As U.S. Coronavirus Cases Hit 3.5 Million, Officials Scramble to Add Restrictions – The New York Times

The official China Film Administration also said in a notice on Thursday that movie theaters in the Chinese mainland would gradually reopen starting next Monday. Bookings will be limited, and theaters will be regularly disinfected, the notice said.

As Trump administration officials have increasingly sought to undermine him in recent days, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and one of the most trusted federal officials working on the pandemic, made his most pointed remarks yet on Wednesday addressing tensions with the White House.

“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with The Atlantic on Wednesday. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”

He spoke as Trump administration officials have sought to undermine his credibility — first anonymously, over the weekend, and then out in the open. A short op-ed by Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, published in USA Today on Tuesday evening was headlined “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, posted a cartoon Sunday evening mocking Dr. Fauci.

In the interview Wednesday, Dr. Fauci called the partisan environment around the virus disturbing.

“It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control, rather than this back-and-forth distraction, which just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Asked to review the government’s response to the pandemic, he said: “We’ve got to almost reset this and say, OK, let’s stop this nonsense and figure out how can we get our control over this now, and looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, because those are the hot zones now, and I’m looking at the map, saying we got to make sure it doesn’t happen in other states.”

“So rather than these games people are playing,” he said, “let’s focus on that.”

Mr. Trump put some distance between himself and his aide’s op-ed piece, saying, “I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci.” Others in the administration went further than the president. Vice President Mike Pence told reporters Wednesday that the administration “couldn’t be more grateful” for Dr. Fauci’s “steady counsel.”

Alyssa Farah, the White House director for strategic communications, wrote on Twitter. ““The Peter Navarro op-ed didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone.”

Drug deaths in the United States, which in 2018 fell for the first time in 25 years, rose to record numbers in 2019 and are continuing to climb, a resurgence that appears related to some of the hardships created by the coronavirus outbreak.

Drug deaths have risen an average of 13 percent so far in 2020 compared with last year, according to mortality data collected by The New York Times. If this trend continues for the rest of the year, the increase in annual drug deaths will be the sharpest since 2016.

Several public health experts said conditions created by the pandemic could hurt the nation’s fragile progress in fighting drug-related deaths, but they noted that the overdose rate was on its way back up well before the virus arrived.

“Covid just makes it a bit worse,” said Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Researchers say the threat of overdose can be exacerbated by the social-isolation practices used to contain the virus. Aside from the emotional effects, there are practical dangers: Using drugs alone means there is no one around if a revival attempt is needed. The vast curtailment of in-person medical treatment — including group counseling sessions and stays at residential treatment centers — means there is far less of the emotional support that can be vital to addiction treatment.

Global Roundup

Women of color have long faced economic and racial inequality in Britain. Now that group is being hit disproportionately by the financial and psychological impact of the pandemic, according to a recent study by a group of British universities and women’s charities.

The survey found that nearly 43 percent of Black and ethnic minority women believed that they would be in more debt than before the pandemic, compared with 37 percent of white women and 34 percent of white men.

More than four in 10 of the women said they would struggle to make ends meet over the next three months.

A government review of the disparities in the risk and outcomes from the coronavirus found that death rates have been higher in Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups than in white groups.

The review found that Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and other Asians, as well as Caribbeans and other Black people, had from 10 percent to 50 percent higher risk of death than white Britons.

In a recent study, Runnymede Trust, a think tank, found women of color were burdened with carrying out menial tasks that can be perilous in a pandemic.

“Covid-19 has brought the harsh realities of pre-existing racial inequalities into sharp relief, and nowhere is this more manifest than the disproportionate social and economic impact of Covid-19 on Black and ethnic minority women,” said Zubaida Haque, the interim director of Runnymede.

In other news from around the world:

• India reported 32,695 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, its highest single-day caseload yet. Several Indian states are reintroducing social distancing measures that they lifted in June, and the country’s total caseload — the world’s third-largest, after the United States and Brazil — is nearing one million.

• Tokyo was expected to report a single-day record of more than 280 new cases on Thursday, Japan’s national broadcaster reported.

• The authorities in the Philippines have empowered the police to fan out home-to-home in search of infected people, triggering an uproar among human rights groups.

• Childhood vaccination rates have plunged during the pandemic, and the World Health Organization warned that the long-term effects from missed inoculations could be worse than Covid-19.

Black business owners are more likely to be hindered in seeking coronavirus financial aid than their white peers, a new study has found.

The study looked at how more than a dozen Washington-area banks handled requests for loans under the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. It was conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit in Washington, in partnership with researchers from universities in Utah and New Jersey.

From late April to late May, the researchers and the nonprofit, which supports better access to capital for low-income and minority communities, sent pairs of would-be loan applicants to branches of 17 banks. In each pair, a Black borrower and a white borrower shared similar credit and asset characteristics, so the only difference between them was their race.

To make the study more conservative, the researchers gave each Black borrower a slightly better financial profile than his or her white counterpart.

The Black borrowers were offered different products and treated significantly worse by employees than white borrowers were in 43 percent of the tests, the study found. Of the 17 banks, some of which were tested through multiple branches, 13 had at least one test in which a white borrower was treated better than his or her Black counterpart. In the rest of the tests, the pairs were treated relatively equally or the difference wasn’t significant enough to count as a violation of fair lending laws, in the researchers’ view.

Myanmar will soon adopt rules that would permit captive breeding of about 175 threatened species, including tigers, pangolins and Irrawaddy dolphins, despite fears that such ventures could encourage the poaching of wild animals and spawn new diseases that jump to humans.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation quietly circulated a list of wildlife last month that could be raised commercially for display in zoos, tourist attractions or hotels and, in a handful of cases, to produce meat for sale to the public.

Officials say the list is aimed at improving wildlife protection by reducing illegal hunting and increasing conservation under an existing law.

But international conservation groups said the plan could undermine wildlife protection by increasing demand for wild meat and for species used in traditional medicine.

Keeping wildlife for human consumption, especially in crowded Asian markets, has been linked to viruses that have infected humans, including the coronavirus that has caused the current pandemic and the one that caused SARS, which emerged in 2002 and killed nearly 800 people worldwide.

“Commercial wildlife breeding and trade can also increase the risk of disease spillover from wildlife to humans, such as Covid-19,” the World Wildlife Fund and Fauna and Flora International said.

The pangolin, which at one point was suspected of playing a part in the transmission of the new coronavirus, could be bred in Myanmar zoos under the new regulations.

It is far from certain that pangolins were involved in the emergence of the new coronavirus. Pangolins do host similar viruses, but a virus found in intermediate horseshoe bats is closer to the one that causes Covid-19.

In addition, none of the viruses carried by pangolins are similar enough to the new coronavirus to indicate a direct spillover to humans, and there has been no clear transmission path established from bats to pangolins.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert H. Redfield, defended the Trump administration’s decision to strip the C.D.C. of control of some of the nation’s key coronavirus data, saying on Wednesday that the move was necessary to modernize data collection.

On a conference call with reporters, Dr. Redfield said the C.D.C. was looking for ways to make its coronavirus data more “externally facing,” so that Americans could examine “the current extent of the pandemic in different counties and in different ZIP codes.”

The administration’s new directive instructs hospitals to report coronavirus information directly to a new central database at the Department of Human Health and Services in Washington, rather than to the C.D.C. in Atlanta, which has been collecting the information since the start of the pandemic and which prides itself on scientific independence. The directive to bypass the C.D.C. has provoked an uproar among public health experts.

Researchers, state health officials and academics rely on the C.D.C.’s data, and expressed concern about whether Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the C.D.C., would be as transparent as the C.D.C. has been.

The new database, called H.H.S. Protect, is not public. Experts including Representative Donna E. Shalala, Democrat of Florida and a former health secretary, accused the administration of trying to politicize the data by taking control of it away from the C.D.C.

Jose Arrietta, the chief information officer for Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that the new database would feed information to the C.D.C., which would continue to issue reports on the pandemic. Mr. Arrieta said the health agency is considering giving members of Congress access to the new database, and is “exploring the best way” to make information from it available to news organizations, academic researchers and the general public.

Temperatures have been soaring across the South and the Southwest, reaching record highs in areas grappling with some of the worst virus outbreaks in the nation — making it more difficult to protect people who are at risk from extreme heat.

San Antonio hit 106 degrees on Monday, tying the July record. Monitors at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport hit a blazing 114, matching the old record. Austin hit a high of 108 degrees — three degrees above the old record.

Such heat can disproportionally affect the vulnerable: people without the means to buy an air-conditioner or crank it up to full blast. Cities typically open cooling centers, in places like community recreation centers, where people can escape the heat. But the virus has introduced complications in a moment when people are being discouraged from congregating indoors.

Austin’s cooling centers now require visitors to maintain social distancing and to wear masks, said Matthew Lara, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “You don’t want to cram 30 people into a room and call it a cooling center,” he said.

On Wednesday, the National Weather Service said that the most punishing heat would begin to abate across the South, but, like a hot bubble under the nation’s wallpaper, “will be on the increase for the eastern U.S. and for the northern High Plains.”

A pair of recent studies found that people with Type A blood are no more at risk of getting the virus or falling dangerously ill than others, contradicting preliminary evidence based on a relatively small sample of people.

Over the past few months, after looking at thousands of additional patients with Covid-19, scientists are reporting a much weaker link to blood type.

Two studies — one at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the other at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York — did not find that Type A blood increases the odds that people will be infected.

The new reports do find evidence that people with Type O blood may be slightly less likely to be infected. But the effect is so small that people shouldn’t count on it. “No one should think they’re protected,” said Nicholas Tatonetti, a data scientist at Columbia University.

Even if blood types don’t matter much for treating people with Covid-19, they could reveal something important about the basic nature of the disease.

That’s because blood type influences how your immune system fights against infections. People with Type A blood do not make the same kind of antibodies as people with Type B blood, for example. It is conceivable that these molecular differences in the immune system explain the purported link between blood type and coronavirus infections.

Pressure is mounting to close Grand Canyon and other national parks in states across the South and the West that are seeing rising cases.

When the pandemic took hold in the United States this spring, many local public health officials demanded that national parks close, arguing that the millions of tourists they attract endangered vulnerable people in adjacent towns and tribal lands, often-remote places with hospitals miles away. After shutting down on April 1, Grand Canyon partially reopened in time for summer tourist season.

In some ways, the parks provide a refuge from the pandemic. Experts say the risk of catching the virus is much lower outdoors. Camping offers a cheap, socially distanced vacation for families, and some parks are in sparsely populated areas with fewer cases. But as the virus infiltrates growing sections of the country, some lawmakers are questioning the decision to keep parks open even partially.

The government in the Philippines has empowered the police to fan out home-to-home in search of infected people. The move has triggered an uproar among human rights groups, which on Wednesday accused President Rodrigo Duterte’s government of employing repressive tactics.

As the number of infected nears 60,000 nationwide, with the death toll surpassing 1,600, health authorities are under tremendous pressure from a public increasingly wary of Mr. Duterte, whose brutal anti-drugs campaign has left thousands dead.

The policing plan, termed “Care Strategy,” lets officers accompany health workers in search of infected people who may be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms.

The government said anyone who could not satisfy the requirements for home quarantine — including having their own bathroom and not living with elderly or pregnant people — are to be taken to a private facility.

“This move reveals the Duterte government’s continuing reliance on police and militaristic approaches to solve a public health emergency,” said Ephraim Cortez, the secretary general of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, a group that provides counsel to the poor.

A well-known Filipino human rights lawyer, Chel Diokno, said the government strategy would sow further terror.

“Those with Covid are not police targets, they are medical patients,” Mr. Diokno said. “They should be treated with dignity and care.”

Frustration over the lockdown exploded into violence in April, when frustrated and hungry people in an impoverished area of northern Manila took to the streets for an impromptu rally demanding government help. Riot police responded with force, violently dispersing the protest and sending some 21 people to jail.

Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, on Tuesday compared the private facilities for patients to a “paid for vacation.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago warned on Wednesday that she is ready and willing to tighten restrictions in her city if cases continue to grow, citing bars that have broken capacity rules recently and new infections among young people.

“I won’t just turn the car around,” she said. “I’m going to shut it off, I’m going to kick you out and I’m going to make you walk home.”

Chicago is “on the precipice” of dangerous growth in cases, Ms. Lightfoot said. On Wednesday, the city reported 192 cases, the mayor said, though if the daily rate rose above 200, she would take steps to impose more restrictions.

Beaches along Lake Michigan, normally a huge draw during the summer, have been closed and will remain closed indefinitely.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois echoed Ms. Lightfoot’s note of caution on Wednesday. At a news conference, he said he was troubled by continuing outbreaks across the state, including those tied to parties, churches and youth sports.

When officials see an outbreak that is especially concerning, Mr. Pritzker said, “we need to start tightening mitigations in that region before it’s too late.”

As of Tuesday, Illinois had reported an average of 992 cases over seven days, and an average positive test rate of 3 percent over two weeks, according to data compiled by The Times and the Covid Tracking Project.

As coronavirus cases surge in Victoria, Australia’s second-biggest state, officials there have barred people from gathering in large groups or traveling to most of the rest of the country.

That has not stopped some fast-food aficionados, Pokémon Go players and train stowaways from trying.

Four men in their twenties were discovered on an interstate freight train heading from Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, to Perth on the country’s west coast, officials said this week. They were found when officers with dogs searched the train during a stop in Adelaide, in South Australia.

The men appeared in court on Wednesday and were released on the condition they do not commit further offenses for 12 months.

Separately, six travelers from Victoria who were attempting to enter Queensland with false papers were fined a total of 24,000 Australian dollars ($16,700), the Queensland police said this week. Victoria Police’s deputy commissioner, Rick Nugent, also said that more than 500 fines totaling more than 880,000 Australian dollars ($560,000) had been issued to people caught breaking stay-at home orders or gathering inappropriately since Melbourne’s six-week lockdown began on July 9.

Among the violators were two men caught playing the video game Pokémon Go outdoors, and others who were clients of sex workers and massage parlors. And 34 people were fined at a house party in Melbourne last week after the police were called there — twice — in response to noise complaints.

In the Melbourne suburb of Dandenong, a suspiciously large KFC takeout order last week led police to more than a dozen people hiding at a house party and 26,000 Australian dollars in fines. Another man refused a police order to leave a KFC restaurant.

On Wednesday, Mr. Nugent of the police department asked residents to abide by the new restrictions. “The time for discretion is over,” he said.

Australia has recorded at least 10,200 confirmed cases and 110 deaths, according to a Times database; Victoria reported 238 new cases on Wednesday.

Australia was initially praised for its response to the pandemic, but a second surge began creeping through Victoria last month and reaching parts of neighboring New South Wales, the country’s most populous state. New South Wales officials have said they would likely introduce new restrictions but stop short of imposing a strict lockdown.

Childhood vaccination rates continue to plunge in the wake of the pandemic, and the World Health Organization warned that the fallout from missed vaccinations could end up being worse than Covid-19.

“The avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunizations could be far greater than Covid-19 itself,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, said in a statement,

Three quarters of the countries that responded to a new survey by the World Health Organization reported disruptions in immunization programs through May.

The report, the second to show a drop in vaccinations because of the pandemic, said that at least 30 measles vaccination campaigns were or are at risk of being canceled. It added that other vaccine programs that require three doses, for diseases like diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, reported a substantial drop in the number of children who received vaccinations.

“Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools in the history of public health, and more children are now being immunized than ever before,” Dr. Tedros said in the statement. “But the pandemic has put those gains at risk.”

He added that vaccines can still be administered during the pandemic.

The study, conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said there are a variety of reasons more parents are not getting their children vaccinated. Some are reluctant to leave home, some face restrictions on movement, interruptions to transportation, economic hardships and the fear of exposure to the coronavirus. It also noted that many health workers have been redeployed to work on the pandemic, as well as a lack of protective equipment.

The pandemic has taken a toll on pretty much everyone, pretty much everywhere. But it’s proving hard for some people to provide sympathy for one group in particular: Airbnb hosts.

On Tuesday, the home-sharing giant messaged its users to say it had a new way to “connect with your favorite hosts.” The company said it was introducing “kindness cards” and the option to add a monetary contribution. “We hope these cards will make hosts smile, and bring a little joy your way,” the message read.

Even though the pandemic has had a real impact on individual homeowners and smaller hotel operators who are struggling to make ends meet, the reaction was anything but joyful — instead it was a mix of mockery and surprise.

“Flabbergasted that a company the size of @airbnb would solicit past customers for donations to hosts,” one Twitter user wrote. Other people shared the sentiment. “Airbnbs new strategy of sending me an email to ask me to send a “kindness card” to Airbnb hosts I’ve stayed with 3 years ago is just downright bizarre,” someone else tweeted.

Airbnb itself has been struggling since the pandemic started crippling the travel industry. In April, the company said it had raised $1 billion in new funding to stockpile cash to deal with the consequences of the coronavirus outbreak. The following month, Airbnb said it would lay off a quarter of its staff.

But while Airbnb is asking its users to send some love to their former hosts, a more tangible piece of news emerged on Tuesday as well: In what could be an early sign of recovery as lockdowns ease in places around the globe, Airbnb said people had made more than 1 million reservations on the platform on July 8, Reuters reported, a number that had not been seen since early March.