Here’s what you need to know:
- With major sports shut down, gamblers turn to stocks — and appear to be moving markets.
- Health experts predict the virus will afflict the U.S. for months to come.
- The White House won’t support extending expanded unemployment benefits past July, a top aide says.
- Efforts to slow the coronavirus sped up the spread of other diseases.
- Macron says France will accelerate reopening by a week.
- From China to Arizona, case spikes highlight a continuing threat.
- Despite acting early to fight the virus, Peru is one of the world’s worst hot spots.
With major sports shut down, gamblers turn to stocks — and appear to be moving markets.
Millions of small-time investors have opened trading accounts in recent months, a flood of new buyers unlike anything the market had seen in years, just as coronavirus pandemic lockdown orders halted entire sectors of the U.S. economy and sent unemployment soaring.
Some Wall Street analysts see people who used to bet on sports as playing a big role in the market’s recent surge, which has largely erased its losses for the year.
“There’s zero doubt in my mind that it is a factor,” said Julian Emanuel, the chief equity and derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm BTIG.
Stymied sports bettors are sitting on a substantial amount of money. Last year, gamblers legally wagered more than $13 billion on sports, according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, a research and consulting firm.
Betting collapsed when the outbreak shut down the major sports leagues. Sports betting revenues in March dropped about 60 percent from February, the company said. They may have fallen as much as 80 percent more in April.
Some of the new stock traders are behaving like aggressive gamblers.
There has been a jump in small bets in the stock options market, where wagers on the direction of share prices can produce thrilling scores and gut-wrenching losses. And transactions that make little economic sense, like buying up the nearly valueless shares of bankrupt companies, are off the charts.
Health experts predict the virus will afflict the U.S. for months to come.
The coronavirus won’t be losing its grip on the United States any time soon, leading infectious disease experts said on Sunday, adding that they were uncertain how the viral spread would be affected by the patchwork of states reopening businesses and by large events like protests and President Trump’s upcoming campaign rallies.
“This virus is not going to rest” until it infects about 60 percent to 70 percent of the population, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
Experts have estimated that without a vaccine, about 70 percent of the population will need to be infected and develop immunity in order to stop the virus’s spread, a concept called herd immunity. The current number of confirmed American cases is over 2 million, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to a New York Times database.
Dr. Osterholm said that recent data show the rate of infection has been level in eight states, increasing in 22 states and decreasing in the rest. The increase is not simply due to more widely available testing, the experts said, noting that Covid-19 hospitalizations are rising in several states.
“At this point, hospitals are at risk of getting overwhelmed and that is basically signaling to me that those states are already behind,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, medical director of the special pathogens unit at Boston University School of Medicine, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said that by July 4, coronavirus deaths in the United States would likely jump from the current level of about 116,000 to somewhere between 124,000 and 140,000.
Dr. Bhadelia said the rise in cases in some states in the South and West suggested that “we opened too early in those states.”
Dr. Osterholm added that so far there had not been widespread indications that protests over police killings of African-Americans and racial injustice had led to a spike in cases. He and other experts have noted that the protests are taking place outdoors and that many participants are wearing masks, factors expected to limit spread of the virus.
“On the other hand, yelling, screaming, being exposed to tear gas or smoke, which causes coughing, being put into a holding cell overnight in jail if you’re arrested — all are reasons why you would expect to see more cases,” Dr. Osterholm said.
The risk of viral spread at a rally like the one President Trump has planned for next weekend in Oklahoma is much higher, the experts said, because the rally will be indoors in a large arena and there will no requirement that attendees wear masks.
The White House won’t support extending expanded unemployment benefits past July, a top aide says.
The Trump administration does not plan to back the extension of expanded unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of July, citing concerns that workers are opting to take the generous benefits instead of going back to their jobs.
Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Sunday that the White House would support new incentives to bring people back to work rather than push to renew the additional $600 in weekly jobless benefits when it expires at the end of next month.
“I mean, we’re paying people not to work,” Mr. Kudlow said on CNN. “It’s better than their salaries would get. And that might have worked for the first couple of months.”
President Trump and his economic advisers have been debating what another round of economic stimulus legislation could look like. They are in favor of a targeted approach to help industries that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, and the president has been calling for a payroll tax cut. White House officials have discussed a package that could cost $2 trillion or more.
One obstacle that could impede negotiations with Congress is a lack of transparency surrounding the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which provides loans for small businesses. The Trump administration has refused to make public the names of the recipients of the loans, which are expected to turn into grants, despite promises to be forthcoming about who is receiving taxpayer money.
On Sunday, Mr. Kudlow said “there is a certain privacy element here” when it comes to releasing the names of businesses that took the loans. He suggested that it would ultimately be up to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to decide on any additional disclosures.
“Now, insofar as naming each and every company, I don’t think that promise was ever made,” Mr. Kudlow said. “And I don’t think it’s necessary.”
Efforts to slow the coronavirus sped up the spread of other diseases.
As poor countries around the world struggle to beat back the coronavirus, they are unintentionally contributing to fresh explosions of illness and death from other diseases — ones that are readily prevented by vaccines.
This spring, after the World Health Organization warned that the pandemic could spread swiftly when children gathered for shots, many countries suspended their inoculation programs. Even in countries that tried to keep them going, cargo flights with vaccine supplies were halted by the pandemic and health workers diverted to fight it.
Now, diphtheria is appearing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Cholera is in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh.
A mutated strain of poliovirus has been reported in more than 30 countries.
And measles is flaring around the globe, including in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Nigeria and Uzbekistan.
As the pandemic lingers, the W.H.O. and other international public health groups are now urging countries to carefully resume vaccination while contending with the coronavirus.
But the obstacles to restarting are considerable. Vaccine supplies are still hard to come by. Health care workers are increasingly working full time on Covid-19, the infection caused by the coronavirus. And a new wave of vaccine hesitancy is keeping parents from clinics.
“Immunization is one of the most powerful and fundamental disease prevention tools in the history of public health,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the W.H.O., in a statement. “Disruption to immunization programs from the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to unwind decades of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.”
Macron says France will accelerate reopening by a week.
President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday accelerated plans to lift restrictions and revive the economy in France, one of Europe’s worst-hit countries.
Restaurants and cafes in Paris, which were supposed to fully reopen in a week, will now be allowed to do so as soon as Monday, and all students, with the exception of high school students, will return to school starting June 22.
Mr. Macron said that starting Monday, all of mainland France will go into a “green zone,” meaning that the country will return to a pre-crisis way of life. Only some overseas territories where the spread of the virus is still posing a threat will remain at the “orange” alert level.
“The fight against the epidemic is not finished, but I am happy about this first victory against the virus,” Mr. Macron said in his fourth address to the nation since the beginning of the crisis.
“We are going to rediscover part of our way of life, our taste for freedom. In short, we are going to fully rediscover France,” Mr. Macron added.
The French government is facing mounting criticism about its handling of the crisis, with close to 30,000 people having died from the virus. A parliamentary inquiry is underway and more than 80 lawsuits have been filed accusing the government of manslaughter, neglect or otherwise mishandling the crisis.
Mr. Macron defended the country’s response, and praised the increase in intensive care units and the increased production of masks and other medical gear. “We can be proud of what has been done and of our country,” he said.
From China to Arizona, case spikes highlight a continuing threat.
With some areas hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic over the past six months having significantly curbed its spread through strict measures, more people around the globe are venturing back into public life, whether for social interactions, work or the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
But rising new cases on multiple continents underscore the virus’s continuing threat. A New York Times tally of cases shows rising trends in some 70 countries.
China, the site of the first major outbreak, appeared to have largely brought the virus under control, but on Sunday it reported 57 new confirmed infections, its highest single-day tally in two months.
In the United States, several states are experiencing spikes, particularly in the Sun Belt and the West. Hospitals in Arizona have been urged to activate emergency plans to cope with a flood of patients. Oregon’s governor has paused a gradual reopening. And cases are rising swiftly around the largest cities in Texas, including Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
“I’m very concerned about it,” said Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, noting that many residents had stopped wearing masks and maintaining social distance out of sheer fatigue. “They’ve been asked for quite some time to not be around people they love, and that they want to spend time with. Wearing a mask is not pleasant. And I think people are tired.”
The virus has caused more than 115,000 deaths in the United States, and the toll is rapidly climbing in Latin America — most notably in Brazil, which this weekend surged to the world’s second-highest number of fatalities, with 42,720 confirmed deaths. The country’s daily death toll is now the highest globally.
In the United States, the daily number of new cases is climbing in 22 states, shifting course from what had been downward trajectories in many of those places.
With many government limits on public life being removed and individuals left to make their own choices about precautions, people have gone back to salons and restaurants, crowded into public parks and, in dozens of cities, joined large public demonstrations protesting racism and police brutality.
Epidemiologists said that even taking increased testing into account, the rise in confirmed cases in Sun Belt states suggested more transmissions.
In Florida, which on Saturday saw its largest single-day count of cases since the pandemic began, at least one official has raised the possibility of another clampdown on businesses.
“I think it’s only a matter of time before the public sees those numbers and starts emailing us that we need to shut down again,” Pat Gerard, the chairwoman of the Board of County Commissioners in Pinellas County said at a board meeting this past week.
Global Roundup
Despite acting early to fight the virus, Peru is one of the world’s worst hot spots.
President Martín Vizcarra of Peru ordered one of Latin America’s first and strictest lockdowns, and rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic aid packages to help people stay home. He shared detailed health data with the public, increased testing and rushed to add hospital beds and ventilators.
But like India, which acted early but now ranks fourth in reported cases, Peru has become one of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots.
Its hospitals are overwhelmed, its people fleeing the cities. The crisis has torn away Peru’s veneer of economic progress, exposing the deep-rooted inequality and corruption that thwarted its pandemic response.
“They asked us to stay at home, but a lot of people have no savings, so that was impossible,” said Hugo Ñopo, who works for Grade, a Peruvian research group. “They asked us to wash our hands, but one in three Peruvian households lacks access to running water.”
Only half of Peruvian homes have refrigerators, he said, so many families must return daily to crowded markets, a major source of contagion.
Peru’s tragedy is unfolding amid a broader explosion of the virus in Latin America, which over the past two months has been transformed from a haven into a center of the pandemic. The hardest hit is Brazil, with more than 850,000 known cases — second only to the United States — but altogether about 1.5 million people in Latin America have tested positive. Experts say the actual number of infections is much higher.
Throughout the region, the pandemic is straining health systems and economies that were already fragile. In Guatemala, at least 58 people on President Alejandro Giammattei’s staff have tested positive, although the president said he had tested negative. And in Chile, the health minister resigned this weekend amid criticism of his handling of the pandemic.
And with winter arriving in the southern part of the region and hurricane season in the northern part, the World Health Organization warned last week that adverse weather conditions could lead to a new spike in infections.
Other developments around the world:
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Egypt on Saturday reported 1,677 new coronavirus cases and 62 deaths, the country’s highest daily numbers since the virus emerged there in February.
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President Hassan Rouhani of Iran said this weekend that he was prepared to reinstate a strict coronavirus lockdown if looser measures were not observed. Press TV, a state-run broadcaster, quoted him as saying that a recent drop in compliance “could be worrying.”
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Immigration officials in Canada said the government might allow caregivers who are seeking asylum to remain in the country permanently because of their outsized contributions to fighting the pandemic.
‘Quarantine raves’ in Britain end with one dead and others injured.
Two “quarantine raves”in northwest Britain left one man dead from a suspected drug overdose and three men injured from separate assaults. A woman also said she was raped at one of the illegal parties, which had taken place in two towns in Greater Manchester, attracting around 6,000 people in total, the police said on Sunday.
“We are aware of two large raves that took place in Carrington and Oldham last night,” Chris Sykes, the assistant chief constable, said in a statement. “These raves were illegal, and I condemn them taking place — they were clearly a breach of Coronavirus legislation and guidelines and have had tragic consequences,” he added.
The police said that in little over 24 hours, they saw a 60 percent increase in emergency calls, with 1,516 such calls from 5 p.m. on Saturday to 4 a.m. on Sunday.
Around 4,000 people attended the rave on Saturday in Oldham, where a 20-year-old man, whom the police has not yet identified, died from a suspected drug overdose, according to the police statement.
The party in Carrington, roughly 24 miles away, attracted around 2,000 people, and ended with three separate stabbing incidents, one of which left an 18-year-old man with life-threatening injuries. The other two men, 25 and 26, sustained injuries too, the police said, adding that they were also investigating the reported rape of an 18-year-old woman.
In separate incidents, the attendees got violent with the police and vandalized a police car, the police said.
Videos of the events that emerged on social media showed a swarm of ravers dancing suffocatingly close to one another in open air fields. A big black banner scrawled with “Quarantine Rave” could be seen in the party in Oldham.
Pressed on the pandemic, Republican senators facing tough elections skip defending Trump and blame China.
Fighting for their political lives amid twin domestic crises — a pandemic and its disastrous effects on the economy — vulnerable Republican senators running for re-election are working to make their races a referendum on China.
The tactic, party strategists say, is a way for Republicans to avoid defending the president’s handling of the virus, which has been met with widespread public disapproval, and instead offer up an alternative issue that already inspires fear and skepticism among voters.
Senator Martha McSally of Arizona has leaned heavily into the message as she trails a Democratic challenger, the former astronaut Mark Kelly, who has business ties to China.
“I learned the day I entered the military, never trust a communist,” Ms. McSally said recently. “China is to blame for this pandemic and the death of thousands of Americans.”
Other Republicans have followed suit. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina released a strategy meant to hold the Chinese government accountable for its “lies, deception and cover-ups.” In Montana, Senator Steve Daines, who is facing a challenge from the state’s popular Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, unveiled an ad campaign centered on casting China as responsible for the virus. Senator Joni Ernst in Iowa posted on Twitter and Facebook condemning “so many bad actions out of China.”
“If only they had stood up and alerted the world much sooner, the pandemic could have been lessened,” she said.
The pandemic has also forced a huge shift in voting itself. First came the move to mail-in ballots in primary elections nationwide, and now it is affecting voter registration, which would normally be up in a presidential election year.
New voter registrations in 12 states and the District of Columbia plummeted 70 percent in April compared to January, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington nonprofit.
As Oklahoma hits new case highs, a senator is undecided about wearing a mask at Trump’s Tulsa rally.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said on Sunday that he had not decided whether to wear a mask to President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa next Saturday, where attendees must sign a waiver prohibiting them from suing the campaign or the venue if they contract the coronavirus.
Oklahoma recorded 222 new cases on Friday and 225 on Saturday, its highest counts since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times database. The state has had more than 8,000 confirmed cases and 359 deaths.
The senator, a Republican, was responding to questions from the host of the CNN program “State of the Union,” Jake Tapper, about whether he would follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and wear a mask to the rally. “I haven’t decided on that,” Mr. Lankford said. “We have had a few more cases in the last week.”
He did note to Mr. Tapper that he wears a mask “everywhere that I go currently and have for weeks and weeks and weeks when I’m out at all here in Oklahoma.”
Senator Lankford also said he spoke to the president about changing the date of the rally, which was originally scheduled for June 19. That is Juneteenth, a holiday honoring the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Texas and read the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the last Confederate state to receive the news.
The decision to hold the rally in Tulsa, the site of one of the country’s bloodiest race massacres, on Juneteenth drew significant criticism. On Friday Mr. Trump finally bowed to pressure to move the date, delaying it to June 20.
Baseball inches, bitterly, toward a 50-game season.
In yet another round of sharply worded statements, the players’ union rejected Major League Baseball’s latest salary proposal and essentially dared the league commissioner, Rob Manfred, to impose the severely shortened version of the season he has threatened.
“It unfortunately appears that further dialogue with the league would be futile,” said Tony Clark, the head of the players’ union. “It’s time to get back to work. Tell us when and where.”
On Saturday, the union’s chief negotiator, Bruce Meyer, sent a letter to his counterpart at M.L.B., the deputy commissioner Dan Halem, declaring that the union believed negotiations were at an end.
Mr. Meyer blamed M.L.B.’s insistence on pay cuts that go beyond a March agreement between the two sides, which stated that players would be paid a prorated salary depending on how many games were played.
But as it became apparent that any games would most likely have to be played without fans, M.L.B. owners repeatedly sought further pay cuts for players. The latest offer from M.L.B. came Friday, calling for players to make 70 percent of their prorated salaries over a 72-game season, with the possibility of reaching 80 percent if the playoffs are completed.
M.L.B. has argued that the shutdown has cost it billions of dollars already, and that games without fans would cut into revenues even more — thus the demands that players take additional cuts. The players’ union has said it hasn’t received sufficient documentation from M.L.B. to support its financial claims.
The union’s counterproposals have called for more games — as many as 114 — with full, prorated pay. But the league desperately wants to protect its lucrative postseason revenue by wrapping up the World Series before a potential second wave of coronavirus infections in the fall, and to avoid a cluttered television sports schedule in November.
Around the world, the pandemic has added an obstacle for women seeking safe abortions.
From the outset of the pandemic, advocacy groups and the United Nations warned that women’s access to reproductive services could be imperiled as movement among jurisdictions became far more difficult.
In many places, that is proving true. In Europe, closed borders added an obstacle for women in countries with strict abortion regulations, such as Poland, if they wanted to seek the procedure elsewhere. The complications were deepened when countries including Germany and Austria did not label abortions as essential, time-sensitive procedures while tackling the health care demands of the pandemic.
But the pandemic also cracked open windows in some parts of the continent. France, Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales in Britain all permitted at-home abortions with medication administered by prescription and the guidance of a medical professional via telephone or online.
Across the Atlantic, where the debate over abortion is more politicized, disruptions to services were more deliberate.
Anti-abortion governors in Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Alabama listed abortions as “nonessential” procedures, arguing that performing them would threaten supplies of medical resources and protective equipment.
The medical community pushed back, setting off a flurry of lawsuits to keep services running.
In the meantime, some women ended up racing across state lines to avoid the new limitations. One traveled from Arkansas to Oklahoma to Kansas before she could terminate her pregnancy.
A funeral director in Harlem reflects on the devastating toll of the virus on his community.
When New York City began reopening last week, funeral directors were still reeling from the pandemic, and still burying its victims. For Isaiah Owens, a funeral director in Harlem who has worked in the industry for five decades, the toll is deeply personal.
He is busier than ever before, a reflection of the disproportionate toll of the virus on black Americans. City data shows that black and Latino residents are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 compared with white residents.
During the course of filming, Mr. Owens buried two friends of his own: Abraham Tucker, 88, of Harlem, and Mary Hughes, 86, of Rockland County.
“The African-American community is going to be in deep mourning for a long time,” Mr. Owens said. “There’s a lot of people that have broken hearts right now.”
How to exercise safely during the pandemic.
As businesses reopen and warm weather brings more people outdoors, here are some precautions to take when venturing outside for a run or returning to a usual fitness routine.
Reporting and research were contributed by Yousur Al-Hlou, Pam Belluck, Julie Bosman, Scott Cacciola, Kevin Draper, Catie Edmondson, Tess Felder, Manny Fernandez, Rebecca Halleck, Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Amy Harmon, Jan Hoffman, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Iliana Magra, Ruth Maclean, Iliana Magra, Patricia Mazzei, Constant Méheut, Raphael Minder, David Montgomery, Emily Palmer, Alexandra E. Petri, Matt Phillips, Monika Pronczuk, Alan Rappeport, Simon Romero, Mitch Smith, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Ana Swanson, Mitra Taj, Michael Wines and Karen Zraick.
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