Covid-19 Live Updates: Colleges are Suspending Students Over Virus Safety Violations

In Florida, the president of the University of Miami, Julio Frenk, said the school had begun evicting students from dorms for violations, warning in a video that the university — which has had 141 cases since the start of the school year — would continue to monitor student behavior on and off campus.

“We will not hesitate to enforce disciplinary procedures when measures aimed at protecting university students, faculty and staff are flouted,” said Dr. Frenk, who formerly was Mexico’s minister of health.

The president of Florida Gulf Coast University, Mike Martin, announced interim suspensions of two fraternities on Monday over parties that were held Friday night in violation of the school’s health guidelines, “posing a serious and direct threat to the safety and well-being of the campus community.”

Central Michigan University directed its fraternities and sororities to cancel all in-person activities on Monday after a week in which 54 students tested positive for the virus, with clusters concentrated in two Greek-affiliated houses and a third large off-campus house.

All told, The New York Times has identified more than 23,000 cases on 750 campuses since the pandemic began in the late winter and spring.

In other education news:

• To help improve poor ventilation in New York City’s aging public school buildings, the mayor said Tuesday that city inspectors would assess every classroom and not allow the inadequately ventilated ones to reopen. About 10,000 portable air filters will be installed in nurses’ offices, isolation rooms and other high-risk areas, he said. Many principals and teachers in the city say they do not believe the buildings will be ready by the scheduled start of classes on Sept. 10, and have urged the mayor to push reopening back a few weeks.

• A Florida judge ruled on Monday that the state’s requirement that public schools open their classrooms for in-person instruction violates the state’s Constitution because it “arbitrarily disregards safety” and strips local school boards of the authority to decide when students can safely return. The ruling was immediately stayed when the state filed an appeal.

Republicans are also more likely to say teachers should work in person, according to the survey, which was administered by Morning Consult to a nationally representative sample of 1,081 parents from Aug. 4 to Aug. 8.

President Trump made school reopenings a contentious issue when, in July, he demanded that schools open, even as virus cases were rising. It ended up alienating many teachers and parents, who said he wasn’t doing what was necessary to reopen safely. But it did not turn away his loyal supporters, the new data indicates.

When parents who approve of the job Mr. Trump is doing were asked whether they had considered keeping their child home from school for health and safety reasons, even if it reopened, 29 percent said they had considered it. Among parents who disapprove of Mr. Trump, 45 percent considered keeping their children home.

Republican parents were nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say teachers should be considered essential workers who needed to return to school. Thirty-six percent of Republicans said that, compared to 13 percent of Democrats.

A February conference in Boston led to the infection of tens of thousands around the world, a study shows.

Scientists have found that a conference in Boston in late February triggered a massive spread of the coronavirus. It ultimately may have led to the infection of tens of thousands of people both in the United States and abroad.

Researchers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed the genomes of coronavirus samples taken from 772 people diagnosed with Covid-19 between January and May. They collected the virus from samples taken at hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters and other locations in the Boston area.

In typical years, doctors often don’t test for flu, simply assuming that patients with coughs, fevers and fatigue during the winter months are probably carrying the highly infectious virus. But this year, with the coronavirus bringing similar symptoms, doctors will need to test for both viruses to diagnose their patients, further straining supply shortages.

Some manufacturers have begun making tests that can screen for several pathogens at once. But these combo tests are expensive and will likely make up only a small fraction of the market.

“The flu season is a bit of a ticking time bomb,” said Amanda Harrington, the medical director of microbiology at Loyola University Medical Center. “We are all waiting and trying to prepare as best we can.”

Flu viruses and coronaviruses differ in many ways, including how they spread, how long they linger in the body and the groups they affect most severely. Food and Drug Administration-approved antivirals and vaccines exist for the flu, but no such treatments exist for the coronavirus, which has killed at least 812,000 people worldwide in less than a year, according to a New York Times database.

Being infected with one virus doesn’t preclude contracting the other. And researchers also don’t yet know how risky it is for a person to harbor both viruses at the same time.

Those differences make it essential to tease the two pathogens apart, as well as to rule out other common winter infections like respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., which hits the very young and very old especially hard.

Two more cases of reinfection with the coronavirus were reported in Europe on Tuesday, a day after a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong was confirmed to have been infected a second time.

In all three cases, researchers compared genetic material from both rounds of infection and confirmed that the patients were not just carrying remnants of dead virus left over from the first illness.

The new cases were announced by European researchers. The data have not been published in any form as yet.

One of the new reinfection cases was an older person in the Netherlands with a weakened immune system, researchers said. The other patient, in Belgium, was a woman who had only mild symptoms in March and became infected again in June.

Mr. Trump, Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, and Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that the treatment reduced Covid-19 deaths by 35 percent. The data point, a subset of a Mayo Clinic study, was not mentioned in the official letter authorizing the treatment, the 17-page memo written by F.D.A. scientists about the treatment or in the Mayo Clinic’s analysis.

Dr. Hahn’s claim that 35 out of 100 sick Covid-19 patients would have been saved by receiving plasma appeared to be an overstatement, statisticians and scientists said.

“That’s a problem if they’re starting to exaggerate data,” Dr. Gellad said.

Plasma has been touted by Mr. Trump as a promising cure for the coronavirus, with his administration funneling $48 million into a program with the Mayo Clinic to test infusions. Although there have been some positive signs that it can reduce deaths in Covid-19 patients, no randomized trials have shown that it works.

Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., said that convalescent plasma has not yet shown the benefit that Dr. Hahn described — and that he should issue a correction.

On Monday night, after The New York Times published an article questioning the statistic, Dr. Hahn said on Twitter that the “criticism is entirely justified,” and clarified that his earlier statements imprecisely suggested an absolute reduction in risk, instead of the relative risk of a certain group of patients compared with another.

Facing an uptick in cases, the city of Danbury, Conn., has closed public boat launches to prevent the spread of the virus among boaters on a popular lake, Mayor Mark Boughton said on Tuesday.

Connecticut has also closed a boat ramp it operates nearby, in an effort to curb parties held on the water or in nearby parking lots, Gov. Ned Lamont said at a news conference with the mayor.

“We want to make sure that we can slow the spread,” Mr. Boughton said.

On Friday, officials in Connecticut issued a public health warning for Danbury, a city of about 84,000 people near the New York border, that urged residents to stay home when possible and limit gatherings. The move came after 178 new cases were reported in the city in the first 20 days of August, more than quadruple the figure for the prior two weeks.

In response, Danbury’s public schools will reopen with remote learning on Sept. 8 and will re-evaluate on Oct. 1 whether to allow some in-person learning.

The governor said that the uptick had not spread to parts of the state beyond Danbury.

A state legislator, David Arconti, said that cases appeared to have risen in neighborhoods of Danbury that lost power for days after Tropical Storm Isaias ripped through the New York region. He and other officials were exploring a possible connection, he said.

Mr. Lamont said the state would monitor other municipalities that had been hard hit by power outages to see if they saw an uptick similar to Danbury’s.

Elsewhere in the U.S.:

When the British government told people they no longer had to stay home, it needed a convincing pitch to get everyone back outside and, crucially, spending money — especially in restaurants.

The answer: half-price food. For the month of August, the government has been paying for a 50 percent discount on all meals eaten in restaurants, pubs or cafes, up to 10 pounds ($13) per person, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

It’s a discount that Britons have taken up with relish.

On the first day, Aug. 3, food sales rose 100 percent compared with the previous Monday, according to CGA, a consultancy firm.

After spending months warning of the dangers of indoor public spaces, the government now has to persuade people that it’s safe to return to their previous habits. Even if the customers want to keep coming back, restaurants face a lot of uncertainty.

Although new daily cases have been declining, with a seven-day average of 1,060 as of Monday, the economy in Britain fared worse than any other in Europe during the second quarter of the year, because of a longer lockdown period and heavy reliance on consumer spending.

Half of Britain’s restaurants are still closed and across the hospitality industry, businesses that are open are making only about 70 percent of their pre-pandemic revenue.

And while the program can help change consumer behavior, it doesn’t address how each establishment will make up for reduced capacity because of social distancing measures, or what will happen when it’s too cold to dine outside.

“Obviously, we don’t live in California or Dubai, we live in the U.K.,” said David Williams, co-owner of Baltic Market, a collection of street food and drinks vendors in Liverpool. “So there’s a finite amount of time that you want to eat a bowl of pasta outside.”

In other news from around the world:

• South Korea said it was again closing schools and switching back to online classes for students in the Seoul metropolitan area, as the country reported 280 new cases on Tuesday, the 12th-straight day of triple-digit daily increases in virus infections.

• As Hong Kong on Tuesday announced plans to begin easing its social-distancing rules, the city’s leader, Carrie Lam, said that criticism by health experts of a new, Beijing-backed coronavirus testing program was a “politically calculated” effort to smear the Chinese government. Some of those experts say the plan is a waste of resources, while activists fear it could lead to the harvesting of DNA samples for China’s surveillance apparatus, accusations that local officials deny.

• The Chinese government has imposed a sweeping lockdown across the Xinjiang region in western China, penning in millions of people as part of what officials describe as an effort to fight a resurgence of the coronavirus. But many residents accuse the government of acting too harshly, reviving concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has spent years perfecting a system of mass surveillance and control in the region and has long imposed draconian social rules on the region’s largely Muslim ethnic minority groups, who make up about half the population.

• Two Irish political leaders have resigned after a furor, now known as “GolfGate,” over their attendance at a dinner organized by the Golf Society of the country’s legislature. The gathering took place a day after the government tightened coronavirus restrictions to combat a spike in infections, and has sparked a backlash that has also threatened the jobs of other public figures, including the European Union’s trade commissioner, Phil Hogan.

• Uganda has recalled its ambassador to Denmark as well as her deputy after allegations that they were plotting to steal funds allocated to deal with the pandemic. The ambassador, Nimisha Madhvani, and her deputy, Elly Kamahungye, were recorded devising ways to share the money along with other embassy staff members. Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the allegations “grave” and said it would carry out a “thorough investigation” into the matter.