Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Daily Deaths Exceed 1,000

Experts in vaccine financing policy did acknowledge that the Pfizer contract was risky because the drug could fail future trials. But they generally felt the risk was warranted because a large investment could jump-start vaccine manufacturing, and may ultimately yield lower prices for Americans.

“It’s a gamble, but a reasonable one,” said Walter Orenstein, an epidemiologist at Emory University who worked for the Clinton administration as director of the United States Immunization Program. “They’re helping gear up production so that, if this vaccine is licensed it will be available in large quantities.”

Along the East Coast, from Delaware through Maine, new case reports remain well below their April peak. As of Tuesday, five of the country’s nine states with flat or falling case levels are in that Northeastern corridor.

“It’s acting like Europe,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said.

Like Europe, the Northeast suffered a devastating wave of illnesses and deaths in March and April, and state leaders responded, after some hesitation, with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts.

But it remains true that the Northeast is the corner of America that has suffered most from the virus.

The daily death total in the United States exceeded 1,000 for the first time in weeks on Tuesday, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were far more infections than have been reported.

Having previously described recent outbreaks around the country as just “embers” of the virus, Mr. Trump conceded that there were now “big fires,” particularly in Florida and elsewhere across the South and West. He also reversed his resistance to masks, for the first time imploring Americans to wear them and acknowledging that “they have an impact.”

His comments came as one of his primary arguments for optimism — what had been a descending death toll, even as overall cases sharply rose — showed more signs of crumbling. The 1,120 deaths reported on Tuesday were the highest total since May 29, excepting two days in late June when large numbers of deaths were reported from unknown dates, according to a New York Times database.

There were 65,449 new cases on Tuesday. But the number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States has been anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the C.D.C.

“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”

In a survey of museum directors published on Wednesday by the American Alliance of Museums, 16 percent of respondents said there was a high risk that their museums could close for good in the next 16 months. Another 17 percent said they did not know if they would survive without further financial help from governments and private donors.

Museums in the United States tend to be more vulnerable than those in most other developed countries because they get fewer government subsidies and rely more heavily on donations and admission fees.

Even behemoths like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have suffered steep financial damage. The Met has announced that it would reopen on Aug. 29, but this depends on the virus situation in the city and is subject to state and city approval. Many other institutions have yet to say how or when they would reopen.

The survey of 760 museum directors, carried out in June, found that 39 percent had not set a target date for reopening. Half said they expected to reopen with a reduced work force, and nearly two-thirds said they expected to have to cut back on education, programming and other services.

And Diane von Furstenberg, the inventor of the wrap dress and the 13-year head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, is at risk of becoming the most recognizable example of its crisis.

As the pandemic began to hit the retail sector, DVF’s problems grew. In January, as the virus forced a lockdown in China, the company began to postpone payments to vendors, struggling with a major loss of revenue from Chinese consumers, who accounted for 20 percent of the brand’s global sales.

As the virus crept across Europe, things worsened, and by early June, DVF reportedly owed more than $10 million in store rent and millions more to vendors.

Within four months, the British and French operations of Ms. von Furstenberg’s company had done the European equivalent of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Just over 60 percent of the corporate and retail staff in the United States, Britain and France was laid off, creditors were complaining vociferously about unpaid bills, and Ms. von Furstenberg was making plans to close 18 of her 19 remaining directly operated U.S. stores. DVF’s physical existence in the United States will be limited to the ground floor of its headquarters in the meatpacking district.

The Nobel Prizes will still be awarded in early October, but the annual banquet in Stockholm to celebrate the winners has been canceled because of the pandemic, the Nobel Foundation announced Tuesday.

Prize winners and their guests and families usually gather in Stockholm and Oslo in December for a week of events, but the celebrations this year will “take on new forms” to account for social distancing, the foundation said.

“We will pay different attention to the prize winners, their discoveries and works,” Lars Heikensten, the chief executive of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement.

The banquet was last canceled in 1956, in a protest over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. It was also canceled during the two world wars.

In other news from around the world:

• The United States ordered China to close its diplomatic consulate in Houston within 72 hours, dealing another blow to the rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries. China promptly vowed to retaliate, calling the move illegal. Consulates principally process visas for travelers visiting China, but travel between the two countries has been severely limited in any case because of the pandemic.

• Hong Kong will require travelers from the United States and Kazakhstan to show proof that they have tested negative for the virus within 72 hours of boarding a flight to the city. The government had already introduced this regulation for travelers from seven other countries it deemed high-risk, including Bangladesh, India, South Africa and the Philippines.

• The average number of daily new daily cases in Spain has more than tripled in the month since the country ended its state of emergency. Spain now has 224 local outbreaks, the health minister, Salvador Illa, told Parliament on Wednesday. Many of the cases have been traced to young people.

• After four months of lockdown, Nepal is lifting most restrictions and will soon open schools, restaurants, international flights and mountain trekking. The government said the number of new coronavirus infections was decreasing, from a daily high of 700 a few weeks ago to 150 now or lower. The country of 30 million people has reported 17,994 infections and 40 deaths.

• British travelers are being urged to postpone applying for a passport, as the government works to process a logjam of more than 400,000 applications, the BBC reported. The United States is experiencing similar delays: In June, there was a backlog of 1.7 million Americans waiting for passports after the State Department shut down most of its consular services.

• Prince Philip, the 99-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain who officially retired from public life in 2017, briefly stepped back into royal duty on Wednesday to hand over a ceremonial military role. In an event reimagined to allow for social distancing, Philip transferred his role as Colonel-in-Chief of The Rifles, the largest infantry regiment in the British army, to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who was 85 miles away.

The volunteers have to be between 18 and 50 and will have to have tested negative for the coronavirus before they attend. The German singer Tim Bendzko will provide the entertainment. As of Wednesday morning, almost 1,000 people had registered, according to the project’s website.

The German researchers aren’t the only ones grappling with the question of how to safely allow large gatherings again. In Britain, the government said it would allow some spectators at a selection of sporting events as a “stress test,” Reuters reported.

CULTURE AND SPORTS ROUNDUP

Streaming concerts have evolved, but will people pay for them?

And, perhaps most critically: Will people pay for them?

Here are other cultural and sports related developments:

• The @NBABubbleLife Twitter account has amassed more than 100,000 followers in less than two weeks with quirky commentary on the social media posts of basketball’s biggest stars. So who’s behind the #wholesomecontent?

• The Citi Open in Washington, D.C., which was scheduled to restart the men’s tennis tour next month, has been canceled for 2020. The tournament was set to begin on Aug. 14 and serve as a lead-in event for the United States Open.

• The Indianapolis 500, now rescheduled to Aug. 23, will be held in front of about 75 percent fewer spectators who will all be required to wear masks.

The crash occurred sometime after nightfall on Monday, a New York Police Department spokesman said on Tuesday, leading to the deaths of two men who were thrown into Eastchester Bay. The operator of a private boat pulled both men from the water and rushed them to shore, the spokesman said, and they were taken to a medical center, where they were pronounced dead.

Recreational boating accidents, including those involving personal watercraft, rose nationwide in the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2019, according to the Coast Guard’s office for boating safety.

Nationwide, fatal boating accidents were up 19 percent in the first six months of the year, the Coast Guard said. In the Northeast region, which includes New York and the New England states, deadly boating incidents were up 400 percent.