Here’s what you need to know:
- Two former leaders of a Massachusetts veterans’ home were charged in connection with an outbreak at the facility.
- The U.S. hits seven million cases, with California leading the way.
- Virginia’s governor and his wife test positive for the virus.
- Democrats are preparing a new $2.4 trillion stimulus bill as time wanes for a compromise.
- Israel will prohibit citizens from traveling abroad in some instances as cases surge.
- Rio de Janeiro’s world-famous Carnival will be delayed amid virus concerns.
- A federal judge bars an early end to the U.S. census, which was delayed for months by the pandemic.
Two former leaders of a Massachusetts veterans’ home were charged in connection with an outbreak at the facility.
Two former leaders of a Massachusetts veterans’ home were indicted on charges of criminal neglect in connection to the coronavirus deaths of at least 76 residents at the facility, the state’s attorney general said on Friday.
Bennett Walsh, 50, and Dr. David Clinton, 71, were indicted Thursday by a state grand jury on charges related to their work at the facility, the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, Mass.
“We began this investigation on behalf of the families who lost loved ones under tragic circumstances and to honor these men who bravely served our country,” the state attorney general, Maura Healey, said in a statement. “We allege that the actions of these defendants during the Covid-19 outbreak at the facility put veterans at higher risk of infection and death and warrant criminal charges.”
Each man was indicted on five counts, and the specific charges were for caretakers who “wantonly or recklessly” permit or cause bodily injury and abuse, neglect or mistreatment of an older or disabled person.
Lawyers for Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton, of Springfield and South Hadley, Mass., could not immediately be reached.
The Soldiers’ Home, a state-run facility that provides health care, hospice care and other assistance to veterans, has been under investigation since early April, when the attorney general’s office began investigating the facility after learning of “serious issues with Covid-19 infection control procedures.”
Investigators focused on the events of March 27, when staff members combined two dementia wards with infected veterans and healthy residents, “increasing the exposure of asymptomatic veterans to the virus,” the attorney general’s office said.
Because of staffing shortages, the facility consolidated the units, which had a total of 42 residents who had different statuses, the office said. Residents who were positive or symptomatic were placed six in a room that typically held four veterans, it said.
Residents believed to be asymptomatic were placed in nine beds in the dining room, where they were “a few feet apart from each other” and next to the room where the infected patients were, it said.
“The residents in the consolidated unit were allegedly mingling together, regardless of Covid-19 status,” the attorney general’s office said, adding that this decision was reckless from an infection control perspective and placed the asymptomatic veterans at an increased risk of contracting Covid-19.”
The office said that Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton would be arraigned in Hampden County Superior Court but did not specify a date.
The U.S. hits seven million cases, with California leading the way.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States surpassed seven million on Thursday, according to a New York Times database, although the country is recording fewer new daily cases than it did during the pandemic’s midsummer peak.
The nation has averaged at least 41,000 new cases a day over the past week, compared with a daily average of about 65,000 cases in July.
In California on Thursday, officials recorded their 800,000th case since the start of the pandemic. That is more than any other state, but the figure is cumulative, and does not capture the state’s current situation.
With health officials in California testing enough of the population to contain the spread of the virus, the state is reporting a relatively low number of new cases a day, according to the Times database.
More broadly, California the most populous state in the country, has had significantly fewer virus cases per capita than other states like Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. California currently ranks 36th among states and territories in known new cases per capita over the past seven days, and 26th in the total number of known cases per capita since the start of the pandemic.
It was less than a month ago that the United States reached six million cases, on Aug. 30. It had taken more than three months for the country to record its first million.
The story of how California came to lead the country in the total number of cases goes back to the spring and summer months, when new cases surged across the Sun Belt states. New cases in California peaked at the end of July when the seven-day average doubled from what it was a month earlier.
It was a far cry from the early days of the pandemic, when most virus cases were in the Northeast and Washington State, and California emerged as a national role model when it became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order.
But the number of cases there began to climb when that order was lifted.
Like health officials in many Sun Belt states, the authorities in California attributed the spike to a premature easing of restrictions. In early July, when virus-related hospitalizations in California were up by more than 50 percent over a two-week period, Gov. Gavin Newsom halted reopening plans and ordered bars and indoor dining closed for most residents.
Virginia’s governor and his wife test positive for the virus.
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said Friday that he and his wife, Pamela Northam, had tested positive for the virus.
They were tested after learning they had been in close quarters with a staff member who had been infected. Mr. Northam, a Democrat, said that he felt fine, while his wife was experiencing mild symptoms.
“As I have been reminding Virginians throughout this crisis, #COVID19 is very real and very contagious,” Mr. Northam wrote on Twitter. “We are grateful for your thoughts and support, but the best thing you can do for us — and most importantly, for your fellow Virginians — is to take this virus seriously.”
The state has been reporting relatively low numbers of new virus cases a day — about 862 — over a seven-day period ending Thursday, according to a New York Times database. Deaths, while on the rise, are still modest with an average of about 28 deaths over a seven-day period.
Mr. Northam is the third governor to test positive for the virus. On Thursday, Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri, a Republican, announced that he would cancel campaign events in his re-election bid and isolate after he and his wife, Teresa, tested positive. Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, also a Republican, contracted the virus in July.
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican who became known for his aggressive approach to containing the virus, initially tested positive as part of a screening to meet President Trump in August, but it was a false positive. He later received a negative result from a more precise test.
Democrats are preparing a new $2.4 trillion stimulus bill as time wanes for a compromise.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and top Democrats on Thursday moved forward with the development of a roughly $2.4 trillion stimulus bill that would provide pandemic aid to American families, restaurants and airlines, amid growing pressure from moderates who demanded additional action before lawmakers leave Washington next week to campaign for re-election.
The effort to present a new package was the first sign of movement in negotiations between Democrats and the White House that have been stalled since early August, and it came as Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said he and Ms. Pelosi had agreed to revive those talks. But it was far from clear that the measure Democrats had in mind, whose cost is about $1 trillion more than the Trump administration has signaled it could accept, would lead to a deal.
Ms. Pelosi privately told top Democrats that the House could vote on it anyway, which would allow anxious Democrats who have been quietly agitating for more action on a stimulus measure to at least register their support for additional relief. Earlier in the week, she instructed lawmakers to begin work, a move previously reported by Politico.
“We are still striving for an agreement,” Ms. Pelosi told top Democrats in a private meeting on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the remarks who disclosed them on the condition of anonymity. “If necessary, we can formalize the request by voting on it on the House floor.”
The measure being drafted is substantially smaller than the $3.4 trillion package the House approved in May, but it is expected to contain some of the same elements, as well as additional funding for needs Ms. Pelosi said had emerged in recent months.
Israel will prohibit citizens from traveling abroad in some instances as cases surge.
Israelis will only be allowed to fly out of the country for vacation if they had already purchased air tickets before new coronavirus lockdown rules came into effect at 2 p.m. on Friday, officials said.
The travel restrictions come as part of a national effort to confront a growing caseload. Israel has recorded nearly 37,000 new cases of the virus over the past week, a per capita rate that is the highest in the world, according to a New York Times database.
Outbound tickets purchased after the Friday deadline will not be honored, Israel’s Ministry of Transportation said in a statement, but the thousands of Israelis already abroad will be allowed to return on their original flights and enter self-quarantine on arrival, if required.
Only a very few countries currently accept Israeli travelers, including Greece and Serbia.
The national lockdown, Israel’s second this year, began last week. It is expected to last at least another two weeks but will probably continue in some form until late October. In light of soaring infection rates, the government approved the tightening of restrictions on Thursday.
The authorities had considered shutting down Ben-Gurion International Airport for all but cargo and emergency flights. But since the airlines were not likely to cancel all their scheduled flights on short notice, there were concerns that thousands of Israelis who had already purchased air tickets would sue the state for refunds, the Israeli news media reported.
Miri Regev, the Israeli minister for transportation, said the decision to curtail outbound travel was meant to balance between the interest of keeping the airport and its workers functioning, the rights of those who had already bought air tickets and “the principle of social solidarity” as part of the national effort to combat the pandemic.
global roundup
Rio de Janeiro’s world-famous Carnival will be delayed amid virus concerns.
Rio de Janeiro’s annual Carnival parade will be delayed next year for the first time in more than a century amid concerns about the coronavirus, the Brazilian news media reported on Thursday.
During a typical Carnival, which is held during the peak of summer in the southern Hemisphere, rambunctious street parties and performances paralyze the city of six million people.
But that could now be an epidemiologist’s nightmare in a country that has so far reported more than 4.5 million cases and nearly 140,000 deaths, and whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, announced in July that he had tested positive.
Rio de Janeiro alone has reported more than 250,000 cases, including more than 11,000 in the past week, according to a New York Times database.
The event’s key organizer, Rio’s League of Samba Schools, said on Thursday that the parade could not be held safely in February as scheduled because of the pandemic, the newspaper O Globo reported. The league said it was looking into other dates.
“We must await the coming months for definition about if there will be a vaccine or not, and when there will be immunization,” the league’s president, Jorge Castanheira, told reporters on Thursday, according to The Associated Press. “We don’t have the safety conditions to set a date.”
It was unclear whether the street parties that normally take place alongside the official parade would still occur.
Carnival was last postponed in 1912, after the death of Brazil’s foreign relations minister, The A.P. reported, but revelers still partied in the streets.
In other international news:
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South Korea announced new social-distancing guidelines on Friday as millions of people prepared to travel to their hometowns during one of the country’s biggest holidays. The Chuseok holiday runs from Wednesday to Oct. 4. and poses a new challenge for health officials who have been struggling to contain infections. Starting Monday, villages cannot hold community parties of more than 50 people indoors and more than 100 outdoors, and facilities for entertainment, including drinking, will be closed in provincial towns.
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The regional government in Spain’s capital, Madrid, has added eight areas to the partial lockdown that went into effect this week. Spain has been fighting a resurgence of the virus, and Friday’s addition extends the restrictions to about one million residents.
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London will be made an “area of concern” and added to the British government’s watchlist of hot spots that could soon be subject to a local lockdown. Reacting to the news, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said in a statement that the city was at a “very worrying tipping point” and urged residents to follow health guidelines, calling on the government to increase testing capacity.
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Attendance at the French Open tennis tournament, which begins Sunday, will be capped at 1,000 spectators per day as part of tightened restrictions in France, which has recorded a daily average of nearly 12,000 new virus cases a day in the past week.
A federal judge bars an early end to the U.S. census, which was delayed for months by the pandemic.
A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Friday from ending the 2020 census a month early, the latest twist in years of political and legal warfare over a contested population count that was delayed for months because of the pandemic.
In U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge Lucy H. Koh issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from winding down the count by Sept. 30, a month before the scheduled completion date of Oct. 31. She also barred officials from delivering completed population data to the White House on Dec. 31 rather than the April 2021 delivery date that had previously been set out.
The ruling came after evidence filed this week showed that top Census Bureau officials believed ending the head count early would seriously endanger its accuracy.
In one July email, the head of census field operations, Timothy P. Olson Jr., called it “ludicrous” to think a curtailed population count would succeed. A second internal document drafted in late July said a shortened census would have “fatal data flaws that are unacceptable for a constitutionally mandated national activity.”
The Trump administration had argued that it needed to end census-taking early to begin processing state-by-state population data or it would miss a statutory Dec. 31 deadline for sending population figures to President Trump.
In a 78-page opinion, Judge Koh said that internal Commerce Department and Census Bureau documents showed that both agencies knew the earlier deadlines could not be met without a high risk of creating a flawed population count. They also knew that the pandemic gave them ample legal justification for missing the December deadline for delivering data to the president, she wrote.
The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, did not immediately react to the ruling.
Moscow adds restrictions, showing officials are wary of rising cases.
The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, asked older people to stay at home and businesses to move to remote work in the clearest sign yet that the authorities are wary of the rising number of cases in the city.
The mayor also noted doctors’ concerns that the flu will coincide with the pandemic, risking more lives, and warned that if people do not take the orders seriously, a full lockdown could follow.
“We all really don’t want to return to the harsh constraints of this spring,” Mr. Sobyanin said.
The order for a partial lockdown contrasted with President Vladimir V. Putin’s suggestions that Russia has the virus largely under control and that a vaccine is ready. Mr. Putin, however, warned on Thursday of rising cases.
Reported cases have been ticking upward in the Russian capital after plateauing at a few hundred per day over the summer. On Friday, Moscow reported 1,560 new cases. In the past week, Moscow hospitals reported a 30 percent rise in virus patients, Mr. Sobyanin said.
The rise in Russian cases comes despite the country being the first to register a vaccine last month for emergency use. People at high risk, such as doctors and teachers, can legally take the vaccine outside of a clinical trial, but few have done so. As of Friday, 126 health care workers in Moscow have taken the vaccine, not enough to slow the spread of the virus in a city of 13 million inhabitants.
Russia has recorded at least 1.1 million cases of the virus, the fourth-highest tally in the world after the United States, India and Brazil.
Can New York City schools pull off their ambitious hybrid teaching plan?
Over the summer, the mayor of New York City and his aides settled on what seemed like a logical solution to the puzzle of how to reopen schools with less-crowded buildings during the pandemic. Students, they decided, would cycle in and out of classrooms, learning remotely the rest of the time.
But turning this so-called hybrid system into a reality has proved to be a logistical morass.
The city still needs to hire thousands of teachers to staff online and in-person classes, and the staffing crisis forced Mayor Bill de Blasio to delay the start of in-person classes for a second time last week.
A web of restrictions, pushed for in part by the teachers’ union, has essentially forced principals to create two versions of school: one in person and one online. That has led to last-minute scheduling changes that have frustrated parents.
Now, the city’s 1,700 principals are racing to make their limited staffing work for children in elementary, middle and high school. Only pre-K students and children with advanced disabilities have been allowed to return to classrooms so far.
The task, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union, is “the hardest logistical challenge in probably most administrators’ careers.”
Myanmar’s caseload soars, threatening food distribution, as an election nears.
With Myanmar’s coronavirus cases skyrocketing and its largest city mostly under lockdown, uncertainty is brewing over the potential effects on both the country’s urban food supply and a national election that is just six weeks away.
As of mid-August, the nation of 54 million people had reported only a few hundred cases. But since then, the national caseload has multiplied quickly, reaching 8,515 as of Friday. More than 1,000 infections were reported on Thursday alone.
Myanmar, also known as Burma, has one of the world’s lowest testing rates, which suggests that the virus had been spreading undetected for weeks.
“I think the government did not expect the scenario of rapidly rising cases,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, an independent political analyst. “They were complacent. They should have been conducting random tests since late April to find the undetected cases.”
All domestic flights have been grounded, and about 50,000 people are in preventive quarantine. But the country’s health care system is woefully unprepared to handle the pandemic.
The largest city, Yangon, has reported about 90 percent of the country’s new cases. About 400 patients have been ordered to stay in tents inside a local soccer stadium.
Officials are also wrestling with how to supply food to the residents of Yangon, also known as Rangoon, so they can remain at home — a tall order in a country with limited resources.
“The government wants to provide support to all seven million people in Yangon,” said U Khin Maung Lwin, a commerce ministry spokesman. “But it will take time and will be difficult in this time of rising positive cases.”
Another question is how to manage campaigning ahead of a general election that is set for Nov. 8.
The country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whose political party, the National League for Democracy, won in a landslide five years ago, hopes to hold on to power.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi suspended public appearances earlier this month just as the official campaign season began. But it may be to her benefit that campaigning is prohibited in Yangon and Rakhine State, the site of the first major outbreak.
Democracy activists and the main opposition party have called for delaying the vote to give the candidates a chance to campaign, and to ensure that voters can cast their ballots safely.
“Despite the pandemic, the minimum norms of the democratic election process must be guaranteed,” said U Sai Ye Kyaw Swar Myint, the executive director of the People’s Alliance for Credible Elections, an independent election monitoring group. “There is a need to guarantee the rights of political parties and candidates to freely campaign and drum up support.”
Reporting was contributed by Pam Belluck, Choe Sang-Hun, Emily Cochrane, Antonella Francini, Mike Ives, Isabel Kershner, Andrew E. Kramer, Raphael Minder, Saw Nang, Richard C. Paddock, Azi Paybarah, Daniel Politi, Alan Rappeport, Anna Schaverien, Eliza Shapiro, Jeanna Smialek, Mitch Smith, Eileen Sullivan, Michael Wines and Elaine Yu.
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Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times
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