Here’s what you need to know:
- ‘Celebrate at home’: Health officials make a plea for the holiday amid record caseloads in the U.S.
- The European Union reopens its borders to international travelers and relaxes restrictions.
- Senate approves an extension to the Paycheck Protection Program.
- Did the George Floyd protests in New York lead to a virus surge? Here’s what we know.
- They lost 5 relatives to the virus. Now they want to help others.
- Wall Street ended its best quarter since 1998 with a big gain.
- In New York City, surviving the virus may come down to which hospital admits you.
‘Celebrate at home’: Health officials make a plea for the holiday amid record caseloads in the U.S.
Health officials are urging Americans to scale back Independence Day plans after coronavirus case levels reached disheartening new highs on Tuesday, with eight states setting single-day reporting records.
The Oregon Health Authority warned that “the safest choice this holiday is to celebrate at home.” In Nebraska, state leaders suggested that holiday cookout hosts keep guest lists to make contact tracing easier. In Los Angeles County, where 10,000 new cases have been announced since Friday, the public health department ordered beaches closed and fireworks shows canceled.
Elsewhere, the pleas were similar: Skip the party. Stay home. Don’t make a bad situation worse.
“We don’t want any more closures, but our numbers are going through the roof,” said Dr. Cameron Kaiser, the public health officer in Riverside County, Calif. “Please don’t mix households, even if you think everyone is healthy, and instead celebrate the holiday with the people you live with. We started seeing more and more cases after Memorial Day, and we can’t afford another jump after the Fourth of July.”
The virus outlook in the United States is bad and getting worse. With more than 48,000 new cases on Tuesday, the country set a daily record for the fourth time in a week. More than 4,600 new cases of the virus were announced in Arizona, by far its most in a single day, as Vice President Mike Pence planned to travel there on Wednesday. California added more than 8,100 new cases, Georgia added more than 2,400 and Texas added more than 7,900, all records. The virus is also surging again in some places that had been doing much better, including Delaware, where new clusters in beachfront cities led Gov. John Carney to close some bars ahead of the holiday.
“Clearly we’ve had an outbreak among bars, restaurants, social activities in Delaware beaches,” said Mr. Carney, who noted “complacency in mask wearing and social distancing.”
The records came as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told Congress on Tuesday that the rate of new coronavirus infections could more than double to 100,000 a day if current outbreaks were not contained. He warned that the virus’s march across the South and the West “puts the entire country at risk.”
Dr. Fauci offered his grim prediction while testifying on Capitol Hill, telling senators that no region of the country is safe from the virus’s resurgence.
“I can’t make an accurate prediction, but it is going to be very disturbing, I will guarantee you that,” Dr. Fauci said, “because when you have an outbreak in one part of the country, even though in other parts of the country they are doing well, they are vulnerable.”
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
The European Union reopens its borders to international travelers and relaxes restrictions.
The European Union reopened its borders on Wednesday to visitors from 15 countries, excluding the United States, Russia, and Brazil, and many European countries further eased pandemic restrictions.
Spain and Portugal are officially reopening their land border, an event that will be attended by King Felipe VI and the prime ministers of both countries. The border had been closed since mid-March. Spain reopened its border with France on June 21.
In Belgium, swimming pools, wellness centers, amusement parks, casinos and indoor playgrounds were among the spaces to reopen. Cinemas and theaters also opened on Wednesday.
Visitors also returned to a growing list of museums, including the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.
In the Netherlands, gatherings of up to 100 are now allowed, although the government urged people stay five feet (1.5 meters) apart. Sex work in the country is also allowed again.
Thousands of people in Prague in the Czech Republic held a symbolic farewell party for the pandemic on Tuesday, the BBC reported. Guests shared food and there was no social distancing. The country, which locked down early, has had about 350 deaths and 12,000 cases of the virus.
Some countries in the Middle East also relaxed virus-related measures on Wednesday. Restaurants in a few tourist areas in Qatar were allowed to reopen under some restrictions. Malls and shopping centers in Qatar also opened their doors, but prayer rooms and cinemas were among the spaces to remain closed.
Some flights in Lebanon and Egypt also resumed. EgyptAir began service to more than two dozen international destinations on Wednesday.
Here are other developments from around the globe:
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In Israel, the Health Ministry announced that it recorded 773 cases on Tuesday — the highest daily case count since the contagion first emerged in Israel. It recorded 752 cases on Sunday. In the past couple of weeks, the authorities have imposed significant restrictions in locations with high numbers of cases, while allowing the rest of the country to stay largely open.
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The Hebron region of the West Bank accounts for more than 80 percent of active virus cases in the territory, and the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry reported Wednesday that it had recorded 199 new cases, bringing the number of active cases there to 1,804. Jibrin al-Bakri, the governor of Hebron, said that the city and its surrounding villages would be locked down for five days, with all movement banned except for visits to places such as pharmacies or bakeries.
Senate approves an extension to the Paycheck Protection Program.
The Senate on Tuesday approved extending the application period for a relief program for small businesses, granting five additional weeks for the remaining money left in the program to be spent.
Less than four hours before the Paycheck Protection Program was scheduled to close with $130 billion still available for loans to small businesses seeking to maintain their payrolls, the Senate approved extending the application period and allowing small businesses to receive aid until Aug. 8.
The legislation now heads to the House, which had finished voting before the bill cleared the Senate, and will require President Trump’s signature for the program to continue. Members of both chambers are expected to leave Washington for the Fourth of July and are not set to fully return for two weeks.
The unexpected approval of the extension, which required agreement from all 100 senators, came as lawmakers began to debate the contours of another coronavirus relief package. With multiple parts of the $2.2 trillion stimulus law set to expire at the end of this month and new outbreaks forcing many states to slow efforts to reopen their economies, lawmakers widely recognize that another measure will be necessary.
Did the George Floyd protests in New York lead to a virus surge? Here’s what we know.
After the police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of New Yorkers poured into the streets to protest police brutality and racism.
Epidemiologists braced for a surge of new coronavirus cases. But it has not come yet.
On May 27, the day before the protests began in New York City, some 754 Covid-19 cases were diagnosed, according to the city’s Department of Health. That was the last time the city recorded more than 700 cases on a single day.
By the end of the first week of protests, the city was recording slightly more than 500 cases a day. By the end of the second week of protests, the case counts were in the low 400s or high 300s a day. They’ve continued to drop slightly. The last time New York City recorded more than 300 cases was on June 22.
“We’ve been looking very closely at the number of positive cases every day to see if there is an uptick in the context of the protests,” Ted Long, executive director of the city’s contact tracing program, said. “We have not seen that.”
In interviews, several epidemiologists expressed either surprise or relief, and offered theories for what occurred. This is what we know:
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The virus spread in New York City was already slowing down.
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Outdoor transmission is more rare.
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Most protesters wore masks.
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We could still see a wave of infections tied to the protests.
They lost 5 relatives to the virus. Now they want to help others.
Over the past three months, the virus has brought a devastating loss to one New Jersey family, the Fuscos: It has killed their mother, three siblings and an aunt, and infected at least 19 other family members.
Those who survived did not emerge unscathed.
Joe Fusco, 49, lost 55 pounds and spent 30 days on a ventilator. His sister Maria Reid, 44, cannot shake the memory of the disjointed hallucinations that dogged her during the 19 or 20 days she was unconscious, or the terror of waking up convinced that her 10-year-old daughter was dead.
“This ain’t over,” Mr. Fusco said on a recent afternoon in the backyard of his home in Freehold. “This ain’t over in the least bit.”
The Fuscos were unwilling pioneers charting an early course through all that was unknown about a virus that has killed more than 127,000 people in the United States. They are now trailblazers of another kind as the subjects of at least three scientific studies.
Their help may prove useful well should a predicted second wave hit.
The Fuscos can see little logic in the virus’s path.
One infected relative who is a heavy smoker showed no symptoms. Two older uncles with myriad underlying health problems rebounded in about a week. Yet several of the sickest family members had no serious underlying health problems.
Mr. Fusco said he remained frustrated by the lackadaisical attitudes of people shown crowding together near beaches or outside bars without masks.
“These idiots are out there and not taking precautions,” he said.
Wall Street ended its best quarter since 1998 with a big gain.
In the first six months of the year, stocks experienced their biggest quarter-to-quarter swing in more than 80 years.
First, the coronavirus pandemic and a shutdown of the economy sent stocks on one of the fastest declines on record. Then, a giant government stimulus not only stopped the sell-off but sent stocks charging to their best quarterly performance in more than two decades.
Where they go next is a mystery. There’s so much uncertainty about the coronavirus crisis that roughly 40 percent of the S&P 500, about 200 companies, have withdrawn their customary forecasts about how their businesses will perform in the months ahead, according to data from S&P Capital IQ.
The companies’ silence has unnerved analysts, who have already axed their expectations for profit growth substantially. They’re now expecting that second-quarter profits will fall more than 40 percent, according to numbers compiled by the data provider FactSet.
That’s an ugly forecast, but investors face a crucial question: Is it ugly enough?
“The numbers are sort of all over the place,” Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said of analysts’ predictions.
In New York City, surviving the virus may come down to which hospital admits you.
In Queens, the borough with the most coronavirus cases and the fewest hospital beds per capita, hundreds of patients languished in understaffed wards, often unwatched by nurses or doctors. Some died after removing oxygen masks to go to the bathroom.
In hospitals in other impoverished neighborhoods around New York City, some critically ill patients were put on ventilator machines lacking key settings, and others pleaded for experimental drugs, only to be told that there were none available.
It was another story at private medical centers in Manhattan, which have billions of dollars in endowments and cater largely to wealthy people with insurance. Patients there got access to heart-lung bypass machines and specialized drugs like remdesivir, even as those in the city’s community hospitals were denied more basic treatments like continuous dialysis.
In its first four months in New York, the coronavirus tore through low-income neighborhoods, infected immigrants and essential workers unable to stay home and disproportionately killed Black and Latino people, especially those with underlying health conditions.
Now, evidence is emerging of another inequality affecting low-income city residents: disparities in hospital care.
As the Caribbean reopens, it faces hurricane season, pandemic-related restrictions and the absence of cruise ships.
The pandemic struck the Caribbean at the height of high season, when snow birds, primarily from the United States, pack the beaches for winter and spring break, and provide the revenue to see resorts and sometimes entire countries through the lull of summer and fall.
Now, as the region begins to reopen to international travelers, it faces not just the challenge of the pandemic, but the financial blow dealt by the absence of cruising and the onset of hurricane season.
Excluding Guyana, the Caribbean economy is expected to contract by 3 percent in 2020, according to the World Bank.
“We’re not fooling ourselves. We fully expect to see a slow return of travel,” said Frank Comito, the chief executive and director general of the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association, which represents 33 national hotel associations in the region.
As countries reopen, most are mandating face masks indoors and social distancing.
As governments have clarified their policies, airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest, plan to resume service to many Caribbean destinations in July.
When they do, they’ll be flying into a hurricane season that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted could be above normal. In May, it forecast 13 to 19 named storms, including three to six major hurricanes at Category 3 and above.
Public fights over masks have become the new American pastime.
On any given day, somewhere in the United States, someone is going to wake up, leave the house and get in an argument with a stranger about wearing masks.
Rules on masks are left up to state and local governments, but enforcing them often falls to store and restaurant employees. Grocery store managers are training staff on how to handle screaming customers. Fistfights are breaking out at convenience stores. Some restaurants even say they’d rather close than face the wrath of various Americans who believe that masks, which help prevent the spread of coronavirus, impinge on their freedom.
Joe Rogers, 47, of Dallas, said he had gotten in a physical fight last week over masks.
In line at a Mini-Mart, he said he spotted an unmasked customer behind him and shook his head. The man asked why Mr. Rogers had been looking at him and Mr. Rogers, again, shook his head.
“I wear a full face guard, the mask that they use when they spray pesticides,” he said. “He reached for my mask and tried to pull it off.” Mr. Rogers said his “natural instinct” came out and he put his hand up and knocked the man to the floor.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California ordered the mandatory wearing of masks in public on June 18. A little more than a week later, Hugo’s Tacos, a taqueria with two locations in the Los Angeles area, announced that it would close temporarily because its staff was “exhausted by the constant conflicts over guests refusing to wear masks.”
Bill Kohne, the chief executive of Hugo’s, said that it was only in the last few weeks that the encounters had become so vitriolic.
“The one that we most viscerally remember is that a customer at the pickup window who was asked to wear a mask literally threw a cup of water through the window at the clerk,” Mr. Kohne said.
Time to give your home a good scrubbing.
There’s no way around it: When you rarely leave home, things get dirty faster. Here are some tips for a good deep-cleaning.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Sheri Fink, Elaine Glusac, Joseph Goldstein, Jenny Gross, Iliana Magra, Raphael Minder, Claire Moses, Sharon Otterman, Matt Phillips, Adam Rasgon, Brian M. Rosenthal, Mitch Smith, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Tracey Tully and Noah Weiland.
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Live Coronavirus Updates: New Cases in U.S. Are Up 80% in Past 2 Weeks - The New York Times
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