Here’s what you need to know:
- U.S. reports its second highest daily total of new cases.
- Houston’s hospitals are running out of intensive-care beds.
- New York will require out-of-state travelers coming from hard-hit states to quarantine upon arrival.
- The global economy will shrink 4.9 percent this year, the I.M.F. predicts in a dismal forecast.
- In Yemen, the toll of the pandemic is rising. So is the cost of a burial.
- The pandemic could erase 20 years of progress against tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria, an NGO warns.
- At a nursing home where 76 veterans died, ‘the opposite of infection control.’
U.S. reports its second highest daily total of new cases.
The United States reached its second-highest daily total of new cases on Wednesday, even before some states had reported their full numbers for the day.
Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina reported their highest single-day totals, with Texas reporting more than 6,200 new cases and Florida reporting more than 5,500 as the country’s total reached 36,126. More than 35,000 new coronavirus cases had been identified the day before. The country’s largest daily total has been 36,739 cases, which were reported on April 24.
The new-cases tally, based on a New York Times database, showed that the outbreak has been far from contained as the United States continues to reopen its economy. Case numbers have been rising in more than 20 states, mostly in the South and West.
New York instituted a quarantine for some out-of-state travelers. And the stock market slid 2.6 percent as investors fretted about what the latest troubling news meant for economic recovery. That could lead some states to slow the process of reopening businesses, further hobbling the economy and delaying its recovery.
Some states, including New York, which at one point had the most daily virus cases, have brought their numbers under control. But cases are still rising in more than 20 states, especially in the South and West.
On Wednesday it was as if the country had found itself back in March — at the start of the pandemic, in the early days of the lockdown, when masks were in short supply and the death toll was skyrocketing.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said Wednesday that the state had recorded more than 7,000 new cases over the past day. In Washington State, where case numbers have again been trending upward, the governor said residents would have to start wearing masks in public. “This is about saving lives,” said Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat. “It’s about reopening our businesses. And it’s about showing respect and care for one another.”
In Florida on Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no indication that the state would roll back its economic opening, but he urged residents to avoid closed spaces with poor ventilation, crowds and close contact with others.
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, continued to attribute the rising infections, especially in cities, to younger people who have started to socialize in bars and homes, in spite of rules in many municipalities prohibiting group gatherings. He pressed older people to keep staying home as much as possible, and pleaded with young people to be responsible.
“You need to do your part and make sure that you’re not spreading it to people who are going to be more at risk for this,” he said.
The elevated case numbers are a result of worsening conditions across much of the country, as well as increased testing, but testing alone does not explain the surge. The percentage of people in Florida testing positive has risen sharply. Increases in hospitalizations also signal the virus’s spread.
Arizona on Tuesday reported its highest number of virus hospitalizations, as did North Carolina, prompting its governor, Roy Cooper, to announce on Wednesday that the state would pause reopening for three weeks and require face masks. In Texas, more than 4,300 people with the virus are hospitalized, more than double the number at the beginning of June.
But in Missouri, where new case reports have reached their highest levels in recent days, coronavirus hospitalizations have declined slightly over the last month.
“We are NOT overwhelmed,” Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, said on Twitter, linking the uptick to more testing. “We are NOT currently experiencing a second wave. We have NO intentions of closing Missouri back down at this point in time.”
The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that if governments and communities in the Americas are not able to stop the spread of the virus through surveillance, isolation of cases and quarantine of contacts, there may be a need to impose — or reimpose — general lockdowns.
“It is very difficult to take the sting out of this pandemic unless we are able to successfully isolate cases and quarantine contacts,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the W.H.O. health emergencies program. “In the absence of a capacity to do that, then the specter of further lockdowns cannot be excluded.”
He said that the growing number of coronavirus cases in the Americas has not peaked and that the region is likely to see sustained numbers of cases and deaths in the coming weeks.
U.S. ROUNDUP
Houston’s hospitals are running out of intensive-care beds.
With cases surging in the Houston area, the city’s intensive-care units are now filled to 97 percent of capacity, Mayor Sylvester Turner told the City Council on Wednesday, with Covid-19 patients accounting for more than one-quarter of all patients in intensive care.
The city, known for its large concentration of medical schools and research hospitals, could run out of I.C.U. beds within two weeks if nothing is done to slow the upward trajectory of the virus, said Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He called on the state to reimpose more aggressive social distancing restrictions.
Dr. Hotez said that hospitalizations were rising along with the case counts, so the data is not just the result of increased testing. “That means we have to act this week,” Dr. Hotez said.
On Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a television interview that more than 5,000 people had tested positive in the past day and that more than 4,000 were hospitalized. There is a “massive outbreak of Covid-19 across the state of Texas today,” he said.
Apple said it closed seven of its stores in the Houston area because of rising coronavirus cases in the region. The move on Wednesday followed its closing of 11 stores in Arizona, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina because of the virus. Apple had closed nearly all of its roughly 500 stores worldwide months ago, but had opened most in the United States in recent weeks after cases declined. Just over 200 of Apple’s 271 American stores are now open, with some still closed because of damage from protests, an Apple spokesman said.
In other news around the United States:
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In Florida, which had a record number of new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis urged people to avoid closed spaces with poor ventilation, crowds and close contact with others. Total virus cases in Florida exceeded 100,000 on Monday, with more than 3,100 deaths. About one-quarter of the cases have been in Miami-Dade County, where the per capita rate is twice the number statewide. Still, Trump National Doral, which is in the county and is the most important source of revenue for the president’s strained family business, reopened last weekend.
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Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, which reached a record 915 virus hospitalizations on Tuesday, announced on Wednesday that the state would pause its reopening for three weeks and require face masks in public. The state has more than 56,000 cases and nearly 1,300 deaths. Mr. Cooper said that hospitals had not reached capacity, but could quickly become overwhelmed. Also, a judge in the state ruled against the reopening of Ace Speedway, which state health officials had ordered to shut down, saying the racetrack had defied restrictions on the size of public gatherings.
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State officials in Virginia are proposing workplace virus safety rules that, unlike those in some other states, would be mandatory and backed by enforcement. Labor activists and state officials said Virginia was acting because the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had not issued enforceable standards or acted on thousands of complaints. The Virginia rules would impose physical distancing and sanitation requirements, and among other measures, companies would have to notify workers of possible exposure. Violators could be fined or shut down.
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Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 presidential race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Mr. Biden has made deep inroads into some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump after his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic. He currently leads Mr. Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50 percent of the vote. Nearly three-fifths of voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
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A judge in Texas who signed an order requiring everyone in the San Antonio area to wear masks was assaulted at a Lowe’s home improvement store on Wednesday after he confronted another customer who was not wearing a mask, the authorities said. When Judge Nelson Wolff tried to hand a card to the man, the other customer slapped away his hand, surveillance video released by the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office showed. It was not clear what the card said. The man, who also berated the judge, could face a felony charge of assault of a public servant, the sheriff, Javier Salazar, said during a news conference at the store.
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As California recorded its highest number of infections, Disneyland indefinitely postponed its plans to reopen in Anaheim on July 17. The Walt Disney Co. said that it was awaiting the state’s guidelines for reopening theme parks, which were not expected to be issued until after July 4. Thousands of workers at Disneyland and at Walt Disney World in Florida, which is scheduled to begin a phased reopening on July 11, have signed petitions calling on Disney executives to pause plans.
N.Y. ROUNDUP
New York will require out-of-state travelers coming from hard-hit states to quarantine upon arrival.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Wednesday that the state will begin requiring out-of-state travelers coming from hard-hit states to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, a move that punctuated a stark shift in the course of the nation’s outbreak.
The restrictions will be based on specific health metrics related to the virus, he said at a news conference. The quarantine would apply to travelers arriving from a state, as well as New Yorkers returning from a state, where there was either a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents, or a state with a 10 percent or higher rate over a seven-day rolling average.
“A lot of people come into this region and they could literally bring the infection with them,” he said. “It wouldn’t be malicious or malevolent, but it would still be real.”
Eight states would be included, Mr. Cuomo said, when the restrictions took effect at midnight: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah. Washington State had originally been included, but was dropped from the list after a further review of the data.
Travelers returning to New Jersey and Connecticut from those states would also be told to quarantine; their governors appeared with Mr. Cuomo to announce a tristate “joint travel advisory.” Mr. Cuomo said that enforcement would be up to each of the three states. Officials from New Jersey and Connecticut said there was no enforcement mechanism at the moment in their states.
In New York, those violating the quarantine order could be “subject to a judicial order and mandatory quarantine,” he said, and fines of up to $10,000. Mr. Cuomo also said that officials would not be stopping people at state borders to forbid them to enter, but that travelers were being asked to comply once they arrived.
A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said that if a New Yorker believes that a recent arrival — or a returning neighbor — has not been abiding by the quarantine, then that person should start by reporting the possible violation to the local health department. Elsewhere in the U.S. where there are similar quarantines for travelers, there has not been widespread enforcement.
The goal, the governor said, was to maintain the hard-fought gains made in the region at great economic and human cost. For months, the state — New York City particularly — had been a global center of the pandemic. Hospitals filled to near capacity. Hundreds died each day, reaching a peak in mid-April. But on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo said there were only an additional 17 deaths statewide.
New York’s quarantine will not apply to Yankees and Mets players returning to the area to complete spring training, which can begin on July 1, Mr. Cuomo said, adding that the state had been working on separate “health protocols” with them since last week.
Elsewhere in New York:
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With the pandemic siphoning as much as $9 billion in tax revenue from New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other top officials said Wednesday that the city might have to lay off or furlough 22,000 municipal workers this fall and make sweeping cuts in infrastructure spending.
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The New York City Marathon has been canceled this year. City officials and organizers decided holding the race, the world’s largest marathon, would be too risky.
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The mayor said that the city will close 23 more miles of streets to car traffic to provide more outdoor space while social distancing rules remain in place. The city’s beaches will also be open for swimming and recreation on July 1 but with required social distancing.
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Five upstate regions are set to enter Phase 4, the final phase of the state’s reopening plan, on Friday, Mr. Cuomo said. Indoor gatherings of up to 50 people will be allowed, and some arts and entertainment venues can open. Malls, movie theaters and gyms must remain closed.
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New Jersey officials said on Wednesday that bowling alleys, museums, arcades, aquariums, batting cages, shooting ranges and libraries may reopen at 25 percent capacity on July 2. Gyms stay closed, though individual appointments with trainers can be scheduled, said the governor, who reported 48 more deaths on Wednesday.
The global economy will shrink 4.9 percent this year, the I.M.F. predicts in a dismal forecast.
The International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday that the global economy faces an even deeper downturn than it previously projected as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sow uncertainty and businesses around the world struggle to shake off the virus.
The forecast underscores the scale of the task that policymakers are facing as they try to dig out from what the I.M.F. has described as the most severe economic contraction since the Great Depression. Even as countries begin reopening their economies, it is increasingly evident that the recovery will be uneven and protracted, particularly until the virus dissipates or a vaccine becomes available.
In an update to its World Economic Outlook, the I.M.F. said it expected the global economy to shrink 4.9 percent this year — a sharper contraction than the 3 percent it predicted in April. The fund noted that, even as businesses began to reopen, voluntary social distancing and enhanced workplace safety standards were weighing on economic activity. Moreover, the “scarring” of the labor force from mass job cuts and business closures means that the world economy will recover much more slowly, with the I.M.F. projecting 5.4 percent global growth in 2021, far below its pre-pandemic projections.
The I.M.F. now projects that the U.S. economy will shrink 8 percent this year before expanding 4.5 percent next year. Economies in the eurozone are projected to shrink 10.2 percent this year and expand 6 percent next year. The economy of China, where the virus originated and which imposed draconian containment measures, is expected to expand 1 percent this year and 8.2 percent in 2021.
In the markets on Wednesday, the S&P 500 fell more than 2 percent by midafternoon, erasing gains from earlier in the week, as investors confronted new signs of the pandemic’s persistence. Shares of retailers, airlines and cruise companies — which are proxies for sentiment about the prospects of a recovery — are faring poorly. Nervousness about the economic outlook was evident in oil prices, and shares of energy companies also declined.
In Yemen, the toll of the pandemic is rising. So is the cost of a burial.
The top U.N. relief official warned Wednesday of a drastic worsening in the outbreak in war-ravaged Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where he said 25 percent of those infected die — about five times the global average.
As Covid-19 sweeps the country, many deaths are most likely going unreported, said Mark Lowcock, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. But there is one unmistakable measure of the virus’s toll: “Burial prices in some areas have increased by seven times compared to a few months ago,” he said.
The United Nations has been chronically hampered in providing aid to Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has been waging war on the rebel Houthi group for more than five years.
Even before the pandemic, the devastation caused by the war had left a vast majority of Yemen’s population hungry, destitute and afflicted with preventable diseases, including cholera and diphtheria. Millions of Yemeni children are malnourished, and some have died of starvation.
Mr. Lowcock spoke Wednesday at a United Nations Security Council briefing on the conflict, held three weeks after a major donor conference to raise money for the humanitarian emergency in Yemen secured $1.35 billion in pledges.
That was about half what was pledged a year earlier — and many of the pledges, Mr. Lowcock said, have not yet been paid.
If donors fail to make good on their pledges, he said, “at a minimum, we can expect many more people to starve to death and to succumb to Covid-19, and to die of cholera, and to watch their children die because they are not immunized for killer diseases.”
The pandemic could erase 20 years of progress against tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria, an NGO warns.
In low-income nations, the pandemic may erase 20 years of hard-fought progress against tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria, diseases that together claim more than 2.4 million lives each year.
A report released on Wednesday estimates that countries hit hard by these diseases will need at least $28.5 billion over the next year to shore up health campaigns and to respond to the pandemic itself. The figure does not include costs associated with a vaccine, assuming one is found.
The toll is most severe in nations already strapped for resources. The pandemic has overwhelmed fragile health care systems in those countries, disrupting programs for preventing and treating tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria. Restricted air and sea transport also threatens the availability of crucial medicines.
Several models produced by the World Health Organization and others project that deaths from these diseases could double as a result. Treatment interruptions also raise the threat of drug resistance, already a formidable problem in many countries.
“The stakes are extraordinarily high,” Peter Sands, who heads The Global Fund, a public-private partnership that published the estimates, said in a statement. “The knock-on effects of Covid-19 on the fight against H.I.V., T.B. and malaria and other infectious diseases could be catastrophic.”
Since March, The Global Fund, which works mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, has provided $1 billion to help countries maintain their campaigns against these diseases. In the new report, the organization said that amount served only as a stopgap measure.
The Global Fund estimated that countries would need more than $13 billion to protect front-line health care workers and shore up their health systems, about $9 billion to develop and deploy treatments, and nearly $5 billion for diagnostics.
At a nursing home where 76 veterans died, ‘the opposite of infection control.’
A state-run veteran’s home in Massachusetts was “total pandemonium” and a “nightmare” in late March, when a series of blunders contributed to the rapid spread of the virus at the home and the deaths of 76 patients, employees told investigators.
A blistering 174-page independent report on the outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, released on Wednesday, paints a picture of a facility in chaos, as traumatized nurses carried out orders to combine wards of infected and uninfected men, knowing that the move would prove deadly to many of their patients.
One social worker told investigators that she “felt it was like moving the concentration camp — we [were] moving these unknowing veterans off to die,” the report said.
More than 60 percent of fatalities from the coronavirus in Massachusetts have been at nursing homes.
In addition to combining crowded wards, the report said, the home rotated staff members between the wards; discouraged them from using protective gear in an effort to conserve limited supplies; and often failed to isolate infected veterans or to test those who had symptoms.
“In short, this was the opposite of infection control,” the report said.
U.S. immigration agency, citing application declines, plans large-scale furloughs.
Thousands of employees with the federal agency that administers the country’s immigration system are expected to begin receiving furlough notices as applications for green cards, citizenship and other programs drop, Zolan Kanno-Youngs reports.
At one office, where well over half the employees were warned to expect furlough notices, staffers were told that the agency was focused on retaining jobs that “keep the lights on,” according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
LaDonna Davis, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that more than 13,000 employees should expect to receive the notices in early July.
“This dramatic drop in revenue has made it impossible for our agency to operate at full capacity,” she said. “Without additional funding from Congress before Aug. 3, U.S.C.I.S. has no choice but to administratively furlough a substantial portion of our work force.”
The agency has asked lawmakers for $1.2 billion, citing economic damage from the pandemic.
But critics say the problem lies not with the recession but with the Trump administration’s restrictionist immigration policies, which have led to backlogs and skyrocketing denials. The agency relies on application fees to fund most of its operations.
Evan Hollander, spokesman for the Democratic-controlled House Appropriations Committee, said the Office of Management and Budget had provided a letter to the committee with “virtually no information on the shortfall or their proposed remedies.” He said Democratic lawmakers were prepared to discuss the financial situation with Republicans.
Citizenship and Immigration Services officials have told Congress they would repay the funds to the Treasury Department by adding a 10-percent surcharge to applications.
In the email obtained by The Times, Jennifer Higgins, associate director of the office that deals with asylum and refugee applications, said the agency would send furlough notices to 1,500 of its 2,200 employees. It will to retain people whose duties include border screenings, refugee case completions and parole requests, she said.
Global roundup
Pummeled by the virus, Russia holds a mostly mask-free victory parade.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday celebrated his country’s victory 75 years ago against Nazi Germany, presiding over an enormous military parade through Red Square in Moscow that featured thousands of soldiers marching shoulder-to-shoulder without face masks.
The parade, the largest of several celebrations taking place nationwide, was originally scheduled for May 9, an annual holiday known as Victory Day, but was delayed for six weeks by the pandemic. The outbreak continues to grow in Russia — the world’s third-worst-affected country, with more than 600,000 cases — but at a slightly slower pace than before.
Aging veterans in their 80s and 90s joined Mr. Putin on the reviewing stand, nearly all of them without masks, to watch 14,000 troops march by.
Kremlin critics have accused Mr. Putin of gambling with public health to put himself at the center of a gigantic display of Russia’s military might and to rally support ahead of a nationwide vote on his future. Voting on constitutional amendments that would allow Mr. Putin to stay in power until 2036 starts on Thursday.
In other news from around the world:
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Saudi Arabia effectively canceled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, for what some scholars say may be the first time in history. The decision sent shock waves of sadness and disappointment across the Muslim world.
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The virus is gaining steam in Latin America, where the number of deaths have more than doubled in a month, according to the Pan American Health Organization. The region now accounts for several of the world’s worst outbreaks.
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Taiwan said on Wednesday that it would relax its entry rules for travelers from Hong Kong and Macau. Arrivals from the Chinese-controlled territories must prove that they have tested negative for the virus and enter home quarantine for 14 days after entry.
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India is under pressure to open its airspace to international airlines after the United States and some European nations accused it of discriminatory practices under the guise of repatriations. The U.S. Department of Transportation accused Air India of selling tickets in the open market, even while New Delhi officials keep American carriers from flying to India.
France’s new contact-tracing app has alerted only 14 people that they were exposed to the virus.
Three weeks after it was introduced, a French contact-tracing app has fallen short of its potential to be a game changer: Only 14 users have been alerted that they were exposed to the virus.
The app, called “StopCovid,” uses Bluetooth technology to trace a person’s interactions. If users test positive and indicate their status on the app, their recent contacts — the ones who are also using the app — get an alert. But so far, only 68 people have informed the app that they were infected, and just a handful of their contacts received alerts.
“These figures correspond to a double reality,” Cédric O, the French digital affairs minister, said during a news conference this week. “A decrease in the spread of the epidemic in France — about 30 people a day are tested positive in Paris — but also a limited use of StopCovid.”
Mr. O said that 1.9 million people had downloaded the app in France, or about 3 percent of the total population. About 460,000 people then uninstalled it.
Modeling by Christophe Fraser, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Oxford University, estimated that to stop the spread of the illness, approximately 60 percent of the population would have to use the app.
Mr. O acknowledged in April that one of his main worries about the technology was whether enough people would install it. In Germany, some 10 million people, or about 12 percent of the population, downloaded a similar app. Britain was set to unroll its own app in June, but those plans were shelved after an initial testing phase revealed major problems.
Unlike most European countries, France opted to develop its own technology to underpin its app, rather than using the standard version backed by Apple and Google, and that decision partly delayed the introduction of StopCovid.
Answering your questions about the virus.
With cases on the rise in the United States and around the world, here’s what to do if you feel sick and are worried it may be the coronavirus.
Reporting was contributed by Azam Ahmed, Brooks Barnes, Ellen Barry, Emma Bubola, Alexander Burns, Jill Cowan, Maria Cramer, Matthew Futterman, Michael Gold, J. David Goodman, Jack Healy, Andrew Higgins, Ben Hubbard, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Ernesto Londoño, Iliana Magra, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jonathan Martin, Patricia Mazzei, Jack Nicas, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Jesse McKinley, Donald McNeil Jr., Constant Méheut, Benjamin Mueller, Aimee Ortiz, Daniel Politi, Austin Ramzy, Alan Rappeport, Dana Rubinstein, Kim Severson, Mitch Smith, Matt Stevens, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Neil Vigdor, Declan Walsh, Sui-Lee Wee, Noah Weiland, Pete Wells, Sameer Yasir and Karen Zraick.
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