saying we got to make sure it doesn’t happen in other states.”
“So rather than these games people are playing,” he said, “let’s focus on that.”
Mr. Trump put some distance between himself and his aide’s op-ed piece, saying, “I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci.” Others in the administration went further than the president. Vice President Mike Pence told reporters Wednesday that the administration “couldn’t be more grateful” for Dr. Fauci’s “steady counsel.”
Alyssa Farah, the White House director for strategic communications, wrote on Twitter. ““The Peter Navarro op-ed didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone.”
In the shadow of the pandemic, overdose deaths in the U.S. have soared.
Drug deaths in the United States, which in 2018 fell for the first time in 25 years, rose to record numbers in 2019 and are continuing to climb, a resurgence that appears related to some of the hardships created by the coronavirus outbreak.
Drug deaths have risen an average of 13 percent so far in 2020 compared with last year, according to mortality data collected by The New York Times. If this trend continues for the rest of the year, the increase in annual drug deaths will be the sharpest since 2016.
Several public health experts said conditions created by the pandemic could hurt the nation’s fragile progress in fighting drug-related deaths, but they noted that the overdose rate was on its way back up well before the virus arrived.
“Covid just makes it a bit worse,” said Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Researchers say the threat of overdose can be exacerbated by the social-isolation practices used to contain the virus. Aside from the emotional effects, there are practical dangers: Using drugs alone means there is no one around if a revival attempt is needed. The vast curtailment of in-person medical treatment — including group counseling sessions and stays at residential treatment centers — means there is far less of the emotional support that can be vital to addiction treatment.
Black business owners had a harder time getting federal coronavirus aid, a study finds.
Black business owners are more likely to be hindered in seeking coronavirus financial aid than their white peers, a new study has found.
The study looked at how more than a dozen Washington-area banks handled requests for loans under the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. It was conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit in Washington, in partnership with researchers from universities in Utah and New Jersey.
From late April to late May, the researchers and the nonprofit, which supports better access to capital for low-income and minority communities, sent pairs of would-be loan applicants to branches of 17 banks. In each pair, a Black borrower and a white borrower shared similar credit and asset characteristics, so the only difference between them was their race.
To make the study more conservative, the researchers gave each Black borrower a slightly better financial profile than his or her white counterpart.
The Black borrowers were offered different products and treated significantly worse by employees than white borrowers were in 43 percent of the tests, the study found. Of the 17 banks, some of which were tested through multiple branches, 13 had at least one test in which a white borrower was treated better than his or her Black counterpart. In the rest of the tests, the pairs were treated relatively equally or the difference wasn’t significant enough to count as a violation of fair lending laws, in the researchers’ view.
Racial disparities worsen the toll of the lockdown for women in the U.K.
Women of color have long faced economic and racial inequality in Britain. Now that group is being hit disproportionately by the financial and psychological impact of the pandemic, according to a recent study by a group of British universities and women’s charities.
The survey found that nearly 43 percent of Black and ethnic minority women believed that they would be in more debt than before the pandemic, compared with 37 percent of white women and 34 percent of white men.
More than four in 10 of the women said they would struggle to make ends meet over the next three months.
A government review of the disparities in the risk and outcomes from the coronavirus found that death rates have been higher in Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups than in white groups.
The review found that Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and other Asians, as well as Caribbeans and other Black people, had from 10 percent to 50 percent higher risk of death than white Britons.
In a recent study, Runnymede Trust, a think tank, found women of color were burdened with carrying out menial tasks that can be perilous in a pandemic.
“Covid-19 has brought the harsh realities of pre-existing racial inequalities into sharp relief, and nowhere is this more manifest than the disproportionate social and economic impact of Covid-19 on Black and ethnic minority women,” said Zubaida Haque, the interim director of Runnymede.
Global Roundup
The Philippines is sending the police to search for those with the virus.
The government in the Philippines has empowered the police to fan out home-to-home in search of infected people. The move has triggered an uproar among human rights groups, which on Wednesday accused President Rodrigo Duterte’s government of employing repressive tactics.
As the number of infected nears 60,000 nationwide, with the death toll surpassing 1,600, health authorities are under tremendous pressure from a public increasingly wary of Mr. Duterte, whose brutal anti-drugs campaign has left thousands dead.
The policing plan, termed “Care Strategy,” lets officers accompany health workers in search of infected people who may be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms.
The government said anyone who could not satisfy the requirements for home quarantine — including having their own bathroom and not living with elderly or pregnant people — are to be taken to a private facility.
“This move reveals the Duterte government’s continuing reliance on police and militaristic approaches to solve a public health emergency,” said Ephraim Cortez, the secretary general of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, a group that provides counsel to the poor.
A well-known Filipino human rights lawyer, Chel Diokno, said the government strategy would sow further terror.
Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, on Tuesday compared the private facilities for patients to a “paid for vacation.”
Elsewhere around the world:
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Responding to a recent spike in new cases in Tokyo, the city government on Wednesday raised its pandemic alert level to “red,” its highest, although the caution appeared to affect little in terms of behavior limitations. Tokyo recorded two consecutive daily records last week, with a peak of 243 cases Friday. Officials had debated whether to raise Tokyo’s alert level, given that a large proportion of the new cases were among younger people who had only mild symptoms.
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Childhood vaccination rates have plunged during the pandemic, and the World Health Organization warned that the long-term effects from missed inoculations could be worse than Covid-19. “The avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunizations could be far greater than Covid-19 itself,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, said in a statement. He added that vaccines can still be administered during the pandemic.
The C.D.C. director defends the shift of virus data collection away from his agency.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert H. Redfield, defended the Trump administration’s decision to strip the C.D.C. of control of some of the nation’s key coronavirus data, saying on Wednesday that the move was necessary to modernize data collection.
On a conference call with reporters, Dr. Redfield said the C.D.C. was looking for ways to make its coronavirus data more “externally facing,” so that Americans could examine “the current extent of the pandemic in different counties and in different Zip codes.”
The administration’s new directive instructs hospitals to report coronavirus information directly to a new central database at the Department of Human Health and Services in Washington, rather than to the C.D.C. in Atlanta, which has been collecting the information since the start of the pandemic and which prides itself on scientific independence. The directive to bypass the C.D.C. has provoked an uproar among public health experts.
Researchers, state health officials and academics rely on the C.D.C.’s data, and expressed concern about whether Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the C.D.C., would be as transparent as the C.D.C. has been.
The new database, called H.H.S. Protect, is not public. Experts including Representative Donna E. Shalala, Democrat of Florida and a former health secretary, accused the administration of trying to politicize the data by taking control of it away from the C.D.C.
Jose Arrietta, the chief information officer for Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that the new database would feed information to the C.D.C., which would continue to issue reports on the pandemic. Mr. Arrieta said the health agency is considering giving members of Congress access to the new database, and is “exploring the best way” to make information from it available to news organizations, academic researchers and the general public.
As record temperatures sear the South and Southwest, the outbreak makes it harder to open cooling centers.
Temperatures have been soaring across the South and the Southwest, reaching record highs in areas grappling with some of the worst virus outbreaks in the nation — making it more difficult to protect people who are at risk from extreme heat.
San Antonio hit 106 degrees on Monday, tying the July record. Monitors at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport hit a blazing 114, matching the old record. Austin hit a high of 108 degrees — three degrees above the old record.
Such heat can disproportionally affect the vulnerable: people without the means to buy an air-conditioner or crank it up to full blast. Cities typically open cooling centers, in places like community recreation centers, where people can escape the heat. But the virus has introduced complications in a moment when people are being discouraged from congregating indoors.
Austin’s cooling centers now require visitors to maintain social distancing and to wear masks, said Matthew Lara, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “You don’t want to cram 30 people into a room and call it a cooling center,” he said.
On Wednesday, the National Weather Service said that the most punishing heat would begin to abate across the South, but, like a hot bubble under the nation’s wallpaper, “will be on the increase for the eastern U.S. and for the northern High Plains.”
Scientists find no virus risk based on blood type.
A pair of recent studies found that people with Type A blood are no more at risk of getting the virus or falling dangerously ill than others, contradicting preliminary evidence based on a relatively small sample of people.
Over the past few months, after looking at thousands of additional patients with Covid-19, scientists are reporting a much weaker link to blood type.
Two studies — one at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the other at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York — did not find that Type A blood increases the odds that people will be infected.
The new reports do find evidence that people with Type O blood may be slightly less likely to be infected. But the effect is so small that people shouldn’t count on it. “No one should think they’re protected,” said Nicholas Tatonetti, a data scientist at Columbia University.
Even if blood types don’t matter much for treating people with Covid-19, they could reveal something important about the basic nature of the disease.
That’s because blood type influences how your immune system fights against infections. People with Type A blood do not make the same kind of antibodies as people with Type B blood, for example. It is conceivable that these molecular differences in the immune system explain the purported link between blood type and coronavirus infections.
U.S. national parks could be the next battleground in reopening.
Pressure is mounting to close Grand Canyon and other national parks in states across the South and the West that are seeing rising cases.
When the pandemic took hold in the United States this spring, many local public health officials demanded that national parks close, arguing that the millions of tourists they attract endangered vulnerable people in adjacent towns and tribal lands, often-remote places with hospitals miles away. After shutting down on April 1, Grand Canyon partially reopened in time for summer tourist season.
In some ways, the parks provide a refuge from the pandemic. Experts say the risk of catching the virus is much lower outdoors. Camping offers a cheap, socially distanced vacation for families, and some parks are in sparsely populated areas with fewer cases. But as the virus infiltrates growing sections of the country, some lawmakers are questioning the decision to keep parks open even partially.
Banksy reveals virus-themed art on a London train.
The graffiti artist Banksy unveiled some virus-themed art when he appeared to spray-paint images of rats on the inside of a London Underground train. “If you don’t mask — you don’t get,” said the caption of a post by his Instagram account this week that featured video footage of the spray painting. The BBC reported that art was removed by cleaners.
Reporting was contributed by Julie Bosman, Julia Calderone, Ben Casselman, Michael Cooper, Michael Corkery, Maria Cramer, Manny Fernandez, Emily Flitter, Dana Goldstein, J. David Goodman, Jason Gutierrez, Maggie Haberman, Makiko Inoue, Isabella Kwai, Apoorva Mandavilli, Patricia Mazzei, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Sarah Mervosh, David Montgomery, Claire Moses, Azi Paybarah, Sean Plambeck, Motoko Rich, Katie Rogers, John Schwartz, Eliza Shapiro, Mitch Smith, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Jim Tankersley, Lucy Tompkins, Hisako Ueno, David Waldstein, Will Wright, Elizabeth Williamson, Ceylan Yeginsu and Carl Zimmer.
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