Here’s what you need to know:
- Health officials say the increased caseload in the U.S. is not solely the result of more testing.
- Germany scrambles to contain an outbreak at the country’s largest pork processing plant.
- New York City begins a new phase of reopening: offices.
- Millions of children return to class in France.
- A tennis tournament hosted by Novak Djokovic falls prey to the virus.
- The once stable cheese market in the U.S. takes a volatile turn.
- Wildlife trade spreads coronaviruses as animals go to market.
Health officials say the increased caseload in the U.S. is not solely the result of more testing.
As the curve of infections in the United States begins to bulge again after flattening in the spring, the Trump administration tried to reset expectations about its efforts to contain the coronavirus and acknowledged that there would most likely be another wave of cases this fall.
Nationwide, cases have risen 15 percent over the past two weeks, with the most significant increases reported in the South, West and Midwest.
California, the most populous state, reported 4,515 new cases on Sunday, setting a record for the highest daily increase in the number of infections since March. And Missouri and Oklahoma also broke records for the number of new cases reported in a single day.
In Washington State, Gov. Jay Inslee warned over the weekend of “a desperate situation for public health” in Central Washington’s Yakima County, where cases have spiked, hospitals have reached capacity and patients were being taken to Seattle for medical care.
“We are frankly at the breaking point,” said Mr. Inslee, who planned to require people in the county to begin wearing face coverings in public. Yakima County has more than 6,300 infections, nearly as many as all of Oregon.
The new infection figures were released after a top White House official said that the federal government was working to replenish the national stockpile of medical equipment and supplies in preparation for another surge of the virus this fall.
The official, Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, told CNN that the effort wasn’t necessarily an indication that the wave would come.
“We are filling the stockpile in anticipation of a possible problem in the fall,” Mr. Navarro told Jake Tapper on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “We’re doing everything we can.”
Mr. Navarro also said that a comment by President Trump over the weekend about wanting to slow down virus testing had been “tongue in cheek.”
At his campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, Mr. Trump said: “When you do testing to that extent, you will find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
Public health experts on Sunday directly contradicted Mr. Trump’s recent promise that the disease would “fade away,” as well as his remarks to a largely maskless audience at the Tulsa rally.
On “Face the Nation” on CBS, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said, “We’re seeing the positivity rates go up. That’s a clear indication there is now community spread underway, and this isn’t just a function of testing more.”
Also on Sunday, the World Health Organization reported the largest one-day increase in infections across the globe. It said that there were 183,020 new cases, with Brazil (54,771) and the United States (36,617) accounting for the most new infections. The virus has sickened at least 8.9 million people worldwide and killed at least 468,000, according to a New York Times database.
Across the United States, the number of new infections has steadily risen over the past five days after plateauing for the previous 80 days.
At the same time, overall deaths have dropped dramatically. The 14-day average was down 43 percent as of Sunday.
global roundup
Germany scrambles to contain an outbreak at the country’s largest pork processing plant.
Germany is scrambling to contain a fast-growing outbreak in the country’s largest pork processing plant.
The authorities have confirmed 1,331 new cases among workers at the Tönnies plant in the northwestern town of Rheda-Wiedenbrück in the last week. The surrounding community has been quarantined and schools and day care centers have been closed. State and federal health workers and soldiers had been deployed to carry out large-scale testing.
Some workers blamed a lack of safety measures and space to practice social distancing. A video released in early April, apparently recorded by a worker, showed a crowded cafeteria. The state prosecutor said he was considering opening an investigation.
With the new cases, the country’s R0, or “r-naught,” which represents the number of new infections estimated to stem from a single case, shot up to 2.9 on Sunday, a number not seen since a nationwide shutdown was started in March. But the national health authority, the Robert Koch Institute, cautioned that the R0 was high precisely because the number of cases remained relatively low.
In other international news:
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India’s underfunded hospitals have begun to buckle as the country reports more infections per day than any country besides the United States and Brazil. People in desperate need of treatment are being turned away, especially in New Delhi. Scores have died in the streets or in the back of ambulances.
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A top health official in South Korea, Jeong Eun-kyeong, said that the country had been battling a “second wave” since early May — but that the caseload remained too small to qualify as a true “wave.” South Korea has reported new cases in the double digits in recent weeks, after recording as many as 800 cases a day several months ago.
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Britain’s government plans to propose that it be allowed to oversee mergers and takeovers involving foreign companies, to protect its ability to combat a public health emergency like the pandemic. An existing law already gives the government oversight of such deals on grounds of national security, media plurality and financial stability.
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Police in The Hague said on Twitter that they had detained about 400 people on Sunday who had protested against the Dutch government’s social-distancing measures. There has been significant unrest in the Netherlands over the closing of businesses and restrictions on public gatherings.
New York City begins a new phase of reopening: offices.
Two weeks after it began easing virus restrictions, New York City reaches another major milestone on Monday, when it allows thousands of offices to welcome employees for the first time since March.
The reopening will pose a major test for efforts to keep the virus at bay, while as many as 300,000 workers are estimated to return to their workplaces.
“Phase 1 was a big deal,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at his daily briefing on Monday. “But Phase 2 is really a giant step for this city. This is where most of our economy is.”
Yet with offices required to limit their maximum capacity and to ensure distance between employees, the number of those returning to work appeared to be a fraction of those that once jostled elbows on crowded subways and cram into high-rise elevators.
“It’s nice to get back to kind of normal, even though it’s not 100 percent normal,” said Kiki Boyzuick, 45, who works in human resources in Midtown Manhattan.
On Monday morning, a time when Midtown Manhattan would typically be crammed with workers, the sidewalks remained largely vacant and the subway cars still felt relatively empty.
Beside offices, the reopening plan also permits outdoor dining, some in-store shopping and also allows hair salons, barbershops and real estate firms to restart their work.
In a survey conducted this month by the Partnership for New York City, a business group, respondents from 60 companies with Manhattan offices predicted that only 10 percent of their employees would return by Aug. 15.
More riders have already returned to public transportation during the first phase of reopening than officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subway systems and buses, had anticipated.
In May, transit officials predicted that daily ridership on buses would reach 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels — 880,000 people — during the first phase. But bus ridership has already reached 56 percent of the usual passenger load.
On the subway, daily ridership has climbed to 17 percent of pre-pandemic levels — two percentage points higher than the M.T.A.’s initial projections. The transit agency expects that number to double, reaching as many as two million people, during the second phase. Before the pandemic, ridership exceeded five million.
Statewide, there were 10 additional virus-related deaths, the governor said Monday.
Millions of children return to class in France.
Parents around France sighed with relief on Monday as schools opened their doors in earnest after weeks of incremental steps toward normalcy. But with summer vacations looming, the return will be short-lived.
There have been no signs of a second epidemic wave in France so far, and millions of schoolchildren were able to return on Monday because the authorities eased some of the strict health restrictions that were in place in schools after May 11, when the lockdown was lifted.
Physical distancing is no longer required in kindergarten, for instance, and mask-wearing obligations have been loosened for middle schools.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, said on Monday that the goal was for “100 percent” of students to return to classes, except in high schools — even if only for two weeks before France’s two-month summer break.
“Each day, each hour of class counts,” Mr. Blanquer told France Inter radio, adding that confinement had been a “global education catastrophe” for students and that those who had dropped behind during the lockdown would receive special support.
France started reopening schools after lifting a nationwide lockdown on May 11, but progress was slow and depended on the age of the children and the location of their school. In many places, schools had remained closed; those that had reopened often did so on reduced schedules.
Before Monday, only 1.8 million elementary-school children had gone back to school, out of 6.7 million in total, according to the Education Ministry. For middle schools, that figure was only 600,000, out of 3.3 million, according to the ministry.
The pandemic has killed over 29,500 people in France but the number of hospitalizations has continued to fall, and clusters of cases that have emerged since the lockdown was lifted have remained under control.
A tennis tournament hosted by Novak Djokovic falls prey to the virus.
An exhibition tennis tournament organized by the top-ranked men’s player, Novak Djokovic, was supposed to fill the vacuum created by the pandemic, bringing some of the world’s best players to four stops in the Balkans.
Instead, the tournament, called the Adria Tour, is causing panic in Zadar, the small coastal town in Croatia that had no confirmed infections until it hosted a leg of the competition.
One of the players, Grigor Dimitrov, revealed on Sunday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, sending the Croatian authorities into a scramble to trace and test people who may have come in contact with him and other participants during his stay in Zadar.
Since Dimitrov’s revelation, three more infections have been confirmed: the player Borna Coric and two coaches.
The tournament had none of the expected protocols — no one wore face masks, and social distancing was not enforced in the stands, where many fans sat shoulder to shoulder.
In April, Djokovic expressed a reluctance to receiving a coronavirus vaccine if doing so became mandatory to compete on the tennis circuit.
The once stable cheese market in the U.S. takes a volatile turn.
The wholesale market for Cheddar is typically a mild one. But the vagaries of supply and demand during the pandemic have caused sharp swings in cheese prices, which rose to record highs this month — just weeks after plummeting to nearly 20-year lows.
Consumers are buying way more cheese, even as the usually huge demand from restaurants and schools has fallen off. Dairy farmers and prepared-food companies, which supply ingredients to cheese makers or buy their products, have seen disruptions in their businesses. Together, these countervailing forces have fueled the up-and-down trading in the market.
“It’s the most volatility that we’ve seen in the cheese market ever,” said Phil Plourd, president of Blimling and Associates, a dairy commodity consulting firm in Madison, Wis.
This month, as restaurants around the country slowly reopened, companies that supply cheese began to stock up to ensure an adequate supply. So much so that some cheese factories have struggled to meet demand, because dairy farmers who cut production during the worst of the downturn have been unable to supply them with enough milk.
Shoppers continue to buy 20 percent to 30 percent more cheese at stores than they did last year, according to data from IRI, a market research firm in Chicago. The return of demand has again pushed cheese prices higher, where they hover roughly 3 percent below record levels.
“The orders fell off literally in days, and they came back literally in days,” said John Umhoefer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. “It was all at once, very much a roller coaster.”
Wildlife trade spreads coronaviruses as animals go to market.
A study of the wildlife trade in three provinces in southern Vietnam has confirmed that the sale of such meat offers an ideal opportunity for viruses to jump between animal species.
The results of the tests — conducted in 2013 and 2014, long before the emergence of the virus behind the current pandemic — show unequivocally how viruses spread between animals as they are transported in crowded conditions.
The percentage of field rats, eaten in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, that tested positive for at least one of six coronaviruses jumped significantly after being transported with other species. It rose from 20 percent of wild-caught rats sold by traders, to slightly over 30 percent at large markets, to 55 percent of rats sold in restaurants.
A team of scientists including Sarah H. Olson, an epidemiologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society who directed the research, posted a report of their research, which has not yet been peer reviewed but has been submitted to a scientific journal, on a website for unpublished research, bioRxiv.
Dr. Olson said she had expected some increase in infections, because many animals are shipped together in proximity, putting them under high stress and more prone to disease. “It’s classic disease ecology,” she said.
But she had not expected the degree of rising infections, she added.
“We saw this huge step-by-step increase,” she said. “I kept going back to check the data.”
The leader of Belarus, in power for 26 years, faces criticism over his response to the virus.
President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who has been in power for 26 years, was once praised by a large segment of the population for keeping the country stable — and avoiding the turmoil and mass unemployment seen across much of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Now Mr. Lukashenko faces a groundswell of criticism, particularly over his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. He is so unsettled by a surge of discontent and support for prospective rivals in the Aug. 9 election that he has turned his propaganda machine on Moscow, long his closest ally and principal benefactor.
Despite only patchy testing for the virus, Belarus has reported over 58,000 cases, compared with about 32,000 in neighboring Poland, which has four times its population. Mr. Lukashenko has spent weeks criticizing lockdowns elsewhere, calling them a “frenzy and psychosis.”
“There are no viruses here,” he said in March, gesturing to a crowded arena after playing in an amateur ice hockey tournament. “Do you see any of them flying around? I don’t see them either.”
Last month, Mr. Lukashenko pressed on with his own Victory Day parade, saying it was better to “die standing up than live kneeling down.”
By contrast, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia bowed to health warnings and put off a big military parade in Red Square to celebrate the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany. (It was rescheduled for Wednesday.)
Maryna Rakhlei, an Eastern Europe expert at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that Mr. Lukashenko’s troubles were largely the result of widespread fatigue among citizens about his long time in office and his poor response to the virus.
“The situation threatens to spin out of control for Lukashenko,” Ms. Rakhlei said. “He is not really able to silence the protests as they are largely on social media and spread like forest fire.”
How domestic work can safely resume.
As communities begin to reopen, many people are wondering when it will be safe to open their houses again to domestic helpers. Here are some tips on how to keep everyone safe.
Reporting was contributed by Ian Austen, Aurelien Breeden, Choe Sang-Hun, Troy Closson, Jeffrey Gettleman, Michael Gold, James Gorman, Andrew Higgins, Jeré Longman, Iliana Magra, Joe Orovic, Matt Phillips, Tariq Panja, Suhasini Raj, Christopher F. Schuetze, Nate Schweber, Megan Specia, Mitch Smith, Neil Vigdor, Mihir Zaveri and Karen Zraick.
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