Here’s what you need to know:
- Trump says the virus will probably ‘get worse before it gets better.’
- U.S. reports more than 1,000 deaths in a day for the first time in July.
- More than 20,000 service members have contracted the virus, testing the U.S. military.
- The C.D.C. says the number of people infected ‘far exceeds the number of reported cases’ in parts of the U.S.
- U.S. officials accuse two hackers of trying to steal virus vaccine data for China.
- Getting the European Union to agree to a landmark stimulus package required compromises.
- Senate Republicans outline their opening proposal for the next round of relief.
Trump says the virus will probably ‘get worse before it gets better.’
President Trump abruptly departed on Tuesday from his rosy projections about the coronavirus, warning Americans from the White House briefing lectern that the illness would get worse before widespread recovery.
“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Trump said. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”
In his first virus-focused news conference in weeks, Mr. Trump appeared before reporters to defend his track record, which has been widely criticized for his tendency to downplay the severity of the pandemic. Appearing without Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx or Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, key members of his White House coronavirus task force, Mr. Trump also implored citizens — especially young people — to wear masks.
“Get a mask,” said Mr. Trump, who has been reluctant to wear them in public himself. “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They will have an effect and we need everything we can get.”
Mr. Trump’s comment urging Americans to wear masks was a stunning departure from his past comments on wearing them. In recent weeks, he has disparaged masks as unsanitary and suggested that people who wore them were making a political statement against him.
In an interview shortly before Mr. Trump’s news conference, Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said that he had not been invited to attend and defended himself against comments Mr. Trump had made in a Fox News interview Sunday, when he called him “little bit of an alarmist.”
“People have their opinion about my reaction to things,” Dr. Fauci said in the interview on CNN on Tuesday afternoon. “I consider myself more of a realist than an alarmist.”
At the White House, Mr. Trump detailed what he said was data that put the United States in a better position to defeat the virus than other countries dealing with the pandemic. At one point, he repeated the false claim that the United States has a lower fatality rate than “almost everywhere else in the world.” The country, according to a New York Times database, has the world’s 10th highest rate of reported deaths per 100,000 people.
Mr. Trump also claimed “no governor needs anything right now,” contradicting the public accounts of a few governors. Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon told PBS last night that “we need help with testing supplies and equipment” while Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland warned of testing shortages earlier on Tuesday.
Asked about a tweet he sent a day earlier, in which he declared mask-wearing as “patriotic,” Mr. Trump did not explain why he often declined to wear one in public.
“If you’re close to each other, if you’re in a group, I would put it on when I’m in a group,” Mr. Trump said. But he did not directly answer when asked why he had not worn a mask during a small group gathering at the Trump International Hotel in Washington the evening before, and appeared to toggle back and forth between his own feelings about mask-wearing as he spoke.
“I’m getting used to the mask and the reason is, think about patriotism. Maybe it helps,” Mr. Trump said.
But even as he acknowledged that the outbreak would worsen, the president continued to maintain, without evidence, that “the virus will disappear.”
U.S. reports more than 1,000 deaths in a day for the first time in July.
The United States on Tuesday recorded more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths in a single day for the first time in July, according to a New York Time database. Officials in Nevada, Oregon and Tennessee reported their highest single-day death figures yet.
Public health experts have warned for weeks that deaths would trail new cases by about a month and case counts have risen substantially since mid-June, when states began lifting stay-at-home orders and reopening businesses.
Tuesday’s number of deaths, which will not be fully totaled until later in the night, was far below the single-day record of 2,752, reported on April 15 during the peak of the outbreak in New York and the Northeast. But with the exception of two days in late June when New Jersey and New York reported large numbers of deaths from unknown dates, Tuesday was the first time since June 9 that more than 1,000 deaths were announced in a day.
The seven-day average of deaths in the United States reached 786 on Monday, up from an average of about 475 in early July, though still far below the country’s April peak.
More than 20,000 service members have contracted the virus, testing the U.S. military.
The United States military has emerged as a potential source of coronavirus transmissions both domestically and abroad, according to military and local public health officials. Over 20,000 members have contracted the virus, and the infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks.
Cases are rising the most on military bases in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas, all states that have seen surges in infections, Jennifer Steinhauer and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of The New York Times reported. At a base in Okinawa, Japan, the U.S. Marine Corps has reported nearly 100 cases, enraging local officials. And in war zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, already awash with untracked cases, U.S. troops have contended with outbreaks of the virus within their ranks.
Domestically, local officials in Georgia’s Chattahoochee County, a sparsely populated area with high infection rates, traced the outbreaks to Fort Benning, the large training base there. And officials in California and North Carolina have also seen connections between military installations and communities.
The rise of cases among a largely young population that lives in dense quarters near cities where bars and other crowded places that have been opened is unsurprising. But the increase raises questions about the military’s safety precautions as the Pentagon wrestles with both containing the virus within the ranks while also addressing logistical problems it has created, like relieving units that had been stuck overseas for longer than expected.
There were 21,909 cases in the military as of Monday, compared with 7,408 on June 10, according to the Pentagon. Three service members have died since March, including a sailor on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. More than 440 service members have been hospitalized.
In the military training camps, there is little room for a socially distant middle ground. Barracks are packed, grueling training schools are the norm, and open bars and other places to socialize beckon, all as troops prepare to head overseas.
“Military bases represent a combustible demographic mix of young and older people in a dense institutional setting, which is pretty much an ideal context for a wildfire-like outbreak to occur,” said Lindsey Leininger, a health policy researcher and clinical professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “Unfortunately both density and demographics place military bases at high outbreak risk. And since many employees on the bases are from the host communities, a base outbreak can easily seed a community outbreak.”
The C.D.C. says the number of people infected ‘far exceeds the number of reported cases’ in parts of the U.S.
The number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States has been anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The findings suggest that large numbers of people who did not have symptoms or did not seek medical care may have kept the virus circulating in their communities. The study is the largest of its kind to date, although some early data was released last month.
“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”
The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior virus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. They also released data from later times for eight sites to the C.D.C.’s website on Tuesday.
About 40 percent of infected people do not develop symptoms, but they may still pass the virus on to others. The United States now tests roughly 700,000 people a day. The new results highlight the need for much more testing to detect infection levels and contain the viral spread in parts of the country.
For example, in Missouri, the prevalence of infections as of May 30 was 2.8 percent or 171,000, 13 times the reported rate of 12,956 cases, suggesting that the state missed most people with the virus who might have contributed to its outsized outbreak.
In some regions, the gap between estimated infections and reported cases decreased as testing capacity and reporting improved. New York City, for example, showed a 12-fold difference between actual infections and reported cases in early April, but by early May the difference was down to tenfold.
The study indicates that even the hardest-hit area in the study — New York City, where nearly one in four people has been exposed to the virus — is nowhere near achieving herd immunity, the level of exposure at which the spread of the virus would start to dwindle on its own. To reach that level, experts believe at least 60 percent of people in a particular place would have had to be exposed to the virus.
“These figures suggest that the U.S. is nowhere near herd immunity,” said Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.
U.S. officials accuse two hackers of trying to steal virus vaccine data for China.
The U.S. Justice Department accused a pair of Chinese hackers on Tuesday of targeting vaccine development on behalf of the country’s intelligence service.
Justice Department officials called the suspects a blended threat who sometimes worked on behalf of China’s spy services and sometimes worked to enrich themselves. The officials said that an indictment secured against them earlier this month and unsealed on Tuesday was the first to target such a threat.
The hacking was part of a broader, yearslong campaign of cybertheft by the pair aimed at an array of industries. American government officials said that at the behest of China’s spy service, the two hackers shifted their focus this year to trying to acquire vaccine research and other information about the pandemic.
The indictment came as the Trump administration has stepped up its criticism of Beijing, both for its theft of secrets and its failure to contain the spread of the virus, and is a significant escalation of that effort. The Justice Department said that China’s covert activity could potentially set back research efforts.
The accusations also came days after the United States and allied countries accused Russia of trying to steal information on vaccine development.
Global Roundup
Getting the European Union to agree to a landmark stimulus package required compromises.
European Union leaders agreed Tuesday to a landmark spending package to rescue their economies: a 750 billion euro ($857 billion) stimulus agreement, spearheaded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, which sent a strong signal of solidarity even as it exposed deep new fault lines in a bloc reshaped by Britain’s exit.
The deal was notable for its firsts: Countries will raise large sums by selling bonds collectively, rather than individually; and much of that money will be handed out to member nations hit hardest by the pandemic as grants, not loans.
But as the dust settles on days of rancorous negotiations, the compromises that allowed Ms. Merkel of Germany, whose country holds the European Union’s rotating presidency, to guide 27 nations toward consensus are all the more apparent, and none too pretty, wrote Steven Erlanger and Matina Stevis-Gridneff in an analysis for The New York Times.
The fissures in the bloc that Ms. Merkel needed to bridge ran up, down and sideways. There were divides between the frugal north and a needy, hard-hit south; but also west to east, between Brussels and budding autocracies like Poland and Hungary that have tested the limits of the bloc’s liberal democratic values.
But allowing the crisis stirred by the pandemic to worsen was in the end considered more dangerous than trimming some of the bloc’s larger budgetary ambitions or even allowing continued challenges to the rule of law.
Economists predict a recession in Europe far worse than anything since World War II. France, Italy and Spain, the bloc’s second-, third- and fourth-largest economies, are expected to suffer the most, clocking in contractions of around 10 percent this year.
Here are other developments from around the world:
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Nearly 900,000 public workers in Britain, including teachers, doctors and security forces, will receive raises in recognition of the “vital contribution” they have made, Britain’s finance ministry announced Tuesday.
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Chinese officials are hailing a visit by a team of experts sent to Beijingby the World Health Organization to investigate the source of the coronavirus as evidence that the country is a responsible and transparent global power. But the investigation by the W.H.O. is likely to take many months and could face delays.
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Air passengers to China must provide a negative test result before boarding the flight, the aviation authority said. The test must be completed within five days of the trip.
Senate Republicans outline their opening proposal for the next round of relief.
Republicans’ opening proposal for the next U.S. virus relief package will include $105 billion for schools, additional funding for a popular federal loan program for small businesses and another round of direct payments to families, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said on Tuesday.
Sketching out the contours of what is expected to be a $1 trillion plan, Mr. McConnell doubled down on his insistence that the package include liability protections for businesses, medical workers and schools and businesses navigating the pandemic — a proposal that Democrats fiercely oppose.
Time is of the essence for lawmakers, given that expanded jobless benefits of an additional $600 per week are set to expire at the end of this month.
But privately, officials working on the package cautioned colleagues that the coming negotiation, a wide-ranging election-year brawl, was likely to stretch into August, leaving tens of millions of unemployed Americans without the extra help as Congress hammers out the latest recovery plan and the virus surges.
On Tuesday, Republicans faced the added challenge of coming to terms with their own president on the details of their legislation.
Mr. McConnell did not say whether the education aid in his bill would be conditioned on schools holding in-person classes in the fall, in line with President Trump’s demands, and made no mention of a payroll tax cut that the president has pressed to include, which has little support in either party. Nor did he mention how his proposal would address the expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits set to expire at the end of July, which Republicans have made clear they intend to scale back.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, were to attend a party luncheon and then meet with leading Democrats, who have already laid out their own, far more expansive, $3 trillion plan.
Speaking with House Democrats Tuesday morning on a private call, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she hoped their side could resolve its differences with Republicans and produce a bill by the end of next week, according to an official on the call who described it on the condition of anonymity.
Pharmaceutical executives tell Congress a vaccine might be ready within six months.
Executives from four companies in the race to produce a coronavirus vaccine told lawmakers on Tuesday that they are optimistic their products could be ready by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. All four companies — AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Therapeutics and Pfizer — are testing proprietary vaccines in various phases of human clinical trials.
“We would hope in the fall or towards the end of the year we have data that we could submit to the FDA for them to make a determination on whether to approve it,” said Dr. Stephen Hoge, the president of Moderna. He added, “We would also hope at that point to have millions of doses of vaccine available for deployment.”
Three of the firms have received federal government funding for their vaccine development efforts. AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, two of the recipients, pledged to the lawmakers that they would produce hundreds of millions of doses of their vaccines at no profit to themselves. Moderna, however, which has received $483 million from the government for its coronavirus research, said it would not be selling its vaccine at cost.
Pfizer, which has so far not received any federal funding for its vaccine, has also said it would seek profit for its product.
The testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight panel was punctuated by notes of optimism from representatives from each company, several of whom referenced promising early results from ongoing studies in people. On Monday, AstraZeneca and Pfizer released data indicating that their vaccines produced strong immune responses with only minor side effects.
Still, the actual effectiveness and durability of these responses against the virus has yet to be determined. No vaccine candidates have been proven effective for preventing infection by the coronavirus, or for protecting people from its severe effects.
A fifth contender, Merck, painted a far less rosy picture of the vaccine development landscape. Dr. Julie Gerberding, the company’s executive vice president and chief patient officer, made no promises about when its product would be ready, citing concerns about safety should the process be rushed.
“We do not expect to be able to accelerate the safety assessment,” Dr. Gerberding said.
Lamenting a ‘vacuum’ of national leadership, a health expert urges states to coordinate their virus reporting.
A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday called on state health officials to start reporting coronavirus data in a detailed and uniform fashion, rather than the hodgepodge most states now produce.
“We have a real vacuum of leadership at the national level,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit health advocacy initiative. “Absent a national strategy, our best hope is to get all 50 states on the same page, so we know where we are.”
Other public health experts said that such guidelines were long overdue and that the C.D.C.’s current director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, should have mandated them months ago.
Dr. Irwin E. Redlener, founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said it was “pathetic” that a private organization had to propose data standards and recruit states to voluntarily agree.
“The feds should have been demanding exactly this kind of standardized information from every state and territory since March,” he said. “This is another illustration of the failures of the federal government — Trump was explicit in telling governors that they were on their own.”
Dr. Frieden’s organization, concluding that states are reporting only 40 percent of the data needed to fight the pandemic, laid out 15 indicators that every state should report daily on a public “dashboard” that anyone can view.
They include not just basic elements like cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but sophisticated metrics. Among them: what percentage of infections came from clusters of people who knew one another; how many health care workers are infected on the job; how long it takes to get a diagnostic test result; and what percentage ofresidents are wearing masks.
Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who helped design the data dashboard used by New York State and cited by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his news conferences, said Dr. Frieden’s proposal was “something we need in our tool kit that’s been absent.”
Here are some of the latest places where mask requirements are appearing.
As the virus surges around the world, government officials and business owners are increasingly turning to mask requirements to try to slow the spread of infection.
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Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami said Tuesday that the city would assign 39 police officers to a new unit that enforces mask violations. “All they will do for the whole week is mask enforcement,” he said.
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Austria announced on Tuesday a new mask mandate to go into effect on Friday for supermarkets and other stores that sell food, as well as post offices, banks and houses of worship. Cases in the alpine nation have begun rising again since restrictions were eased. On Tuesday, Austria recorded 1,386 active cases — roughly the same number as in mid-March, when the country was placed on lockdown.
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President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said the police would arrest people for not wearing masks in public. “We have to ask our police to be more strict,” he said. “Catch them. A little shame, or put them on notice forever.”
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In the United States, Southeastern Grocers, owner of the Winn-Dixie chain of supermarkets, joined the growing list of retailers that are requiring customers to wear masks. The announcement late Monday came a day after a company spokesman defended the company’s earlier policy of not requiring them. The new policy will go into effect on July 27. Another large grocery chain in the region, Publix, started to require masks on Tuesday.
U.S. roundup
Arizona, in the grip of an outbreak, sees hopeful signs the virus may be leveling off.
Arizona is averaging more than 3,000 new cases a day this month, double what it was in mid-June. The state’s death toll is steadily climbing to nearly 3,000. But disease specialists are expressing cautious optimism that the crisis there may be leveling off or even starting to ebb.
While Arizona still has one of the most serious outbreaks in the nation, cases there have been decreasing there over the past 14 days, according to a New York Times database.
And disease specialists are pointing to several other indicators that suggest some improvement. Arizona reported 3,041 hospitalizations on Monday of people who either tested positive for the virus or were believed to be infected with it, a 14 percent decline from a week earlier. The number of virus patients there who are on ventilators remains high, but that too has been decreasing: The state reported 608 on Monday, down from a record high of 687 on Thursday.
“We still could be getting a little bit worse but we’re getting worse slower,” said Dr. Joe Gerald, a public health professor who does coronavirus modeling at the University of Arizona. “I think that’s probably the most pessimistic view, though.”
Dr. Gerald said the situation in Arizona may actually be improving, though lag times in the reporting of confirmed cases and delays in obtaining test results are making it difficult for researchers to piece together more precisely how the virus is evolving in the state.
Infectious disease specialists say that a combination of factors may be helping, including Gov. Doug Ducey’s move in mid-June that allowed mayors to order the use of face masks in their cities, and his order later that month shutting down bars and nightclubs. Here’s what else is happening around the nation.
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New York, grappling with how to prevent another large outbreak, will now require travelers from a total of 31 states to quarantine for 14 days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Tuesday. The weekly update saw Minnesota taken off the list and the addition of 10 states: Alaska, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Virginia and Washington. New Jersey and Connecticut are also asking travelers from those states to quarantine.
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The top public official in hard-hit Hidalgo County, Texas, ordered residents on Monday to stay at home, imposed a curfew and implored all but essential businesses to shut down. But the order lacked any means of enforcement, a situation that has frustrated local officials across Texas. As Gov. Greg Abbott prepared to reopen the state in April, he blocked local officials from issuing enforceable stay-at-home orders.
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Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a sweeping new $775 billion investment in caregiving programs on Tuesday, with a series of proposals covering care for small children, older adults and family members with disabilities.
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Mississippi on Tuesday reported more than 1,630 cases, a single-day record for the state. Nevada reported 27 deaths, breaking its single-day record; previously, 25 deaths were reported on April 11.
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In Florida, officials reported 9,440 cases and 134 deaths, daily tallies that were fewer in number than its record in each category.
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A study of patients in New York published in the journal JAMA reports that blood clotting problems may be significantly more common among Covid-19 patients than among those with other infectious diseases. And patients with blood-clotting problems were twice as likely to die, the study found.
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The beverage giant Coca-Cola reported a big drop in revenue and profit in the second quarter as many consumers remained at home during the pandemic.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Vaccine Trust Problem
Why developing a coronavirus vaccine may be easier than persuading people to get it.Now is still a good time for your home improvement project.
Contractors may be allowed back in your home as lockdowns lift, but it’s also a good time to tackle that new bathroom light installation, paint job or other project yourself. Here are some tips to help you get the job done right, and what to know if you call a professional.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Almukhtar, Peter Baker, Pam Belluck, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Julia Calderone, Christopher Clarey, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Julie Creswell, Melissa Eddy, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Christina Goldbaum, Shane Goldmacher, J. David Goodman, Javier C. Hernández, Tiffany Hsu, Juliana Kim, Robin Lloyd, Patricia Mazzei, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Claire Cain Miller, Heather Murphy, Elian Peltier, Eduardo Porter, Amy Qin, Linda Qiu, Katie Rogers, Simon Romero, Brian M. Rosenthal, Kaly Soto, Jennifer Steinhauer, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Eileen Sullivan, Noah Weiland and Katherine J. Wu.
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