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Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times

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Maps tracking new coronavirus infections in the continental United States were bathed in a sea of red on Friday morning, with every state showing the virus spreading with worrying speed and health care workers bracing for more trying days ahead.

More than 250,000 people have died in the United States, a number that grew by another 1,962 on Thursday. The Covid Tracking Project reported that more than 80,000 people were in the hospital, the highest number since the pandemic began.

An urgent message from officials in El Paso County, Texas, seeking to hire a temporary morgue attendant drove home the reality of what the soaring numbers will mean for communities across the country.

“All applicants must be able to lift between 100 to 400 pounds, with assistance,” the job notice said, according to The Texas Tribune. “Not only is the assignment physically taxing, but it may be emotionally taxing as well."

As the picture across the country grew more dire, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned people against traveling and visiting family for the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House coronavirus task force appeared in public for the first time in months, along with Vice President Mike Pence, who said the country was in fine shape.

“America has never been more prepared to combat this virus than we are today,” Mr. Pence declared. “We approach this moment with the confidence of experience. We know the American people know what to do.”

He did not wear a mask and did not take questions.

By contrast, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, appearing at the same news briefing, issued a dire assessment of the pandemic, urging Americans to “increase their vigilance” as they await the approval of a vaccine.

Dr. Birx came armed with alarming statistics and a still-more-alarming map of the country that was a vast expanse of bright red.

She implored Americans to practice social distancing and to wear masks, one of which she wore herself as she delivered her remarks.

“Every American needs to be vigilant in this moment,” she said, “because we know when you are we can mitigate this virus and stop the spread together.”

But togetherness eluded the politically divided nation. State and local governments continued to go their own way in fighting the pandemic, and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still arguing in vain for the access that might prepare him to do his job.

After meeting with health care workers on Thursday, he lambasted President Trump for blocking “access to all the information we need” about vaccinations and other virus data.

“There is no excuse not to share the data and let us begin to plan,” he said.

Mr. Biden vowed quick action after he takes office but promised not to impose a national shutdown. Asked about the president’s erratic behavior as he fights to overturn the results of a free and fair election, Mr. Biden responded with two words: “Totally irresponsible.”

Credit...Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press

The pandemic had been raging for months when the United States reported 100,000 daily coronavirus cases for the first time on Nov. 4.

It was a stunning number that showed a virus spreading out of control.

Less than three weeks later, the country is edging closer to reporting 200,000 newly detected infections every day — at the very moment that cold weather is driving people indoors in many parts of the country and the holiday season beckons people to gather together.

More than 187,000 cases were announced nationwide on Thursday, another single-day record, and daily tallies have been rising in 47 states, according to a New York Times database. 

In discussing the current spread on CNN on Friday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said, “This is faster, it is broader and, what worries me, is it could be longer.”

In California alone, officials reported more than 13,000 cases, a single-day record, prompting the state to announce a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew for all but essential workers.

Even if the current seven-day national average of about 166,000 daily cases were to hold until the end of the year, nearly seven million more people would contract the virus. That is roughly equivalent to about 2 percent of the U.S. populations.

The potential consequences — in a nation where 250,000 people with the coronavirus have already died — are devastating.

Many health care systems are close to buckling under the strain, and soaring hospitalizations inevitably mean more fatalities. The Covid Tracking Project reported on Thursday that there were more than 80,000 Covid-19 patients in U.S. hospitals, more than ever before.

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation noted that Covid-19 had become the nation’s third-leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. If current trends continue, the death toll could reach 300,000 by New Year’s Eve.

Though talk of effective vaccines has dominated the news cycle in recent days, they are not yet available.

“We are in for a rough period through the end of February,” said Dr. Jessica E. Justman, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “It looks hard to find a way to break it.”

To some extent, the upward curve in new cases had been expected as colder weather drove people to spend more time indoors, where the virus spreads more readily. But wintry conditions are not the only culprit.

Epidemiologists and other experts say the equation for reining in the runaway spread of the virus ought to be simple: The more people wear masks, keep a physical distance from others, wash their hands and avoid crowds (especially indoors), the better the chances of bending the infection curve downward.

But as each state and many cities set their own rules and make their own plans, the nation has no unified approach and no coordinated strategy for balancing the pandemic’s economic and human effects.

Credit...Stephanie Keith for The New York Times

The number of new coronavirus cases in New York City has climbed to the point where officials are struggling to untangle chains of transmission and make sense of how the virus is spreading. Now they are facing the reality that they are dealing with a surge that will linger for weeks, if not months.

“Just a matter of time,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of new restrictions on indoor activities and businesses at his news conference on Thursday.

After a summer of dwindling transmission, New York City is in the grips of a second wave.

On Wednesday, after the seven-day rolling average positivity rate in the city hit 3 percent, Mr. de Blasio ordered the closing of public schools and hinted that other changes were coming. Despite opposition from the Trump administration, school systems around the country have also stopped in-person classes, including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit.

On the same day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned that citywide restrictions on mass gatherings, indoor dining and houses of worship could follow in the coming weeks if the numbers continued to worsen.

More than 10,000 new cases of the coronavirus have been diagnosed this past week. At hospitals, doctors who worked through the surge in the spring are growing anxious once again, as more than 700 people in the city are hospitalized with the virus. Over the past week, there have been 44 deaths in the city.

In numbers released on Thursday, 38 ZIP codes in the city had a seven-day average positive test rate of more than 4 percent. Nine had rates above 5 percent.

While cases are surging, epidemiologists and public health experts do not expect the second wave to be as bad as the first, when ambulance sirens filled the air, emergency rooms overflowed with patients, and more than 20,000 New York City residents died. But there is growing concern.

Last week, a group of health organizations and doctors sent a letter to Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo warning that they were waiting too long to impose new restrictions “to reverse the tide of new infections.”

The group, which calls itself the Covid-19 Working Group-New York, had urged Mr. de Blasio in early March to impose social-distancing measures and restrictions, only to see the city wait, possibly costing thousands of lives. Now the group sees the current hesitancy for new restrictions — including the closures of indoor dining and gyms, which are both thought to give rise to a disproportionate number of infections — as a repeat of the spring.

“I’m shocked that City Hall seems to have learned so little from what happened in March,” said James Krellenstein, an H.I.V. activist and member of the Covid-19 working group who helped organize the Working Group-New York letters. “We don’t have time in an epidemic to dither.”

Credit...Illustration by Mark Weaver, Photograph by Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Elisabeth Rosenthal, a former New York Times correspondent, worked as an emergency room physician before becoming a journalist. She interviewed Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, for the Times’s Opinion section.

As a health journalist, a physician and a former foreign correspondent who lived through SARS in Beijing, I often get questions from friends, colleagues and people I don’t even know about how to live during our current pandemic. Do I think it’s safe to plan a real wedding next June? Would I send my kids to school, with appropriate precautions? When will I trust a vaccine?

To the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one.

He’s a straight shooter, with no conflicts of interest — political or financial — or, at 79, career ambition. He has no interests, other than yours and mine.

So I asked him how Americans might expect to live in the next six to nine months. How should we behave? And what should the next administration do? Some answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Are there two or three things you think a Biden administration should do on Day 1?

There were some states in some regions of the country that somehow didn’t seem to have learned the lessons that could have been learned or should have been learned when New York City and other big cities got hit. And that is to do some fundamental public health measures. I want to really be explicit about this, because whenever I talk about simple things like uniform wearing of masks, keeping physical distance, avoiding crowds (particularly indoors), doing things outdoors to the extent possible with the weather, and washing hands frequently, that doesn’t mean shutting down the country. You can still have a considerable amount of leeway for business, for economic recovery, if you just do those simple things. But what we’re seeing, unfortunately, is a very disparate response to that. And that inevitably leads to the kind of surges that we see now.

Do you think we need a national policy like a national mask mandate? The current administration has left a lot of Covid-19 management to the states.

I think that there should be universal wearing of masks. If we can accomplish that with local mayors, governors, local authorities, fine. If not, we should seriously consider national. The only reason that I shy away from making a strong recommendation in that regard is that things that come from the national level down generally engender a bit of pushback from an already reluctant populace that doesn’t like to be told what to do. So you might wind up having the countereffect of people pushing back even more.

When do you think we’ll all be able to throw our masks away?

I think that we’re going to have some degree of public health measures together with the vaccine for a considerable period of time. But we’ll start approaching normal — if the overwhelming majority of people take the vaccine — as we get into the third or fourth quarter [of 2021].

Credit...Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

The drugmaker Pfizer said it planned to submit an application to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday for emergency-use authorization of its coronavirus vaccine. That would set in motion an accelerated regulatory process that could allow the first Americans to get a vaccine by the middle of December.

Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, announced on Wednesday that the vaccine was safe and 95 percent effective, and that it also worked well in older people and in preventing severe Covid-19. Another front-runner, Moderna, said on Monday that its vaccine, which uses similar technology, was 94.5 percent effective and that the company also expected to apply soon for emergency authorization.

An emergency authorization would allow limited groups of Americans to get the vaccines before the F.D.A. has completed the typical monthslong approval process, but agency officials have made clear through new guidelines that their bar for emergency authorization will be high.

If both vaccines are authorized for emergency use, federal and company officials have said, there could be enough doses to immunize about 20 million Americans before the end of the year, a group that would most likely include health care workers and nursing home residents. There are an estimated 17 million to 20 million health care workers in the United States, and about a million people living in nursing homes.

Credit...Nic Coury for The New York Times

As the United States confronts an outbreak of the coronavirus that shows no sign of slowing and local governments move to reimpose restrictions on businesses in an attempt to get some control over the epidemic, millions of Americans face the prospect of losing federal funds that had been providing a lifeline.

More than 12 million unemployed workers will see their jobless benefits disappear by the end of the year as two federal programs created in March under the CARES Act are set to expire unless Congress extends them.

It is a development that also threatens the larger economy.

Congressional action is unlikely before Joseph R. Biden Jr. becomes president on Jan. 20 and there are no guarantees it will happen even then: If Republicans retain control of the Senate after two runoff elections in Georgia in early January, the odds of passing a major stimulus package will lengthen.

A new study by the progressive Century Foundation found that 7.3 million workers would lose their benefits with the end of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which provides coverage for gig workers, the self-employed and independent contractors. An additional 4.6 million would be cut off from Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which kicks in when state employment benefits run out.

The programs represent “the last lifelines available to millions of Americans in desperate need,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation and co-author of the study with Elizabeth Pancotti. “It will be a crippling end to one of our darkest years.”

At the same time, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he does not plan to extend several key emergency lending programs beyond the end of the year and asked the Federal Reserve to return the money supporting them, a decision that could hinder Mr. Biden’s ability to use the central bank’s vast powers to cushion the economic fallout from the virus.

Mr. Mnuchin on Thursday said he would not continue the Fed programs, including ones that support the markets for corporate bonds and municipal debt and one that extends loans to midsize businesses. The emergency efforts expire at the end of 2020, but investors had expected some or all of them to be kept operational as the virus continues to pose economic risks.

The pandemic-era programs are run by the Fed but use Treasury money to insure against losses. They have provided an important backstop that has calmed critical markets since the coronavirus took hold in the country in March. Removing them could leave significant corners of the financial world vulnerable to the type of volatility that cascaded through the system as virus fears mounted in the spring.

By asking the Fed to return unused funds, Mr. Mnuchin could prevent Mr. Biden’s incoming Treasury secretary from quickly restarting the efforts at scale in 2021.

“The Federal Reserve would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy,” the central bank said in a statement.

The emergency programs were backed by $454 billion that Congress appropriated in March as part of a broader pandemic response package. Because of the way the Fed’s emergency lending powers work, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, needs the Treasury secretary’s signoff to make major changes to the programs’ terms. Extending the end date counts as one of those changes that need approval.

Credit...Gilead Sciences, via Associated Press

The World Health Organization on Thursday recommended against using the antiviral remdesivir, a drug that had generated intense interest as a treatment for Covid-19.

An expert panel “concluded that remdesivir has no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients, such as the need for mechanical ventilation or time to clinical improvement,” the W.H.O. announced. The panel published its review in the journal The BMJ. The report did not rule out the use of the drug altogether as a Covid treatment, but said evidence was lacking to recommend its use.

Gilead Sciences, manufacturer of remdesivir, whose trade name is Veklury, said in a statement that its drug “is recognized as a standard of care for the treatment of hospitalized patients with Covid-19 in guidelines from numerous credible national organizations, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Infectious Diseases Society of America, Japan, U.K., and Germany.” It added that there are “multiple randomized, controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals that demonstrate the clinical benefits of Veklury.”

The potential utility of remdesivir had been the subject of debate and skepticism for months, and especially in recent weeks, after the Food and Drug Administration approved it as the first treatment for Covid-19 in late October. One large study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, found that the drug reduced recovery time in hospitalized patients from 15 to 11 days. Two other trials the agency considered, sponsored by Gilead, did not include placebo controls, which are considered critical to judging effectiveness.

President Trump was administered remdesivir along with other treatments last month when he was hospitalized with Covid.

For the new analysis, the panel reviewed evidence from four trials, including one conducted by the N.I.H. and another sponsored by the W.H.O. and recently posted to a preprint server, which included some 5,000 patients, the largest to date. The paper has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

The results from that trial “brought into question some of the benefit that had been seen earlier, in the N.I.H. study,” said Dr. Bram Rochwerg, an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and a co-chair of the W.H.O. panel.

Remdesivir has been authorized for emergency use since the spring in the United States, and in October, Gilead reported that it had generated $873 million in revenue thus far this year.

Credit...David Mariuz/Australian Associated Press, via Associated Press

It was the lie that launched a lockdown — and it hinged on a pizza joint.

After dozens of coronavirus cases emerged this week in the state of South Australia, the government quickly clamped down, issuing onerous stay-at-home orders. Masks were mandatory. Restaurants, cafes, pubs and retails stores were closed, along with schools.

But officials abruptly reversed course two days later, saying on Friday that the infected individual had “deliberately misled” a contact-tracing team in the city of Adelaide. It all came down to his relationship with a pizza shop.

It turned out that the person at the Woodville Pizza Bar wasn’t a customer, as he had told contact tracers, but a part-time employee and a close contact of another coronavirus patient who also worked at the restaurant. That mattered because health officials initially feared that the newly infected man had contracted the virus from only a brief exposure.

South Australia’s top official, Steven Marshall, told reporters on Friday that given the new information, the state’s lockdown would end three days earlier than planned.

“To say that I am fuming about the actions of this individual is an absolute understatement,” he said.

Schools, restaurants and gyms were set to reopen, but new rules include a cap of 50 people at funerals and a ban on dancing at weddings. Mr. Marshall said that contact tracers still needed “breathing space” to continue investigating the source of the outbreak, the state’s most severe in months.

After a woman tested positive for the coronavirus at an Adelaide hospital, health officials found that she had contracted it from her daughter, a cleaner at a downtown hotel being used to quarantine Australians returning from abroad, the country’s national broadcaster reported on Friday. The cluster later expanded to include two security guards at the hotel, one of whom worked part-time at the Woodville Pizza Bar.

The man who lied to contact tracers said he had bought takeout from the restaurant, declining to tell them that he was a close contact of one of the infected guards.

“That clearly changes the circumstances, and had this person been truthful to the contact-tracing teams, we would not have gone into a six-day lockdown,” Grant Stevens, South Australia’s police commissioner, told reporters on Friday.

Credit...Andrej Cukic/EPA, via Shutterstock

The leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Irinej, died of the coronavirus on Friday, according to the church, three weeks after he attended a packed funeral for a senior bishop, who had also died after contracting the virus.

Patriarch Irinej, 90, was admitted to a military hospital in Serbia on Nov. 4, just days after he and thousands of unmasked people gathered in neighboring Montenegro to honor the country’s most senior bishop, Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic, who had died after contracting the coronavirus and whose body lay in an open coffin.

Video from the event showed mourners pressing their lips against his body.

The majority of Serbia’s population of seven million identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, and Patriarch Irinej, born Miroslav Gavrilovic and enthroned as the 45th leader of the church in 2010, was a major political force in the Balkan country. He opposed Serbia’s joining the European Union unless the nation’s “culture and religion” were respected. And he was outspoken in his condemnation of both abortion and gay rights. “A woman’s duty is to give birth in order to regenerate the nation,” he once told a local newspaper.

He was also one of the few conservative clerics open to a possible rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church to resolve historical animosity.

In 2019, as protests swept across Serbia to oppose the autocratic drift of the country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, he condemned the tens of thousands who took to the streets.

On Friday, Mr. Vucic paid tribute to Patriarch Irinej on Instagram.

“It was an honor to know you,” Mr. Vucic wrote. “People like you never depart.”

After having largely avoided widespread outbreaks of coronavirus in the spring, several Balkan countries, including Serbia, have faced a surge in cases in recent weeks. Serbia reported a record 6,109 new daily cases on Thursday, which likely understated the level of infection because of sporadic testing.

Last week, Serbia began fining people who fail to comply with the government restrictions, which include mandatory mask wearing.

In Montenegro, where the virus has also been spreading rapidly, is halfway through a two-week overnight curfew, with people barred from leaving their homes between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. except for essential work and “medical and humanitarian needs.”

Credit...Pavlo Palamarchuk/EPA, via Shutterstock

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the spread of the coronavirus held within it the seeds of another public health crisis: the overuse of antibiotics, which over time gives rise to resistant forms of sometimes lethal bacterial disease.

That problem has now come into clear focus in Ukraine, health officials and outside experts said, as antibiotics are sold without prescriptions and doctors have also prescribed the drugs widely.

Antibiotics are not needed to treat Covid-19 unless patients contract a secondary, bacterial infection. Nonetheless, grasping at straws in a disease without many effective treatments, Ukrainians took advantage of over-the-counter sales to consume vast quantities.

Sales of all types of antibiotics doubled since the start of the pandemic, the head of pharmaceutical supply department of the Ukrainian Health Ministry, Oleksandr Komarida, said in a briefing this month. “Our main task now is to take control over the panic” buying of antibiotics in the population, he said. Sales of one type tripled in October alone, he said.

More than half of all patients with coronavirus infection have been prescribed antibiotics without an obvious need for it, Serhiy Makarov, a member of an online doctors’ group opposed to misuse of antibiotics, said in a telephone interview.

“There are cases in Ukraine where patients take up to five kinds of antibiotics during the first weeks of the infection without any reason,” Dr. Makarov said. Antibiotics, he said, are handed out “like a vitamin.”

The W.H.O. warned in June of the risk of doctors and patients turning to antibiotics in desperation during the pandemic, accelerating the decline in the effectiveness of these drugs, the miracle cures of an earlier era. The United Nations has estimated drug resistant bacteria will kill 10 million people annually within 30 years.

In Ukraine, current and former health officials have been raising alarms. “Many people are afraid of getting Covid-19 and embark on a path of radical self-medication,” Zoriana Skaletska, a former minister of health, wrote in a warning published in the Ukrainian news media. “I’m not talking about herbal teas but about antibiotics.”

Global Roundup

Credit...Mazen Mahdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As China rushes to keep up with the global race to find a coronavirus vaccine, a state-owned drugmaker is reporting promising results for a candidate after administering doses to nearly a million people in the country.

For the past few months, the company, Sinopharm, has been inoculating people — including its employees and their families — outside of the traditional testing process as part of an emergency-use policy, even though its two vaccine candidates have not been formally proved safe or effective.

China’s push to be the first country to bring a vaccine to market before the completion of late-stage trials has prompted scientists to warn that the government is gambling with the health of its people.

Sinopharm’s chairman, Liu Jingzhen, told the local news media on Tuesday that only a few people had reported mild symptoms from one of its vaccines, and that no one had suffered serious adverse reactions. “Our progress so far, from research and development to clinical trials and production and emergency use, is leading the world in all aspects,” he said without offering evidence.

Though members of the public in China have long been skeptical of vaccines after a spate of quality scandals, many have been lining up to be inoculated. Last week, Mr. Liu said that 56,000 people who had taken the company’s vaccine had traveled abroad, and that none contracted Covid-19.

The coronavirus is largely under control in China, so local drugmakers have looked abroad to recruit trial participants. Mr. Liu told Chuanguan News on Tuesday that Sinopharm had inoculated nearly 60,000 people as part of late-stage human testing that it was conducting in 10 countries, including Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He said that 40,000 of those inoculated showed promising results, though he did not provide details.

The report comes as two American drugmakers pulled ahead this week in the global vaccine race. Moderna announced on Monday that its vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, while Pfizer said on Wednesday that the results of its late-stage trial showed its vaccine was 95 percent effective with no serious side effects. China has four candidates in late-stage human testing.

In other news around the world:

  • South Korea reported 363 new coronavirus cases on Friday, its highest caseload since late August, when the country was hit by a second wave of infections. Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun urged the public to avoid social gatherings and to stay home as much as possible. He also warned that the latest spike, which is concentrated mainly in the Seoul metropolitan area, was threatening the country’s vaunted K-Quarantine strategy of fighting the virus while keeping the economy running.

Credit...Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty Images

Anthony J. Tata, a senior Pentagon official, has tested positive for the coronavirus after meeting with a visiting Lithuanian official who also met with the acting American defense secretary and other high-level U.S. military officials.

In a statement on Thursday night, a Pentagon spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, said the Defense Department was notified earlier in the day that the Lithuanian defense minister, Raimundas Karoblis, who visited Washington on Nov. 13, had tested positive for the virus.

After tests were performed on the American officials, Mr. Tata was the only one so far found to be infected, the Defense Department said, adding that he would isolate at home for the next 14 days.

While at the Pentagon, Mr. Karoblis also met the acting secretary of defense, Christopher C. Miller, as well as the secretaries of the Army and the Air Force. Three days later, he met with the secretary of the Navy.

All have since tested negative and are not quarantining, despite their exposure, the Pentagon said.

“We have and are continuing to conduct further contact tracing of D.O.D. personnel who have had close contact with the Lithuanian delegation or Mr. Tata, and are taking appropriate precautions in accordance with CDC guidelines,” the statement said.

Although Mr. Tata has been described as “performing the duties of the under secretary of defense for policy,” he does not, in fact, hold that post. His nomination for the job was withdrawn over the summer, in part when it emerged that he had called President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”

But in an end run around lawmakers, the Trump administration appointed Mr. Tata, a retired Army one-star general turned Fox News commentator, to a temporary senior position that did not require Senate approval. He is among a group of hard-line Trump loyalists installed into senior jobs at the Pentagon in recent days.

Credit...Erinn Springer for The New York Times

The pandemic was a faraway nightmare — a catastrophe on the coasts — when Patty Schachtner, the medical examiner in St. Croix County, Wis., began preparing.

She delivered masks to funeral homes. She installed showers in an unused warehouse for frontline workers. And on the grim chance that the virus did come, and that there were more deaths than the county morgue could handle, she rented a refrigerated truck to store bodies.

“I pray that I never have to use it,” Ms. Schachtner said in March. “But this Covid can get out of control really quick.”

All summer long, coronavirus barely rose above a trickle in St. Croix County. Then came fall.

“It was like a snowball,” Ms. Schachtner said. “Just all of a sudden the reality of what everyone said was going to happen, was happening.”

Listen to ‘The Daily’: When the Pandemic Came to Rural Wisconsin

As the coronavirus spread, a public servant tried to prepare her conservative community for the worst-case scenario. Now it’s here.

The outbreak in Wisconsin spiraled beyond control, with rates of new cases that have consistently been among the country’s worst. On Thursday, all but one of the state’s 72 counties was seeing a “critically high” level of case activity, the highest level of concern, according to the state’s own designations.

In October, Ms. Schachtner’s sister-in-law tested positive — then, in quick succession, her brother-in-law, her sister and a niece, who was an aide in the nursing home where Ms. Schachtner’s father lived.

Two weeks ago, he got it too.

He died last Saturday, as Ms. Schachtner huddled with her siblings in the cold, peering at their father one last time through his window.

“There’s so many families that are going through the same thing we are,” she said. “And it’s hard now. It’s hard not to be angry.”

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