Health

Coronavirus News: Live Updates – The New York Times


The U.S. reels as July cases more than double the total of any other month.

The United States recorded more than 1.9 million new infections in July, nearly 42 percent of the more than 4.5 million cases reported nationwide since the pandemic began and more than double the number documented in any other month, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The previous monthly high came in April, when more than 880,000 new cases were recorded.

The virus is picking up dangerous speed in much of the Midwest — and in states from Mississippi to Florida to California that thought they had already seen the worst of it.

Gone is any sense that the country may soon get ahold of the pandemic. The seven-day average for new infections has hovered around 65,000 for the past two weeks, more than doubling the peak average from the spring, when the country experienced what was essentially its first wave.

In many states, distressed government officials are re-tightening restrictions on residents and businesses, and sounding warnings about a rise in virus-related hospitalizations.

Across the country, deaths from the virus continued to rise after a steep drop from the mid-April peaks of about 2,200 a day. At the start of July, the average death toll was about 500 per day. Over the last week, it has averaged more than 1,000 daily, with many of those concentrated in Sun Belt states.

The Northeast, once the virus’s biggest hot spot, has improved considerably since its peak in April. Yet cases are now increasing slightly in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, as residents move around more freely and gather more frequently in groups.

The picture is similarly distressing overseas, where even governments that would seem well suited to combating the virus are seeing surges.

New daily infections in Japan, a country with a long tradition of wearing face masks, rose more than 50 percent in July. Australia, which can cut itself off from the rest of the world more easily than most, is battling a wave of infections in and around Melbourne. Hong Kong, Israel and Spain are also fighting second waves.

None of those places has an infection rate as high as the one in the United States, which has the most cases and deaths in the world.

Hours after unemployment benefits for tens of millions of Americans lapsed, administration officials arrived on Capitol Hill on Saturday morning for a rare meeting with top congressional Democrats to discuss a coronavirus relief package and work to break an impasse over new aid as the American economy continues to shudder.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who hosted the meeting with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York in her Capitol Hill suite, emerged after three hours and said the discussion “was productive in terms of moving us forward,” but they remained far apart on a number of issues. They declined to offer specifics, but said that staff would meet on Sunday and that the principal negotiators would again convene on Monday for another meeting.

“Here we have this drastic challenge and what they were saying before, is ‘we’re going to cut your benefit,” Ms. Pelosi said. “That’s, shall we say, the discussions we’re having.”

“This is not a usual discussion, because the urgency is so great healthwise, financial health-wise,” she added.

Also in attendance were Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. (Mr. Mnuchin observed before entering Ms. Pelosi’s suite that it was “just another working day in the Capitol.”)

Among the largest sticking points in the discussion is a $600 weekly federal jobless benefit that became a lifeline for tens of millions of unemployed Americans, while also helping prop up the economy. The aid expired at midnight as officials in Washington failed to agree on a new relief bill, but Mr. Meadows and Mr. Mnuchin said there were signs that the two sides could begin to reach common ground, including on reviving a federal moratorium on evictions and funding for schools and child care.

“There’s things we agree on. There’s things we don’t agree on,” Mr. Mnuchin said after the meeting. “We’re trying to narrow down the things we don’t agree on. Obviously any negotiation is a compromise.”

Joblessness remains at record levels, with some 30 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits. More than 1.4 million newly filed for state unemployment benefits last week — the 19th straight week that the tally had exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the pandemic.

Nearly 11 percent of Americans have said that they live in households where there is not enough to eat, according to a recent Census Bureau survey, and more than a quarter have missed a rent or mortgage payment.

The benefit’s expiration will force Louise Francis, who worked as a banquet cook at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans for nearly two decades before being furloughed last spring, to get by on just state unemployment benefits, which for her come to $247 a week.

“With the $600, you could see your way a little bit,” said Ms. Francis, 59. “You could feel a little more comfortable. You could pay three or four bills and not feel so far behind.”

The aid lapsed as Republicans and Democrats in Washington remained far apart on what the next round of virus relief should look like.

Democrats wanted to extend the $600 weekly payments through the end of the year, as part of an expansive $3 trillion aid package that would also help state and local governments. Republicans, worried that the $600 benefit left some people with more money than when they were working, sought to scale it back to $200 per week as part of a $1 trillion proposal and have begun to push the prospect of doing a short-term package that deals with just a few issues, including the unemployment insurance benefit.

“They’ve made clear that there’s a desire on their part to do an entire package,” Mr. Mnuchin said of Democrats. “We’ve made clear that we’re really willing to deal with the short-term issues, pass something quickly and come back to the larger issues so we’re at an impasse on that.”

Democrats have rejected a short-term proposal.

An estimated 17,000 Germans packed the heart of Berlin on Saturday, defying public health requirements to maintain a safe distance from one another, or cover their noses and faces, before Berlin police moved to break up the demonstration against the country’s efforts to fight the spread of coronavirus.

The protest, under the motto “Day of Freedom” — a title shared by a 1935 Nazi propaganda film by Leni Reifenstahl — was supported by known neo-Nazi groups and conspiracy theorists, along with Germans who say they are fed up with the government-imposed restrictions on public life. Germany enforced a strict lockdown from mid-March that has been lifted in stages since the end of April, but large public gatherings are still banned and requirements for wearing masks on public transportation and in all stores remain.

A majority of Germans support the measures, but public health officials worry that people are becoming more lax, as the past weeks have seen a rise in new infections. On Saturday, 955 new cases were reported, compared with 580 two weeks ago.

Protesters at the demonstration blew whistles, heckled and jeered anyone wearing a mask, and carried the red, white and black flag of the 19th-century German Empire. They also carried signs equating the government-imposed restrictions to the Nazis’ forcing Jews to wear yellow stars. One banner, emblazoned with images of Chancellor Angela Merkel, her health minister and leading German public health officials, as well as Bill Gates, demanded: “Lock Them Up Already!”

Here are some other developments from around the globe:

  • South Africa on Saturday surpassed 500,000 coronavirus infections, according to Johns Hopkins University and Medicine, fifth most in the world. More than 10,100 new cases had been recorded, South Africa’s Department of Health said, adding virus-related deaths had risen to 8,153. South Africa in March quickly became Africa’s first epicenter and the first country on the continent to impose a severe lockdown, restricting travel between provinces.

  • Belgium on Saturday announced that its number of confirmed coronavirus infections had doubled in one week. On average about 448 people per day tested positive from July 22 to July 28, the Belgian health authorities said. The city of Antwerp was of particular concern, officials said.

  • Kuwait on Saturday began to resume some commercial flights after a five-month suspension. It announced that flights would remain suspended from 31 countries, including India, China and Brazil. Flights are also still barred from some countries that were once major hot spots, such as Spain and Italy, but not the United States, which remains a global epicenter. Kuwait, with its relatively small population, has one of the highest infection rates in the world. Its 1,618 cases per 100,000 people is the sixth highest globally, according to a New York Times database.

  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain announced that lockdown measures that were set to be lifted Saturday would continue for two more weeks, as case numbers in the country rise. Restrictions remain on indoor performances, casinos, wedding receptions and other gatherings, which Mr. Johnson said he knew would come as a “real blow” to some people. But it was necessary to apply the “break pedal,” he said, in order to stem the spread of the virus.

  • In Vietnam, the city of Danang plans to test its entire population for the coronavirus, local authorities said, after dozens of cases there showed how the disease can stalk even places that were thought to have eradicated the virus. As the country went more than three months without reporting any local transmission or even a single death from the virus, up to 800,000 domestic tourists flocked to Danang, a coastal city known for its golden beaches. Vietnam has now recorded three deaths and 558 cases, although many are returnees in quarantine.

  • As of Saturday morning, Mexico’s confirmed death toll of 46,688 was the world’s third highest behind the United States and Brazil. Britain ranked fourth, with 569 fewer deaths. The number of new reported infections in Mexico has been climbing since May and topped 8,000 on Friday, bringing the country’s caseload to nearly 425,000.

  • Officials in Poland are considering new lockdown restrictions after the country reported record numbers of new coronavirus cases for three days in a row. The health minister told a local radio station this could include reducing the number of people allowed to attend weddings, according to Reuters. The country has reported 46,346 total cases and 3,650 deaths.

  • 36 crew members aboard a Norwegian cruise ship tested positive for the virus, Hurtigruten, the ship’s operator, said in a statement over the weekend. None of those who tested positive showed any symptoms, the statement said. According to the company, 387 guests who may have been exposed to infected crew members during two trips on the ship in July will self-quarantine in accordance with Norway’s public health regulations.

Another U.S. lawmaker tests positive for the coronavirus.

Florida, home to one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the United States, braced for the arrival of Isaias on Saturday.

The state’s battle with the virus could make evacuating homes and entering community shelters especially risky. Friday was the third consecutive day that Florida broke its record for the most deaths reported in a single day, according to a New York Times database.

Floridians spent Saturday preparing for wind gusts up to 80 miles per hour and dangerous coastal surf.

The YMCA in Georgia apologizes for hosting a summer camp after hundreds who attended were infected.

The hosts of a summer camp in Georgia said over the weekend that they regretted hosting the lakeside retreat in June, after health officials said more than three-quarters of tested campers and staffers had been infected.

The virus quickly spread through Camp High Harbour, which is run by the YMCA of Metropolitan Atlanta, in June, after a teenage counselor got chills and later tested positive. The camp began sending children home the next day, and shut down not long after, but at that point, about 260 campers and staff members had already been infected, according to a report issued Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report said that the C.D.C. had data for 344 campers and staffers who were tested, and that there were about 250 more whose data the C.D.C. did not have.

The C.D.C. did not name the camp, but the YMCA of Metropolitan Atlanta soon acknowledged that it was Camp High Harbour, which is held in northern Georgia.

Parrish Underwood, the YMCA branch’s chief advancement officer, said the YMCA had hosted the camp at the request of some parents who hoped it would allow for “normalcy” in their children’s lives.

“This weighed heavily in our decision to open, a decision in retrospect we now regret,” Mr. Underwood said in a statement.

All campers passed screenings of some kind, he said, and the counselor who first tested positive for the coronavirus had provided a negative test and had no symptoms when he first arrived.

The C.D.C. said the camp had required staff members to wear masks but did not require the children to do so. The report found that the camp also did not open windows and doors to increase circulation and that campers stayed overnight in cabins, with an average of 15 people sleeping in each.

One of the most important aspects of curtailing the spread of the virus is understanding where people are being infected. This week the Maryland Department of Health released new data from its contact tracing program that provides an informative — if limited — view of the patterns of behavior of people who tested positive.

The numbers do not show where virus transmission occurred — only what activities people had engaged in. After conducting contact-tracing interviews with people with the virus, the state found:

  • 44 percent had attended a family gathering.

  • 23 percent had attended a house party.

  • 23 percent had dined indoors at a restaurant.

  • 23 percent had dined outdoors at a restaurant.

  • 54 percent worked outside of the home.

  • 25 percent worked in health care.

The health department did not say how many patients were interviewed, or when people had attended the events.

“I’m really excited to see that they’re putting data on this out,” said Dr. Crystal Watson, an assistant professor in the department of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “But it’s a little hard to interpret.”

Dr. Watson said it would help to know if people had worn masks at the family gatherings and practiced social distancing. She said she was struck by the fact that only 12 percent of the people interviewed were workers in the restaurant and food service industry, given the risks of exposure.

Reporting was contributed by Hannah Beech, Julie Bosman, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Choe Sang-Hun, Emily Cochrane, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Melissa Eddy, Manny Fernandez, Thomas Fuller, Johnny Diaz, Jeffrey Gettleman, Jason Gutierrez, Shawn Hubler, Mike Ives, Sheila Kaplan, Zach Montague, Liliana Michelena, Eshe Nelson, Matt Phillips, Kai Schultz, Eliza Shapiro and Sameer Yasir.



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