Here’s what you need to know:
- Two P.R. experts at the F.D.A. have been removed after the fiasco over convalescent plasma.
- ‘We are incredibly concerned’: Local health departments urge the C.D.C. to pull its new guidance on testing.
- Notre Dame will start in-person classes again next week after an outbreak forced it to go virtual.
- Japan’s leader, whose handling of the virus had been criticized, says he will resign.
- Many infected children show no symptoms but may spread the virus, a South Korean study finds.
- India reports 75,000 new cases a day, and fears it hasn’t seen the worst.
- Ukraine closes its borders ahead of a Jewish pilgrimage.
Two P.R. experts at the F.D.A. have been removed after the fiasco over convalescent plasma.
Two senior public relations experts advising the Food and Drug Administration have been fired from their positions after President Trump and the head of the F.D.A. exaggerated the proven benefits of a blood plasma treatment for Covid-19.
On Friday, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, removed Emily Miller as the agency’s chief spokeswoman. The White House had installed her in the post just 11 days earlier. Ms. Miller had previously worked in communications for the re-election campaign of Senator Ted Cruz and as a journalist for the conservative cable network One America News. Ms. Miller could not be reached for comment.
The New York Times correspondents Sheila Kaplan and Katie Thomas report that Ms. Miller’s termination comes one day after the F.D.A.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, terminated the contract of another public relations consultant, Wayne L. Pines, who had advised Dr. Hahn to apologize for misleading comments about the benefits of blood plasma for Covid-19.
“I did recommend that he correct the record,” Mr. Pines said, adding that he wasn’t told why his contract was severed. “If a federal official doesn’t say something right, and chooses to clarify and say that the criticism is justified, that’s refreshing,” Mr. Pines said.
The Department of Health and Human Services denied that Mr. Pines’s contract was terminated because of his involvement in the plasma messaging.
It was “100 percent coincidence,” said Brian Harrison, the department’s chief of staff. “H.H.S. has been reviewing and canceling similar contracts, so I had it sent to our lawyers, who recommended termination. This was routine.”
The F.D.A. had been considering allowing the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19 on an emergency basis, but earlier this month, The Times reported that the decision had been delayed after a group of federal health officials, including Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, intervened and expressed concern that the available evidence on the effectiveness of the treatment was too weak, prompting Mr. Trump to call the F.D.A. a deep state. Mr. Trump and Dr. Hahn made the inflated claim for the treatment’s value on Sunday, on the eve of the Republican National Convention.
The announcement should have been a rare win for the F.D.A., which for months had been fending off criticism over its track record on the pandemic, as well as the independence of Dr. Hahn, who was previously pressured by Mr. Trump to authorize malaria drugs that turned out to be harmful.
Instead, it spurred a week of recriminations, anger and mistrust between the F.D.A. and the H.H.S., drawing sharp criticism from scientists and at least three former agency commissioners, who said the exaggerated statements undermined public trust in the F.D.A.
“This is a low moment for the F.D.A. in at least a generation,” said Daniel Carpenter, a professor at Harvard University who studies the agency. “This was a major self-inflicted wound.”
‘We are incredibly concerned’: Local health departments urge the C.D.C. to pull its new guidance on testing.
Two organizations that represent thousands of local public health departments in the United States sent a letter to senior Trump administration officials on Friday asking that they “pull the revised guidance” on virus testing and restore recommendations that individuals who have been exposed to the virus be tested whether or not they have symptoms.
The letter — addressed to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Adm. Brett P. Giroir, an assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services — was sent by the leaders of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, and the Big Cities Health Coalition. The organizations’ leaders wrote that their members were “incredibly concerned” about the changes.
The C.D.C. quietly modified its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus.
Experts questioned the revision, pointing to the importance of identifying infections in the small window immediately before the onset of symptoms, when many individuals appear to be most contagious.
After a storm of criticism, Dr. Redfield tried to clarify the agency’s recommendation and said “testing may be considered for all close contacts of confirmed or probable Covid-19 patients.”
The letter sent on Friday said, “As public health professionals, we are troubled about the lack of evidence cited to inform this change. CDC’s own data suggest that perhaps as many as 40 percent of Covid-19 cases are attributable to asymptomatic transmission. Changing testing guidelines to suggest that close contacts to confirmed positives without symptoms do not need to be tested is inconsistent with the science and the data.”
The letter went on to say that while the new guidance allows local or state health officials to make exceptions, it “will make their ability to respond to the pandemic even harder,” allowing skeptical officials or members of the public to blame and question them. “This revision and its resulting impact is adding yet another obstacle for public health practitioners to effectively address the pandemic.”
Notre Dame will start in-person classes again next week after an outbreak forced it to go virtual.
The University of Notre Dame, which pivoted to virtual instruction earlier this month after a spike in infections, will resume face-to-face classes next week amid signs that the surge is receding, its president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins announced.
“In our first two weeks back, the virus hit us harder and more swiftly than we expected, and we fell behind,” Father Jenkins wrote in a message to students on Friday. “However, through the efforts of many, we have adapted and improved our systems and procedures. We are now in a much stronger position.”
Since Aug. 18, when cases shot up to nearly 150 just eight days after the start of classes, the daily number of new cases has substantially dropped, Father Jenkins said.
The positivity rate stood at nearly 16 percent when the university postponed its plans to welcome students physically into classrooms. Since then, Father Jenkins said, the rate “is still high at 10.8 percent, but it is declining.”
Notre Dame was among the first institutions to announce plans near the start of the pandemic to bring students back onto campus, arguing that colleges should maximize learning through in-person instruction rather than try to maximize protection via remote classes. In a May op-ed, Father Jenkins wrote that “the mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young.”
Those plans were severely tested, however, when returning students gathered off-campus without required masks and social distancing. The school issued a strongly worded statement last week urging students to “call one another to accountability” and reminding that “university authorities cannot be in all spaces at all times.”
The president said Friday that disciplinary hearings for 87 students are in process “involving violations of varying levels of gravity.”
“Although we do not comment on the outcome of hearings,” he wrote to students, “I assure you that we will respond to violations with the seriousness they deserve.”
global roundup
Japan’s leader, whose handling of the virus had been criticized, says he will resign.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said on Friday that he would step down because of ill health, just four days after becoming the country’s longest-serving leader.
Though Mr. Abe had led Japan through a recovery from a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and restored a semblance of economic health, the public was dissatisfied with his administration’s handling of the virus, particularly its effects on the economy. In the months since the pandemic began, what achievements he could claim under his economic platform, known as “Abenomics,” had been erased.
Mr. Abe, 65, had been prime minister for nearly eight years, a significant feat in a country accustomed to high turnover in the top job. He developed a close personal relationship with Mr. Trump that many in Japan believe helped avert punishing trade deals or demands that Japan pay more to support close to 55,000 American troops on bases across the country.
Mr. Abe said during a news conference that he had suffered a relapse of the bowel disease that led him to resign during his first stint in office. He said he wanted to make way for a new leader who could focus fully on tackling the challenges facing Japan, chiefly the pandemic.
His conservative governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party, is expected to appoint an interim leader who will serve until the party can hold a leadership election, according to NHK, the public broadcaster. Mr. Abe’s term was set to expire in September 2021.
In other developments around the world:
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Pubs in Ireland should remain shut, the country’s health authorities recommended, reversing plans to allow them to open next week. Pubs which offer food alongside drinks reopened in late June, but about 3,500 pubs which serve only drinks have been closed since March, making Ireland’s lockdown on pubs the longest in the European Union. The country has recently seen growth in virus cases, and Ireland’s acting chief medical officer, Dr. Ronan Glynn, said “It simply isn’t the appropriate time right now to open pubs,” calling them “one of the most high-risk environments for transmission of disease.”
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Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the biggest cities in the Netherlands, will no longer require masks in some public places starting next week, the local news media reported on Friday. The rule to wear masks in designated areas went into effect on Aug. 5, but it is expected that colder weather and fewer tourists will make social distancing easier. Face masks are mandatory on public transportation in the country.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain is encouraging workers to return to their offices in an effort to dig his country’s economy out of its deepest recession in modern history. Timed to coincide with the reopening of many schools in England and Wales next week, a government campaign will ask employers to assure their workers that it is safe to return. Many office employees in Britain are working remotely, and many companies have said they don’t have plans to bring them back right away. Mr. Johnson made the renewed push after business leaders warned on Thursday that city centers could become “ghost towns” if workers did not return to their offices soon.
Many infected children show no symptoms but may spread the virus, a South Korean study finds.
Children who are infected with the virus but show no symptoms may shed the virus for nearly as long as children who are visibly sick, researchers reported on Friday.
The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, suggest that the vast majority of infected children appear healthy but still may spread the virus to others. The study is hardly the final word: Research into asymptomatic children has been unfolding rapidly, some studies have been reconsidered, and it still is not clear to scientists how often they may transmit the virus and under what circumstances.
The new study is short on details, and does not indicate whether the virus the children shed is alive and capable of infecting others, or whether older children are more contagious than younger ones.
The researchers in South Korea followed 91 children under age 19 — with a median age of 11 — at 20 hospitals and two isolation facilities between Feb. 18 and March 31. They tested the children’s nose, throat and sputum every three days on average. (Anyone in South Korea who tests positive is sent to a hospital or isolation center.)
Twenty children, or 22 percent, remained symptom-free throughout. In the other children, the symptoms spanned a wide range, from lack of smell or taste to diarrhea, cough, runny nose and fever — “not specific enough for Covid-19 to prompt diagnostic testing or anticipate disease severity,” the researchers wrote. Only two children were sick enough to need oxygen.
Of the children with obvious signs of illness, only six had shown symptoms at the time of diagnosis; 18 developed symptoms later. The remaining 47 had unrecognized symptoms before being diagnosed — which is noteworthy given the tight surveillance in South Korea, the researchers said.
Asymptomatic children continued to test positive for 14 days after diagnosis on average, compared with 19 days in children with symptoms. But the researchers did not try to grow the virus to confirm that the tests were not just picking up remnants of dead virus.
Overall, the findings suggest that screening for symptoms is likely to miss the vast majority of infected children who can silently spread it to others. In their study, 93 percent of the children could have been missed were it not for “intensive contact tracing and aggressive diagnostic testing,” the researchers reported.
India reports 75,000 new cases a day, and fears it hasn’t seen the worst.
India has become the fastest growing virus crisis, reporting on Friday at least 75,000 new cases per day over the past two days.
In the past week, India has reported nearly half a million cases, by far the world leader, according to a New York Times database. The country has a total of 3.3 million cases and at least 61,000 deaths.
Packed cities that make social distancing nearly impossible, lockdown fatigue and virtually no contact tracing have allowed the virus to spread to every corner of the country of 1.3 billion people.
Health experts say the virus reproduction rate is ticking up as more state governments, desperate to stimulate an ailing economy, are loosening lockdown restrictions.
“Everything right now is indicating toward a massive surge in the caseload in coming days,” said Dr. Anant Bhan, a health researcher at Melaka Manipal Medical College in southern India. “What is more worrying is we are inching toward the Number One spot globally.”
Dr. Bhan said that during the strict lockdown from late March to late May, most of India’s Covid-19 cases were concentrated in urban areas. But as restrictions on interstate travel were eased, many people started moving from the cities to rural areas, bringing the virus with them.
Some public hospitals have become so overwhelmed with sick people that doctors have had to treat patients in the hallways. In some cases, people in critical condition, even if they don’t have the coronavirus, have no place to get help.
Thekkekara Jacob John, a former head of clinical virology at the Christian Medical College in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, said the country was heading toward a peak in September.
He complained that the government had not followed a careful exit strategy from its strict lockdown and that many people had grown tired from staying in their houses for so long and were ignoring the rules about social distancing.
“Now they think it is better to get the virus than to stay hungry inside,” he said.
Ukraine closes its borders ahead of a Jewish pilgrimage.
Ukraine closed its borders for a second time this year after new cases in the country rose and amid concerns that an influx of Hasidic Jews traveling to pilgrimage sites in the town of Uman risked spreading the virus.
In typical years, tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews visit Uman, in central Ukraine, to celebrate Rosh Hashana, or the Jewish New Year. The grave of Rabbi Tzaddik Nachman of Breslov, who revived the Hasidic movement and died in 1810, is in Uman.
The country instituted the ban on foreigners from Friday until Sept. 28. This year, Jewish New Year celebrations run from Sept. 18 to Sept. 20. Infections in Ukraine had already been rising sharply because of outbreaks linked partly to gatherings for weddings and Orthodox Christian religious ceremonies in the west of the country.
Still, the decision to close the borders again was met with a wave of criticism in Ukraine. European Pravda, a business newspaper, said it would “punish investors.”
The government took pains to explain the closure was strictly on public health grounds. “We do not make decisions based on discriminatory criteria,” the minister of foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, said during an online briefing.
Mr. Kuleba said that Rosh Hashana has been recognized as a national holiday in Ukraine and that the recognition is “an indication of how much we respect the key holidays of communities living in Ukraine.” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, became the country’s first Jewish leader last year.
Israel’s lead adviser on the virus, Ronni Gamzu, has sent a letter to Mr. Zelensky supporting the suspension of the pilgrimage this year, Reuters reported. “A gathering of this sort, at such troubled times, is expected to generate mass events of infection of tourists and local Ukrainian residents, turning into a heavy burden on local medical systems, while thousands more are expected to come back to Israel and further spread the virus,” he said.
Before the decision to close the border was made, the governor of the Uman region, Oleksandr Tserbiy, spent a night in a tent near the presidential office in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to protest in favor of canceling the pilgrimage.
On Thursday night in Uman, clashes took place between locals and Hasidic Jews who had arrived early to celebrate. Pilgrims were not allowed to go to the rabbi’s tomb. The police intervened to separate the two groups.
Where Americans gathered, the virus followed.
Six months into the pandemic, The New York Times has collected data on more than 500,000 cases linked to thousands of distinct clusters around the United States. Many of those cases turned up in settings that became familiar headlines: cruise ships, prisons, nursing homes, meatpacking plants.
But thousands of other cases emerged in other corners of American life, often with little fanfare. Thirty-five cases at the Belleville Boot Company in Arkansas. Twelve at First Baptist Church in Wheeling, W.Va. Ninety-nine at Saputo Cheese in South Gate, Calif.
The clusters illustrate how the virus has crept into much of life, with a randomness that seems the only rule.
Elsewhere in the U.S.:
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Even after a warning from the U.S. Postal Service that it may not be able to meet deadlines for delivering last-minute mail-in ballots, more than 20 states still have not changed their policies, potentially disenfranchising thousands of voters whose ballots could arrive too late to be counted in the November election amid the pandemic, an expert told Congress on Friday.
“The necessary policy changes to align dates and deadlines with USPS delivery standards hasn’t happened in many states and more than 20 states allow for a voter to request a ballot be mailed to them within seven days of an election — after the time that USPS recommends the ballot be mailed back,” Tammy Patrick, the Democracy Fund’s senior adviser for elections said in written testimony submitted to the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Germany’s Merkel says she expects the colder months to complicate the pandemic.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany believes the pandemic will get worse with the end of summer and the arrival of colder weather.
“We have all enjoyed the freedoms and relative protection from aerosols in the summer, which is possible through life outdoors,” Ms. Merkel said on Friday during her traditional summer news conference with reporters.
“Yes, we must expect that some things will be even more difficult in the coming months than they are now in the summer.”
Ms. Merkel said that her continued focus was schools, the economy and societal cohesion, calling the virus “an imposition on democracy.”
On Thursday, Ms. Merkel and state governors had agreed on a number of new virus measures, including a minimum fine for not wearing masks and rules designed to lower infections brought back to Germany by returning travelers.
While a vast majority agree with the government’s virus measures, a vocal minority believe that the government has gone too far. In Berlin, city officials had canceled several demonstrations against virus restrictions planned for the weekend. But on Friday, a Berlin court overturned the city’s decision and ruled that the demonstrations could take place if special social-distancing rules were followed.
On Thursday, German health authorities registered 1,571 new infections in the past 24 hours, with many of the infected thought to have become ill while on vacation abroad. A week ago the country registered more than 2,000 cases in a single day, a number not seen since the end of April. Germany has had at least 239,500 cases of the virus and 9,288 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
“It won’t be the same as before until we have a vaccine and a drug,” Ms. Merkel said.
In a survey about how 14 countries have handled the virus, Americans and Britons rate themselves lowest.
In a survey of 14 countries with advanced economies, the United States and Britain fared the worst on a question about how people view their country’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Only 47 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said their country had done a good job of handling the spread of the virus, according to results published on Thursday, while 46 percent of Britons viewed their government’s response favorably.
None of the other countries got an approval percentage below 50, and among all 14 surveyed, a median of 73 percent of respondents said they approved of how their country had handled their outbreak. The highest rates of approval were in Denmark (95 percent) and Australia (94 percent).
The United States has by far the highest number of infections and related deaths in the world, while Britain ranks fifth in total deaths, according to a New York Times database.
The researchers also asked whether people believed their country was more divided than before the virus hit, and 77 percent of the Americans surveyed said yes, while no other country registered above 60 percent on that question. Only a quarter of Danes said the same about their country. That was the lowest percentage, followed by 27 percent of Japanese respondents and 29 percent of Canadians.
In Europe, people with positive views of right-wing populist parties were more likely to say that division had increased, especially in Germany.
In the United States, three-quarters of Republicans and independent voters who lean toward the Republican Party told Pew researchers that the government had done a good job dealing with the virus, while only a quarter of Democrats, or those leaning toward the Democratic Party, said the same.
The researchers said perceptions of economic circumstances played a role in how people rated their country during the pandemic.
“Across all 14 nations included in the survey, those who think their current national economic situation is good are also more likely than those who believe the economy is bad to say their country has done a good job of dealing with the coronavirus outbreak,” the researchers wrote.
The Pew researchers spoke to 14,276 adults by phone from June 10 to Aug. 3.
For many U.S. schools, returning to the classroom means a stop in the courtroom.
The fight over whether to reopen classrooms in person in the United States is increasingly moving into the country’s courtrooms as the pandemic disrupts the nascent fall semester.
The legal actions reflect the competing views over brick-and-mortar versus remote instruction. Some are suing to stay out of the classroom, and others to get in.
In Iowa, the Des Moines school district has asked a court to reverse an “unsafe” mandate that it bring students back in person at least halftime.
In Florida, a circuit court judge sided on Monday with teachers’ unions fighting a state rule conditioning school funding on the availability of in-person classes. (The state is appealing.)
The California Supreme Court has taken up two lawsuits — one filed on behalf of private schools, the other by a charter school and the Orange County Board of Education — challenging state mandates that have kept classes solely online for most California students.
And in Oregon this month, a federal district judge rejected a petition from three Christian schools seeking an exception to state health restrictions so they could hold classes in person.
The litigation often mirrors the country’s partisan divide.
Florida and Iowa are led by Republican governors who support President Trump’s push to get students back into classrooms in the hope that it will boost the economy, which remains very weak as the nation heads into the election.
California and Oregon are Democratic-led states with strong teachers’ unions, and the governors there have argued that until infection rates are brought under control, it is unsafe to fully reopen schools.
Ordinarily, decisions on how best to educate children and protect the public rest with elected officials, said Tom Hutton, interim executive director of the Education Law Association. “But a combination of factors is bringing these things to the court, one being that the stakes are so very high from an education and health standpoint,” he said.
Many judges now find themselves faced with a balancing act.
“I think courts generally are deferential to public health authorities,” Mr. Hutton said. “At the same time, on education calls, they tend to defer to school boards. And if you have the immovable object and the unstoppable force, in most cases, public safety wins.”
Some suits have presented a rare exception.
In Ohio, the parents of a special needs student in Columbus filed a suit early this month against their school district after it announced plans to follow the local health department’s recommendation and begin the school year with remote instruction. The suit, which was later joined by five other families, said the children would suffer irreparable harm.
Other lawsuits are more ideological.
In California, for instance, the plaintiffs against the state include two Christian schools and the board that oversees charter school applications in Orange County, a small panel dominated by political conservatives who have urged schools to reopen without face masks.
And in Iowa, a suit filed Tuesday by the Des Moines schools names Gov. Kim Reynolds, a supporter of the president whose aggressive push to reopen schools has been criticized by teachers unions and health experts, and has prompted other lawsuits.
“At its core, this is a case about local control,” the Des Moines suit argues.
Reporting was contributed by Luke Broadwater, Alexander Burns, Sheri Fink, Jeffrey Gettleman, Maggie Haberman, Shawn Hubler, Mike Ives, Sheila Kaplan, Corey Kilgannon, Sharon LaFraniere, Claire Moses, Apoorva Mandavilli, Motoko Rich, Anna Schaverien, Christopher F. Schuetze, Katie Thomas, Marina Varenikova, Lauren Wolfe and Sameer Yasir.
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