Here’s what you need to know:
- Coronavirus cases surpass 10 million worldwide, as deaths approach 500,000.
- Pence and Azar attribute surges to more testing. Health experts and the evidence say otherwise.
- Positivity rates are climbing in hard-hit states. What does that mean?
- The governors of New York and Washington sharply criticize the Trump administration.
- U.S. testing sites in the West and South see long lines and sometimes unruly crowds.
- Outbreaks from restaurants grow as more U.S. states permit indoor dining.
- Ukrainians are stuck in their country’s warring east because they can’t access a quarantine app.
Coronavirus cases surpass 10 million worldwide, as deaths approach 500,000.
The global total of coronavirus cases passed 10 million on Sunday, according to a New York Times database, as countries around the world struggled to keep new infection rates from reaching runaway levels while simultaneously trying to emerge from painful lockdowns.
The number of confirmed infections, which took roughly 40 days to double after hitting five million in May, may be substantially underestimated, public health officials say. Data released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that the actual figures in many regions of the United States are probably 10 times as high as reported.
In April, roughly a month after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic, global virus deaths topped 100,000. That figure then climbed to 250,000 in early May and has nearly doubled in less than two months. More than a quarter of all known deaths have been in the United States.
In the United States, early hot spots emerged in the Northeast, particularly the New York metropolitan area, but the recent surge has occurred primarily in the South and the West, forcing some states to retreat from reopening plans.
Other countries are also being hit with a wave of new infections.
Brazil, which has reported the second highest total of infections, has seen its caseload surge significantly in June. The country has over 1.3 million cases and over 57,000 deaths.
And India, which is reporting more new daily infections than all but the United States and Brazil, confirmed that cases surged beyond 500,000 this weekend. Last month, India moved ahead with reopening public life despite soaring case counts, and officials said they were exploring whether to try to test the entire population of New Delhi — nearly 30 million people — to better identify the scale of the outbreak.
Dozens of countries that took early steps to contain and track the pandemic have been able to control the virus within their borders. But experts fear that fatigue with lockdowns and social distancing has allowed the virus to spread with renewed intensity across many corners of the world.
Pence and Azar attribute surges to more testing. Health experts and the evidence say otherwise.
Vice President Mike Pence and the nation’s top health official, Alex M. Azar II, continued to assert on Sunday that reopenings in many states were not causing the sharp rises in coronavirus cases, but rather that increased testing was uncovering more and more infections.
But their position was disputed by other public health experts, who said that broadened testing is revealing not only more total cases, but also a higher rate of positive cases.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that both the total number and the percentage of positive tests for the coronavirus had increased in several states, saying, “There’s also no doubt that the virus has the upper hand.” He predicted that the explosive spread in some states would continue to worsen over the coming weeks.
While much of the Sunday talk shows were more focused on exploring reports that Russia had offered, and paid, bounties to Taliban fighters for killing U.S. soldiers, the country’s surging pandemic remained a major topic. And the comments by Mr. Pence, Mr. Azar and Dr. Frieden exemplified the contradictory positions taken by the White House, which is pressing full speed to reopen the economy and for Mr. Trump to resume in-person campaigning for the fall election, and health experts, who are alarmed by case surges around the country.
Mr. Pence, on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” said, “I know there’s a temptation to associate the new cases in the Sunbelt with reopening,” but denied that to be true, adding that many states with increased cases had already reopened weeks ago.
When the show’s host, John Dickerson, cited the concerns of health experts that states had opened too early, Mr. Pence replied, “I beg to differ.”
Even as residents in some states have been turned away from testing sites that have reached capacity, Mr. Pence falsely said that anyone who wanted to be tested for the coronavirus could be tested.
“Because of the public-private partnership that President Trump initiated, we are literally able to test anyone in the country that would want a test who comes forward,” Mr. Pence said.
President Trump first made this claim in March, and top health experts have repeatedly contradicted this. Testing sites in several states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, have been overrun.
Positivity rates are climbing in hard-hit states. What does that mean?
Along with soaring case counts, many places where the coronavirus is now spreading rapidly are reporting another statistic that is trending the wrong way: A rising share of coronavirus tests are coming back positive.
In Los Angeles County, officials said on Saturday that the positivity rate there had risen to 9 percent; two weeks ago it was averaging 5.8 percent. In Texas, the rate climbed above 13 percent on Friday; it was bobbing around 7 percent two weeks ago.
Arizona’s positivity rates have been climbing steadily since early May and have been averaging above 20 percent for a week, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Public health experts watch positivity rates, along with hospitalization rates, deaths and other key indicators, in order to develop as clear a picture as they can of how prevalent the virus is in a particular city or state and how fast it is spreading.
“The positivity rate is a very important marker for how a state’s testing is going, and for how the state is doing,” said Dr. Thomas Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for Health Security.
Don’t read too much into the specific figures, though: They can vary greatly from one place to another because of major differences in testing availability and criteria, in the way the data is compiled, and in other factors that don’t directly reflect what the virus is doing. All else being equal, more limited testing would be expected to yield higher positivity rates than widespread testing would, just because those who are tested would be more likely to have already shown signs of infection or have known exposure.
What’s most significant about positivity rates is which way they are moving, and up is not good. It’s a strong suggestion that the pandemic is gaining strength — and that rapidly rising case counts are not merely the result of having performed more tests, as President Trump and Vice President Pence have argued recently. If wider testing were all there was to it, positivity rates ought to be flat or falling, not rising.
“It should make public health officials and political leaders very concerned, and should make them really reconsider the policies that are in place,” Dr. Inglesby said.
The C.D.C. criteria for each stage of reopening from a lockdown include a requirement that positivity rates decline for 14 days. According to Johns Hopkins, only 12 states reported lower average positivity rates last week than the week before.
The governors of New York and Washington sharply criticize the Trump administration.
Two governors who have had sometimes testy relationships with the White House during the pandemic expressed harsh reactions to the administration’s insistence on deferring to local governments rather than offering strong national policies to contain the virus at a time when outbreaks are escalating in a number of states.
Vice President Mike Pence strongly defended the approach on the CBS show “Face the Nation,” while attributing the rise in cases to increased testing and irresponsible behavior by young people.
“One of the elements of the genius of America is the principle of federalism, of state and local control,” Mr. Pence said. “We’ve made it clear that we want to defer to governors. We want to defer to local officials and people should listen to them.”
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo characterized that approach as negligent on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “They’re basically in denial about the problem,” he said. “They don’t want to tell the American people the truth. And they don’t want to have any federal response, except supporting the states.”
Mr. Cuomo said that New York, once a global epicenter, had reported five deaths on Sunday, the lowest number since the start of the pandemic. But he said that he was afraid that travelers from states with higher infection rates could reverse his state’s hard-won gains.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington expressed frustration at the president’s unwillingness to wear masks or to do more to encourage his supporters to wear them. “Instead of tweeting the other day about the importance of masks, he tweeted about monuments,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “We need a president who will care more about living Americans and less about dead confederates.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she supported a federal mandate that all Americans must wear masks. “Definitely long overdue for that,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said on ABC’s “This Week.” She urged Mr. Trump to start wearing one in public, saying: “Real men wear masks. Be an example to the country.”
The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, noted on “Meet the Press” that Mr. Pence had donned a mask for a public appearance on Friday, “even though he doesn’t need to in the sense that everybody around him is tested, he’s in a bubble.”
President Trump and those around him “are tested constantly,” he said, reiterating that the government recommends that people wear face coverings if they cannot practice social distancing.
U.S. testing sites in the West and South see long lines and sometimes unruly crowds.
Coronavirus testing sites in Arizona, Florida and Texas have become a source of tension and risk, with numerous residents waiting in long lines, and others being turned away as sites reached capacity. Crowding is raising the risk of infection as people rush to the front of the line at some centers.
Residents of these and other hard-hit U.S. states are turning out in droves to get tested as the virus continues its surge across the South and West, threatening to overwhelm areas that until recently were spared the worst of the pandemic.
“Pushing, yelling, ZERO social distancing enforced,” one Houston resident wrote on Twitter. Two testing sites at Houston stadiums reached capacity just hours after opening on Saturday, according to the local health department. The city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, has said that intensive care units there are nearly at capacity.
Elsewhere in Texas, Stefano West drove more than an hour from Killeen to Austin to find a testing site, noting that few were available closer to him. He said he then waited about four and a half hours in his car at the site.
“I was annoyed,” Mr. West said. “There wasn’t really communication. No one explained the process.”
In Florida, the first car on Saturday at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando found its spot in line for testing at 12:30 a.m., according to the Florida Association of Public Information Officers, even though testing did not start until 9 a.m. At a site in Jacksonville, the testing line was cut off in the early afternoon, before closing time, the association said on Twitter.
In Arizona, people seeking drive-up coronavirus tests in Phoenix have faced car lines up to three miles long. On Friday, the state’s largest laboratory received twice as many samples as it could process.
Nationwide, coronavirus cases have risen 65 percent over the past two weeks. On Saturday, more than 42,000 cases were reported across the United States, including single-day records in Florida, Nevada and South Carolina. It was the third consecutive day with more than 40,000 new cases in the country.
Outbreaks from restaurants grow as more U.S. states permit indoor dining.
As more restaurants and bars open for indoor dining, hard-to-trace outbreaks are prompting warnings from public health officials in several states.
In Michigan, more than 70 cases were linked to Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub in East Lansing. In Alaska, the Seward Alehouse closed and encouraged customers to get tested after an employee contracted the virus.
And in Kansas, cases were linked to the Wild Horse Saloon in Topeka and a bar called the Hawk in Lawrence. Sonia Jordan of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health said her department released details of the Hawk outbreak because “we are not confident in being able to identify everyone who was there.”
Many times, restaurant outbreaks are contained to a handful of known cases. But in recent weeks, they have also been the sites of more widespread infections. At least 100 cases were tied to the Tigerland nightlife district in Baton Rouge, La.
In Michigan, where dozens of the people infected at Harper’s Restaurant were between the ages of 18 and 23, officials urged others who visited the business to isolate themselves.
“There are likely more people infected with Covid-19 not yet identified,” Linda S. Vail, the Ingham County health officer, said in a statement. “We need help from people who went to Harper’s during the exposure dates so that we can contain the outbreak. We need everyone exposed to stay home.”
The rapid identification of restaurant clusters contrasts with the continuing uncertainty about infections stemming from protests against racially biased policing, which have been held in more than 2,000 U.S. cities since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25. The Times has reached out to dozens of cities that have had large protests, finding some small case groupings but no major clusters.
Thus far, the effort has found about 50 infections connected to protests, including members of the National Guard in Nebraska, Minnesota and Washington, D.C.
Ukrainians are stuck in their country’s warring east because they can’t access a quarantine app.
A rule in Ukraine that requires travelers to self-quarantine has had a surprising effect, stranding dozens of people in a buffer area within the war zone in the country’s east.
Ukraine has been fighting a Russian-backed uprising in the east since 2014, which long ago settled into a stalemate along a line of trenches separated by a no man’s land pocked with landmines, snipers and artillery shelling. Each side maintains its own checkpoints.
Before the pandemic, Ukrainians crossed that no man’s land more than a million times a month, sometimes for reasons as simple as collecting pensions, though some also have family and property across the war zone.
But this week, a group of civilians who passed through the separatists’ territory were suddenly faced with Ukraine’s requirement that new arrivals quarantine for two weeks, either by checking into a hospital or staying home while using a location-tracking app.
About 50 people trying to cross — including pregnant women, elderly people and children — either did not have smartphones to download the app or, in some cases, were unable to figure out how to use it. The separatists declined to let them back into their territory, leaving them stranded, with no way to quarantine as Ukraine required.
“Dozens of people have had to camp out, in some cases overnight, in the middle of an active military conflict, just because they didn’t have a smartphone to download an app,” Laura Mills, Europe and Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
By Friday, 17 had agreed to check into a hospital in government-held territory to escape the buffer zone. Others managed to exit after relatives or volunteers from nongovernmental groups passed them smartphones at a checkpoint, said Denys Yaroshenko, a monitor for a nonprofit organization in the area called Right to Protection. Separatists finally allowed others to reenter. Nobody was harmed, but it’s unclear how many remain.
Ukrainian authorities have provided tents and food for those who are still stranded.
As some lament missing out on their first Pride march, a Taiwan gathering shows support.
This weekend would normally have been a time for large Pride marches, parades and parties. And in New York City, Sunday’s events would have included the 50th anniversary of the city’s Pride March.
Instead, with public life only gradually resuming amid the coronavirus pandemic — and restrictions being tightened in some places where cases have spiked in recent days — these events were replaced with small gatherings and virtual events, including a 24-hour online celebration streamed on YouTube and the Global Pride website.
And while the Pride celebrations are not alone in being called off, few other events are as much about being seen — by everyone. So this year, some L.G.B.T.Q. people are missing out on an important moment of visibility and acceptance: their first Pride.
“It’s something that’s so central to our identities as L.G.B.T.Q. folks,” said Fred Lopez, the executive director of San Francisco Pride. “To remember that time when we were able to walk hand in hand with a boyfriend or a crush, even amongst hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, is really inspiring.”
An in-person Pride gathering was held on Sunday in Taiwan, however, as the self-governing island has largely kept the coronavirus at bay, with just 446 recorded cases and seven deaths since its first case was reported in January.
A giant rainbow flag led a procession across Liberty Square, a large plaza in central Taipei, in an event that Darien Chen, one of the organizers, said he hoped would bring comfort to the millions around the world who could not attend large gatherings because of the pandemic.
“We really hope we can bring some hope to all the L.G.B.T. community who can’t march for themselves this year,” he said.
Yemeni militias are killing and driving out migrants, mostly Ethiopians, scapegoating them as virus carriers.
Yemeni militiamen rumbled up to a group of migrants in a settlement one morning, firing their machine guns at Ethiopians caught in the middle of somebody else’s war. The militiamen shouted: Take your coronavirus and leave the country, or face death.
“The sound of the bullets was like thunder that wouldn’t stop,” said Kedir Jenni, 30, an Ethiopian waiter who fled the settlement near the Saudi border in northern Yemen that morning in early April. “Men and women get shot next to you. You see them die and move on.”
This scene and others were recounted in telephone interviews with a half dozen migrants now in Saudi prisons. Although their accounts could not be independently verified, human rights groups have corroborated similar incidents.
The Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that controls most of northern Yemen, have driven out thousands of migrants at gunpoint over the past three months, blaming them for spreading the coronavirus, and dumped them in the desert without food or water.
EGYPT
SAUDI ARABIA
SUDAN
Migrant
gathering area
Red
Sea
AL JAWF
GOVERNATE
ERITREA
YEMEN
Taiz
Aden
ETHIOPIA
Gulf of Aden
Kemise
Addis Ababa
500 miles
Five years of war between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition propping up Yemen’s government have ransacked the country, the poorest in the Middle East, starving and killing its people.
Humanitarian officials and researchers say that the African migrant workers who traverse Yemen every year endure torture, rape, extortion, bombs and bullets in their desperation to reach Saudi Arabia. And this spring, when the pandemic made them scapegoats for Yemen’s troubles, they lost even that slender hope.
“Covid is just one tragedy inside so many other tragedies that these migrants are facing,” said Afrah Nasser, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Without students, college towns face a stark loss in population, jobs and revenue.
The community around the University of California, Davis, used to have a population of 70,000 and a thriving economy. Rentals were tight. Downtown was jammed. Hotels were booked months in advance for commencement.
But when the campus closed in March because of the coronavirus, an estimated 20,000 students and faculty members left town. With them went about a third of the demand for goods and services, from books to bikes to brunches. And officials expect most of that demand to stay gone even as the city reopens.
Reliant on institutions that once seemed impervious to recession, “town and gown” communities that have evolved around rural campuses — Cornell, Amherst College, Penn State — are confronting not only Covid-19 but also major losses in population, revenue and jobs.
For the cities involved, the prognosis is daunting. In most college towns, university students, faculty and staff are a primary market. Local economies depend on their numbers and dollars, from sales taxes to football weekends to federal funds determined by the U.S. census.
Where business as usual has been tried recently, punishment has followed: Last week, the Iowa health authorities reported case spikes among young adults in its two largest college towns after bars reopened. And on campuses across the United States, attempts to bring back football teams for preseason practice have resulted in outbreaks.
“One of the things that makes a college town so wonderful is the vibrant young population,” said Davis’s incoming vice mayor, Lucas Frerichs, who attended the university and has lived in the city for 24 years. “They’re the lifeblood.”
U.S. primaries foreshadow the pandemic’s effect on the general election.
Including last week’s votes in New York and Kentucky, 46 states and the District of Columbia have now completed primary elections or party caucuses, facing the large challenge not just of voting during a pandemic, but also of voting by mail in record numbers.
Despite debacles in some states, votes have been counted and winners chosen largely without incident — a notable feat, some say, given that many states had just weeks to scrap decades of in-person voting habits for voting by mail.
Yet the challenges — and the stakes — will be exponentially higher in November, when Americans choose a president and much of Congress.
For starters, in some areas, elections boards are already short of cash. Postal and election workers overwhelmed by 55 million-plus primary-election voters now face triple that turnout in November.
States must recruit armies of poll workers to replace older ones deterred from working because of the virus — nearly six in 10 poll workers were 61 or older in 2018, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
And election offices will have to process millions of ballots packed in millions more specialty envelopes — which only a handful of companies are capable of printing.
The primaries have “provided a sort of training ground for states to turn the corner on voting by mail,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
November, he said, could be like the pandemic itself: manageable if done right, but vulnerable to unpredictable hot spots — “and we only need it to go badly in a few places for the whole election to feel like it’s in trouble.”
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York reopens for public Mass.
As New York City’s gradual reopening has been rolled out in recent weeks, people have begun returning to restaurants, bars, offices and hair salons. And on Sunday, the city’s iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral is opening to the public for Mass for the first time since lockdown measures were imposed.
Attendance at the cathedral — the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — will be limited to 25 percent capacity, and those present will be subject to strict health and safety guidelines. The cathedral was also sanitized to prepare for the Masses, scheduled for 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern.
The closing of houses of worship around the globe during the pandemic has been painful for those who would typically seek both solace and community there, particularly on religious holidays.
It has also been a subject of heated debate, with some arguing that the closings violate freedom of religion and others wary of the public health risk since enclosed spaces with large numbers of people in close contact have fueled outbreaks.
Many have hosted services and events online throughout the pandemic, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral will continue to do so with its Masses. When it was closed during Easter, its Palm Sunday service attracted more than 100,000 viewers.
“We do miss the people in the pews,” Jennifer Pascual, the cathedral’s music director, said at the time. “It’s kind of odd to be doing Mass and doing it to an empty cathedral. You look out there and there’s nobody there.”
How to use public bathrooms as safely as possible.
As people begin venturing out into public more, here are some strategies for minimizing the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus in public restrooms.
Reporting was contributed by Christopher Cameron, Rebecca Chao, Melina Delkic, Nicholas Fandos, Tess Felder, Jeffrey Gettleman, Rebecca Halleck, Chris Horton, Shawn Hubler, Sheila Kaplan, Sarah Kliff, Andrew E. Kramer, Pierre-Antoine Louis, Pat Lyons, Zach Montague, Raphael Minder, Tiksa Negeri, Aimee Ortiz, Elian Peltier, Michael Shear, Mitch Smith, Maria Varenikova, Michael Wines, Vivian Yee, Carl Zimmer and Karen Zraick.
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