Here’s what you need to know:
- Texas and Florida have drawn attention, but the virus is surging in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, too.
- Trump cancels the Florida portion of Republican National Convention.
- The U.S. passes four million known cases, as hospitalizations and deaths rise.
- Draft Republican virus aid proposal reflects significant retreat by White House on tax cuts, testing and schools.
- A Washington Nationals star is pulled from baseball’s season opener after testing positive.
- U.S. testing continues to falter with more shortages in lab equipment.
- Another study finds that the drug hydroxychloroquine didn’t help Covid-19 patients.
Texas and Florida have drawn attention, but the virus is surging in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, too.
As the coronavirus rages across the Southern United States, skyrocketing case counts in Texas and Florida have drawn the most national attention, but the virus is also surging in the three states between them along the Gulf Coast: Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Alabama recorded 61 new virus-related deaths on Wednesday, its highest daily total so far, and set a daily record for cases on Thursday, with 2,390. Louisiana has surpassed New York for the most identified cases per capita, though testing was scarce when cases peaked in New York this spring. And in Mississippi, deaths are increasing at one of the highest rates in the nation.
“We’re certainly not where we want to be in Louisiana,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a news conference Thursday, noting that the state had surpassed 100,000 total cases.
Mr. Edwards said many hospitals in his state had halted nonemergency surgery to save room for rising numbers of Covid-19 patients.
Many hospitals in smaller cities and rural areas have filled their intensive care wards and must transfer patients to bigger cities, said Susan Hassig, associate professor of epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
There have been infections in the region since the early stages of the pandemic, Dr. Hassig said, but many went unrecognized, furthering the spread of the virus. “Some of it has always been there — we just weren’t finding it,” she said.
And preventive measures to curb the spread of the virus are often ignored. Dr. Hassig noted that at least 30 Mississippi state legislators had tested positive in recent weeks, including many who were still not wearing masks while continuing to hold public events. Practices like that have helped the virus make its way to areas that were initially unaffected, she said, and higher hospitalizations and death rates have followed.
The Gulf Coast states are not alone in setting new case records. California recorded new highs in both deaths and total number of cases on Wednesday, and Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia recorded their highest daily case numbers, according to a New York Times database. On Thursday, the nation passed four million reported cases since the pandemic began.
Deaths in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have so far largely been among older people, but more young people in the region are becoming infected now, Dr. Hassig said, and otherwise healthy younger people are dying from it as well.
Mortality rates have been higher among Black and Hispanic residents, she said, in part because they are, on average, less likely to have jobs they can perform from home and more likely to have underlying health issues than their white neighbors.
Trump cancels the Florida portion of Republican National Convention.
President Trump on Thursday said he is canceling the portion of the Republican National Convention that was to be held in Jacksonville, Fla., at the end of August, just weeks after he forced party officials to move it there because North Carolina could not guarantee him the crowds he wanted.
“It’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Fla.,” portion of the event that begins on Aug. 24, Mr. Trump said at a White House briefing.
Cases have been rising at a steep rate in Florida, and in Jacksonville in particular. The state is crucial to Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts, but even he could not ignore the virus’s spread.
Mr. Trump, who has begun to change his tone on the pandemic (which he continues to call the “China virus”) in the past week — urging the use of masks and other protective measures that he had previously downplayed — said he did not plan to scrap the entire event.
“We’re going to do other things, like ‘tele-rallies’ and other, smaller events,” Mr. Trump added. “And I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form, but we won’t do a big, crowded convention, per se. It’s just not the right time for that.”
Mr. Trump had insisted on moving ahead until Thursday, even after some Republican Senators said that they planned to skip the event. He claimed that officials had tried to tell him they could make it work. “I said, there’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe,” Mr. Trump said.
He had forced the Republican National Committee to walk away from Charlotte, N.C., other than the first night, because the state’s Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, would not guarantee him that he could gather large crowds given social distancing.
Mr. Trump made the announcement on a day when Florida reported 173 deaths, a single-day record for the state.
Farther south, in the Miami area, some local leaders have grown so alarmed that they urged people to consider social distancing — and possibly wearing masks — in their own homes.
“I would tell our residents — and this is voluntary, this is not something that we can mandate — that they should consider, particularly if you have a multigenerational household, that you should consider wearing masks indoors,” Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami said, noting that many new cases were being spread within households. At a separate news conference, Mayor Carlos Gimenez of Miami-Dade County said that “you also need to start maintaining your distance from your loved ones for a while.”
And in Hialeah, the blue-collar city at the heart of the outbreak in the county, hospitals and physicians warned that the situation inside their facilities was worsening, with the city’s mayor, Carlos Hernández, saying, “We have reached a critical situation.”
Key Data of the Day
The U.S. passes four million known cases, as hospitalizations and deaths rise.
The number of people known to have been infected with the virus in the United States passed four million on Thursday, another grim milestone in a pandemic full of them, according to a New York Times database.
And it’s not just cases that are rising. The numbers of hospitalizations and deaths reported in the U.S. each day have also been increasing.
Public health experts have warned that the actual number of people infected is certainly far higher than the number of reported cases, and could be up to 13 times as high in some regions.
Cases are trending upward in 39 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and are decreasing in only two. In the past week, cases have risen most quickly, relative to population, in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Texas has added more than 10,000 cases each day, on average.
More than 143,000 people have died of the virus in the United States, and experts say that the trend in hospitalizations and deaths often lags weeks behind the trend in cases. Even so, according to the Covid Tracking Project, the number of people hospitalized in the country on Thursday approached the high of nearly 60,000 on April 15, when the outbreak was largely concentrated in New York.
The United States reported its millionth case on April 28, more than three months after the first reported case. The country passed two million cases 43 days later, on June 10, and passed three million on July 7.
Draft Republican virus aid proposal reflects significant retreat by White House on tax cuts, testing and schools.
The White House and Senate Republicans neared agreement on Thursday on a new economic rescue proposal that includes another round of stimulus payments to individuals, additional aid to small businesses and a partial extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, according to a summary of the agreement that was circulating on Capitol Hill.
The draft summary, which was obtained by The Times, reflects a significant retreat by the White House after days of infighting among Republicans. It does not include a payroll tax cut, a favorite idea of Mr. Trump’s, which administration officials backed away from amid tepid support from Republicans in Congress. It includes $16 billion in funds for new testing that the administration had opposed, and conditions only a portion of education funding on schools reopening.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who had hoped to roll out his bill early Thursday, instead spent the morning continuing to negotiate with top White House officials over its central elements.
“We’re just having a conversation with the leader, hopefully we’ll be able to resolve this,” Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of staff told reporters as he entered Mr. McConnell’s office Thursday morning.
Among the final sticking points was the language surrounding the amount of additional benefits that the unemployed would continue to receive after a program providing $600 per week in extra aid expires at month’s end.
Republicans agree that they want to slash the jobless payments, which they argue discourage people from returning to work. But while Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a television interview that they would seek to limit the new payments to 70 percent of a worker’s wages, the outline suggests the level could rise to 100 percent.
The summary also includes $26 billion for vaccine development and deployment, $20 billion in direct payments to farmers and a total of $105 billion for education, $30 billion of which would be reserved for institutions that reopen. There is no new money for state and local governments to plug budget holes and avert layoffs, but the outline notes that such funds are expected to be added in negotiations with Democrats, who have insisted on hundreds of billions of dollars.
The document did not specify who would receive the direct payments or how much the checks would be.
It includes a substantial expansion of a program to aid small businesses, relaxing the terms of a loan program designed to help them maintain their payrolls and creating a new “working capital” loan to cover operating expenses. The proposal would also more heavily restrict the number of businesses who were eligible, including by requiring evidence of steep revenue losses during the recession.
A Washington Nationals star is pulled from baseball’s season opener after testing positive.
Hours before the Yankees and the Washington Nationals were to begin the opening game of the delayed Major League Baseball season on Thursday night, the sport got a stark reminder of the precariousness of playing amid a pandemic: Juan Soto, the 21-year-old Nationals star, tested positive for the virus and was held out of the lineup.
Soto must record two negative tests at least 24 hours apart before he can return. He was asymptomatic, Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo told reporters, and all the other Washington players were available to take the field on Thursday.
Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said that those in closest contact with Soto were tested on Thursday morning and would be again on Friday.
The game between the Yankees and the Nationals, the reigning World Series champions, was the first of two scheduled for Thursday, as the M.L.B. begins an abbreviated season of 60 games almost four months late.
President Trump said on Thursday that he would throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Aug. 15, which would be the first time during his presidency that he has participated in the M.L.B. ritual. A person in baseball familiar with the situation confirmed that the president had been invited to throw out the first pitch but said that a date had not been worked out.
The announcement came days after the Nationals said that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert who has raised concerns about the administration's handling of the virus, would throw out the first pitch at Thursday’s game.
A prominent Yankee will also miss the opener because of the virus. Star relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman tested positive two weeks ago.
M.L.B. has put in place extensive health and safety protocols, including barring fans from the games for now, and has had relatively few cases during summer workouts. But the true test will come as teams begin traveling, particularly into hot spots such as Florida, Georgia and Texas.
U.S. testing continues to falter with more shortages in lab equipment.
Labs across the United States are facing backlogs in coronavirus testing, leaving anxious patients and their doctors waiting days and sometimes weeks for results, thanks in part to a shortage of tiny pieces of tapered plastic.
These little disposables, called pipette tips, are needed to quickly and precisely move liquid between vials to process the tests. Pipette tips, which are fed into automated devices, can help researchers blaze through hundreds of tests in a matter of hours, sparing them grueling manual labor.
The recent shortages of pipette tips and other lab supplies are once again stymieing efforts to track and curb the spread of disease at a time when the number of known cases in the United States has topped four million.
The crisis is an eerie echo of the early days of the pandemic, when researchers scrambled to find the swabs and liquids needed to collect and store samples en route to laboratories. And the delays in producing test results hurts the effectiveness of contact tracing.
Thousands of New Yorkers have had to wait a week or more for results, and at some clinics the median wait time is nine days. Officials have been unable to adequately expand the capacity of state and city government laboratories to test rapidly at a time when they are asking more people to get tested to guard against another large outbreak.
Companies that produce the pipette tips needed for processing test results are slammed with orders. And they are not the only laboratory items in short supply. Dwindling stocks of machines, containers and chemicals needed to extract or amplify the virus’s genetic material have clogged almost every point along the testing workflow.
Many laboratories are now having to prioritize testing for the sickest patients, a trend that has troubled many as evidence mounts of the virus’s ability to spread from infected people before symptoms appear, if they do at all.
Another study finds that the drug hydroxychloroquine didn’t help Covid-19 patients.
Another study showing that a malaria drug that was heavily promoted — and even taken — by Mr. Trump did not improve the conditions of patients with Covid-19 was published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The study of more than 500 people found that taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine — with or without an antibiotic, azithromycin — did not lead to better outcomes for virus patients.
The findings bolstered previous work showing that the drugs are not effective in treating the disease. The Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine for use in Covid-19 patients, and has warned that it can cause a host of serious side effects.
More than 500 people in the study with confirmed Covid-19 were assigned to three groups, spread across 55 hospitals in Brazil. All received standard treatment, but one group received hydroxychloroquine, one received hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, and one group received neither drug. The study concluded that the patients in the first two groups did not have better clinical outcomes than the group that did not receive either drug.
It also found that patients in the two groups that were given hydroxychloroquine more frequently experienced a heart arrhythmia and had elevated levels of liver enzymes, two potentially harmful side effects of the drug. The clinical trial focused on patients who were hospitalized but were not yet severely ill with Covid-19.
“I would say overall that it shores up everything we’ve come to understand about these drugs from other randomized studies,” said Dr. Judith Feinberg, vice chair of research in the department of medicine at West Virginia University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “There’s nothing you can point to that says, oh, I’d want my mom to get this.”
U.S. ROUNDUP
Cases and hospitalizations appear to level off in hard-hit Houston, while other parts of Texas still reel.
City and hospital officials in Houston, which has been hammered by the virus, have seen new cases and hospitalizations appear to level off and even dipped slightly.
Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, chief executive of Harris Health System, said the organization’s two public hospitals in the Houston area had 24 fewer Covid-19 patients on Wednesday than they had a few days earlier.
“I’m hoping that this trend is going to continue,” Dr. Porsa said. “It really doesn’t mean that all of a sudden I have a whole bunch of capacity. It just means that my staff gets to take a breather.”
The city’s largest medical complex, the Texas Medical Center, also reported a slight decrease.
“The good news is the numbers aren’t climbing precipitously; the bad news is it’s plateauing at a high level, so it’s still a very serious problem,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He added that it was hard to be optimistic “because there’s still a very aggressive level of transmission in the city and the county.”
Other parts of Texas have emerged as new hot spots, including Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley, where the Pentagon recently sent Army and Navy medical teams to assist overwhelmed hospitals. Mayor Jim Darling of McAllen, a border city, released a public-service announcement last week reminding residents that not everyone who tests positive needs urgent treatment.
Dr. Porsa said he found it frustrating that some people did not view the situation as an emergency. “It’s disheartening to see people going about their business as if nothing is happening,” he said. “I see patients on ventilators, patients in a prone position, face down, because we can’t get enough oxygen to them.”
Elsewhere in the U.S.:
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In Ohio, where cases have been climbing sharply, the governor said that large clusters of cases were being caused by gatherings like pool parties and funerals. Fifty-three cases in Henry County were linked to an event at a local winery, he said. He also pointed to out-of-state travel, citing the example of two women who took a road trip to Texas. One of them began to feel sick on the drive back, he said, but still reported to work at a nursing home afterward; now there are 30 cases there.
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The private school in suburban Maryland attended by Mr. Trump’s son will not fully reopen in September out of virus concerns, despite the president’s demand that all students be brought back to U.S. classrooms in the fall. At a briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Trump expressed no unease over his son Barron, 14, or his school-aged grandchildren returning to class. “I am comfortable with that,” he said.
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As case numbers rise in Kansas, the Republican-led state Board of Education voted against an executive order from Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, that would have delayed school reopenings until Sept. 8. The vote left individual school boards free to decide when to reopen. Classes begin as soon as Aug. 10.
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The actor Mel Gibson spent a week in a California hospital in April after testing positive for the virus, a representative for Gibson said Thursday night. While in the hospital, Mr. Gibson, 64, was treated with the drug remdesivir, the representative said, and since his stay, the actor has tested negative “numerous times.”
New unemployment claims in the U.S. rose last week for the first time since early in the pandemic.
After more than three months of slow declines, the number of people filing new claims for state unemployment benefits in the United States rose last week. The Labor Department reported Thursday another 1.4 million new state applications.
The spike comes just days before an extra $600-a-week jobless benefit is set to expire.
An additional 975,000 claims were filed by freelancers, part-time workers and others who do not qualify for regular state jobless aid but are eligible for benefits under an emergency federal program, the Labor Department announced. Unlike the state figures, that number is not seasonally adjusted.
The stubbornly high rate of new weekly claims more than four months into the pandemic “suggests that the nature of the downturn has changed from early on,” said Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI. It may mean that businesses are shutting down again as cases surge in some places, or that funds from emergency small business loans through the Paycheck Protection Program are running out, he said — or worse, something more fundamental.
“It might be that businesses are running through their first line of credit,” he said, “and now they’re facing the music of an economy that has recovered a little bit but not nearly enough.”
During the worst of the Great Recession in 2008-9, the weekly number of claims never exceeded 700,000. Since mid-March, new state unemployment applications have yet to fall below a million.
Congressional lawmakers and the White House are negotiating a roughly $1 trillion relief package that would include extending some benefits for unemployed workers.
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
Costa Rica is reopening, despite reporting a spike in its caseload.
After four months without any international visitors, Costa Rica is reopening its borders to tourists, but U.S. citizens aren’t welcome just yet.
Five flights a week will be allowed in from the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada starting Aug. 1, Gustavo Segura, the country’s tourism minister, announced Thursday. Tourists will have to fill out an online travel health form, provide proof of a negative coronavirus test taken within the previous 48 hours and buy insurance that would cover medical and quarantine costs.
The announcement came minutes after the health minister reported the country’s biggest daily increase in coronavirus cases. More than 13,000 people have been infected in Costa Rica, and 81 have died. There were 768 new cases and 10 deaths on Thursday alone.
“The decisions we’re announcing today are drops of hope, drops of hope for the more than 600,000 people who directly or indirectly depend on tourism,” Mr. Segura said during the government’s daily virus briefing.
The decision to reopen came after months of pleas and protests from business owners, mayors and representatives from the tourism industry. More than 3.1 million tourists — including 1.3 million from the United States — visited Costa Rica in 2019
Costa Rica’s economy was already faltering before the pandemic hit. The country started the year with a 12.4 percent unemployment rate and its highest budget deficit in decades. Now, after two strict lockdowns, border closures and a patchwork of restrictions across the country, the unemployment rate stands at 20.1 percent, and an estimated 45 percent of the country’s 19,000 restaurants have shut down.
President Carlos Alvarado said he was trying to balance health with the need to reactivate the economy.
“The daily number of cases can’t be what determines what direction we take,” Mr. Alvarado said.
Elsewhere in the world:
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The surge of cases could be slowed if the world’s poorest people receive a temporary basic income, enabling them to stay at home, according to a United Nations report released on Thursday. It would cost at least $199 billion a month to provide fixed-term basic income to 2.7 billion people in 132 developing countries, the report said, allowing these people to pay for their food, and health and education expenses.
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China’s National Health Commission issued new safety guidelines on Thursday for the country’s meat processors, citing outbreaks at plants in the United States, Germany and Britain, and the high risks of transmission in crowded processing plants.
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In Israel, cases have risen to new heights, with more than 2,000 new daily infections reported on Wednesday. The Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, passed a law early Thursday that expands the government’s powers in imposing virus restrictions and lessens parliamentary oversight of them. The legislation, which was ratified in a 48-35 vote, was criticized by opposition lawmakers: “Tonight, Israel’s government gave up on its most important partner in dealing with the coronavirus crisis — the Knesset,” Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition, wrote on Twitter.
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The head of the World Health Organization roundly rejected reported claims by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he had been “bought” by China. “The comments are untrue and unacceptable, and without any foundation,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general. He was responding to a report in The Times of London about a closed-door meeting Mr. Pompeo had with British lawmakers.
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New cases are on the rise in Romania, which on Wednesday reported over 1,000 — the first time the country passed that daily milestone since the pandemic began. And on Thursday, that number rose further, to 1,112 new cases and 25 deaths, bringing the country’s total case count to 41,275 with 2,126 deaths. The surge has put many on edge. The prime minister said this week that he would order local lockdowns if daily cases rose above 1,200.
NEW YORK ROUNDUP
New York’s governor again warns about infections among younger people.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York again warned on Thursday of rising cases among younger people. Though most of the state’s cases were being diagnosed in older residents, the share of those found in 21- to 30-year-olds increased to 13.2 percent from 9.9 percent over the last two weeks, he said. The U.S. outbreak has more recently seen an increase in people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are testing positive.
The governor attributed the state’s spike in part to the number of younger people gathering to socialize, including attending parties and drinking at restaurants and bars. On Tuesday, the state’s liquor authority issued new guidance requiring bars and restaurants to serve “a substantial item” with alcohol — not a bag of chips or pretzels, as some establishments had been doing.
“This is not the time to fight for your right to party,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Elsewhere in New York:
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In New York City, the mayor said Thursday that eight public swimming pools are scheduled to open Friday, with seven more next week. There will be social distancing measures to prevent overcrowding in locker rooms and to ensure visitors are wearing face coverings when not inside the pool.
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More than 6,000 people have died of the virus in nursing homes and other long-term facilities across the state. That death toll surpasses the number of fatalities in several states, and the governor has faced heated attacks from Republicans in Washington and elsewhere over his response to the crisis. The tension and pain surrounding the issue bled into the debate over a related bill that was passed on Thursday by the Legislature.
Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Julia Calderone, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Keith Collins, Matthew Conlen, Michael Cooper, Julia Echikson, Nicholas Fandos, Manny Fernandez, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Gillian Friedman, Lazaro Gamio, Kit Gillet, Michael Gold, Joseph Goldstein, Matthew Goldstein, J. David Goodman, Maggie Haberman, Christine Hauser, Juliana Kim, Tyler Kepner, Iliana Magra, Sapna Maheshwari, Patricia Mazzei, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Jesse McKinley, Sarah Mervosh, Katie Rogers, Eileen Sullivan, Jim Tankersley, Katie Thomas, Lucy Tompkins, Alexander Villegas, Daniel Victor, Neil Vigdor, James Wagner, David Waldstein, Allyson Waller, Katherine J. Wu, Elaine Yu and Jeanna Smialek.
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