Coronavirus Live Updates: World Approaches One Million Deaths

Ms. Brennan asked why the White House would insert itself into the F.D.A.’s process, raising concerns of political interference. “We want to make sure that it’s safe,” Mr. Meadows replied. “We’re trying to make sure that the guidance we give is not an inhibitor to getting things out fast,” but also “doesn’t detract from it.”

Ultimately, he added, the F.D.A. guidelines would make sure that everyone who gets the vaccine “can do that with some kind of assurance that the process is meted out properly.”

Mr. Meadows’s line of reasoning echoed that of Michael Caputo, the former spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, when he responded to reports two weeks ago that he and one of his aides had pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to alter its weekly disease assessments.

The aide “makes his position known, and his position isn’t popular with the career scientists sometimes,” Mr. Caputo told The Times on Sept. 12, a day before he made outlandish claims against C.D.C. scientists in an online video and a few days before going on medical leave. “That’s called science. Disagreement is science.”

As the world moves toward another morbid threshold in the pandemic, a coronavirus death toll of one million, the countries where fatalities are increasing fastest remain spread out across the globe, with new hot spots constantly emerging.

On Saturday, India, the world’s second-most populous nation, continued to lead in daily virus-related deaths, with about 7,700 over the most recent seven-day period. The United States is second, with more than 5,000, Brazil third with more than 4,800, and Mexico fourth with nearly 3,000. Those four countries account for more than half of the world’s total deaths from the virus, according to the Times database.

New hot spots are also emerging in smaller countries like Israel, which led the world in new cases per capita over the past week.

The pandemic continues to wreak havoc in South America, where countries including Argentina, Colombia and Peru are recording thousands of new cases daily along with some of the highest numbers of deaths per capita in the world.

“I’m a little concerned we’re going to see that shift to the northern latitudes as the weather gets cold,” said Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who studies how viruses move through the air.

Health experts offered several tips for dodging the virus indoors: Open the windows, buy an air filter — and forget the ultraviolet lights. Fear of the risk of transmission indoors has fueled a market for expensive devices that promise to scrub surfaces — and even the air — but most of those products are overkill and may even have unintended harmful consequences.

“Anything that sounds fancy and isn’t tried-and-true — those are all things to avoid,” said Delphine Farmer, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Soap and water work beautifully.”

Managers of larger buildings should encourage those who can to work from home and adopt strategies like adding air filters and disinfecting surfaces. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created an app to determine how many people can safely congregate in a given space and for how long.

But regardless of these precautions, the optimal strategy is simply to wear a mask indoors, said Martin Bazant, a chemical engineer at M.I.T., adding, “That’s a much bigger effect than any of those strategies would provide.”

Colombia reached more than 800,000 cases this weekend, just as social life has begun to return to Bogotá, the capital and the heart of the health crisis.

The reopening of restaurants and other businesses has injected much-needed buoyancy into the economy and has lifted the collective mood, particularly in Bogotá. But concerns remain about the possibility of a new surge.

Colombia has been hit hard by the virus, though it has fared better than many of its neighbors.

Colombia’s overall infection rate is close to that of Argentina, where about 1 in 63 people have been infected, and where cases topped 700,000 over the weekend.

Social life across much of Colombia has been almost completely shut down since late March. But in recent weeks Bogotá’s mayor, Claudia López, began allowing restaurants to offer indoor dining at reduced capacity and permitting long-shuttered businesses to renew operation.

The city’s markets and shops now bustle with mask-wearing residents, and a degree of normality has returned to the streets. The country’s airports, which closed in late March, have also begun to reopen.

Officials, however, say this appearance of normality hides a grimmer reality: The country continues to be a hot spot for new cases, at about 6,800 a day. On Sunday, the Colombian health ministry said its intensive care units were at 50 percent capacity.

Vermont’s population is exploding, and its small towns are struggling to keep up.

For years, Vermont has been stuck at around 620,000 residents, a plateau so threatening to the labor force and tax base that in 2018 the state began offering a cash incentive of up to $10,000 for remote workers who moved to Vermont.

In towns like Winhall, which had a year-round population of 769 before the pandemic, that is not the problem anymore.

Instead, officials are hard-pressed to keep up with the burst of growth.

Elizabeth Grant, the town clerk, reckons that the town’s population topped 10,000 over the summer. When school reopened this month, the number of enrolled students had increased by 54, a jump of more than 25 percent, so the costs to taxpayers will exceed projections by half a million dollars.

The post office ran out of available P.O. boxes in mid-June. Electricians and plumbers are booked until Christmas. Complaints about bears have quadrupled.

Since then, the number of available single-family homes in Winhall and Stratton, the adjacent ski resort, has dropped to 29 from 129, its lowest level since 2003, according to Tim Apps, a realtor with the Vermont Sales Group.

Now the question is whether the newcomers will stay, since many of their companies allowed remote working only on a temporary basis.

Officials will have a better sense of how many people have moved into the state in a few weeks, after gathering figures on school enrollment, which had been steadily declining in Vermont for a decade. They expect an increase of 2 to 5 percent statewide, and as much as 15 percent in some towns, said Michael S. Pieciak, commissioner at the state Department of Financial Regulation.

Infections are skyrocketing in France, with a daily average of more than 10,000 new cases over the past seven days, more than double the number at the height of the country’s first wave in the spring.

The number of Covid-19 deaths has risen by 83 percent over the last 14 days, according to a New York Times database. Still, the death rate — averaging about 50 deaths per day in the last week — is far lower than it was in the spring, when the figure averaged more than 1,000 per day. Nonetheless, dozens of cities and regions across the country are preparing to enforce new restrictions on Monday, in an attempt to stem the rising tide of infections.

French authorities have placed a number of French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux, on a “reinforced alert” level, which, starting on Monday, will restrict public gatherings to no more than 10 people. Bars will have to close early and enclosed sport establishments must shut down completely.

Meanwhile, hospitals are again under strain, with some 600 new Covid-19 hospitalizations each day since mid-September. Covid-19 patients now represent at least 10 percent of patients in intensive care across the country.

In recent months, France has ramped up its testing policy, with more than one million tests conducted per week, or about five times more than in April. But French laboratories lack the capacity to keep up with the number of tests carried out, resulting in a backlog of tests that have hampered France’s strategy for preventing a second outbreak.

Mr. Véran reacted by saying that a lockdown was not part of the government’s plans so far: “We do not rule out any option, but we do not plan for the lockdown option, we act to prevent it.”

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Melbourne further eases its lockdown as cases drop faster than expected.

Efforts to combat the virus in the Australian state of Victoria are “ahead of schedule,” Premier Dan Andrews said on Sunday, as he announced a further easing of restrictions after two months of a severe lockdown in Melbourne, the state capital.

Melbourne residents are still required to stay at home except for care or caregiving, essential shopping, exercise and work or education that cannot be done from home. Restaurants and cafes remain closed for dine-in service. Other rules have been tightened, with fines for unlawful indoor or outdoor gatherings of almost 5,000 Australian dollars, or about $3,500, and residents now required to wear fitted face masks rather than scarves or bandannas.

The rolling 14-day average of new cases in Melbourne — which was over 400 at the height of the city’s outbreak last month — is now 22.1, well below the target of 30 to 50 for taking this second step out of lockdown. If the decline in cases continues, Mr. Andrews said, all restrictions on leaving home could be lifted on Oct. 19, a week earlier than planned.

In other global developments:

• With positive coronavirus tests reaching new highs, the number of critically ill threatening to overload intensive care wards and hospitals reporting alarming numbers of younger patients, Israeli officials pleaded with the public on Sunday to heed lockdown measures heading into Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

• In Madrid, about 1,000 protesters took to the streets on Sunday to demand an end to a partial lockdown imposed by the regional government last Monday on about a million residents of specific neighborhoods, most of them in working-class suburbs. While the Madrid authorities have argued that the lockdown was needed to contain a second wave of infections, the decision has sparked protests and outrage among residents who consider it discriminatory. That viewpoint was bolstered on Friday when Spain’s health minister, Salvador Ila, said that Madrid should instead have introduced stricter restrictions across the whole capital region.

• Britain could end up “caught in a cycle of epidemic waves” without further restrictions, a member of the government’s scientific advisory board has warned. The adviser, Jeremy Farrar, wrote in the Times of London that tightened measures announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson this past week were a “fudge” and would “neither deliver an open economy nor save lives.” Mr. Farrar called for a ban on people from different households meeting indoors, and said another closure of restaurants, pubs, gyms, places of worship and nonessential shops should also be considered as the country tries to arrest a steep climb in infections.

• South Korea on Sunday called for a joint investigation into the death of a South Korean official who was killed by North Korean troops who discovered him floating in North Korean waters. South Korea said that the official was trying to defect and that the troops shot him and set his body on fire on the unsubstantiated fear that he might be infected with the virus. The North disputes key parts of that account. “Since there are gaps in the findings by South and North Korea, we request a joint investigation so we can establish the truth as soon as possible,” said Suh Choo-suk, a deputy director of national security in South Korea​.

Foundation Source, which advises smaller corporate and family foundations, recently surveyed its members and found that 39 percent of respondents had shifted their foundations’ missions in response to the events of this year, while 42 percent had increased their giving.

“We’ve seen a change in behavior,” said Stefanie Borsari, national director of client services for Foundation Source. “Of the top reasons that people shifted their mission or focus,” she added, “the biggest was certainly Covid, but about a third of respondents also noted social justice concerns.”

A June report from Fidelity Charitable, the largest grant maker in the United States, said that grants to food assistance programs were up 667 percent nationally, but that donors had continued to give to their regular charities.

What smaller foundations and individual donors have often lacked, though, is information on which nonprofits in which communities would best use their donations. Two new philanthropic databases are aiming to fill that breach by highlighting nonprofits that are addressing social justice and pandemic issues.

For generations, snow days meant sleeping in, loafing in front of the TV with hot cocoa, and hours of sledding and snowball fights.

Now, they are likely to mean logging into a laptop for a Zoom lesson on long division.

If it were being painted for the French Open’s new dates, falling leaves and chestnuts would be more appropriate.

This is not the first time a major tennis event has been played at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris in the autumn. But none of the others ended in mid-October, and none of them had to deal with the coronavirus, which is on the rise again in France. The second wave forced organizers to scale back their grand plans for a nearly full house to a meager 1,000 spectators per day on the entire grounds.

A happier change is the new retractable roof over the main Philippe Chatrier Court, which will allow play to continue if the forecast of frequent rain for Week 1 turns out to be correct.

The Chatrier court and the 11 other courts at Roland Garros have also been equipped with lights for the first time, which will allow play to continue after dark.