Here’s what you need to know:
- Work by researchers in Hong Kong finds that reinfection may be possible in rare cases.
- Zoom fixes partial outages that disrupted the first day of virtual classes for many U.S. students.
- 336 socially distanced Republican delegates gather to renominate Trump for president.
- The F.D.A. approves plasma treatment, as Trump claims the agency is undercutting him.
- Europe limited mass job losses for a few months, but now a wave is coming.
- Dozens of virus cases are linked to a nudist camp in the south of France.
- Why are the numbers of U.S. cases decreasing? Because restrictions are working, experts say.
Work by researchers in Hong Kong finds that reinfection may be possible in rare cases.
Researchers in Hong Kong are reporting the first confirmed case of reinfection with the coronavirus.
“An apparently young and healthy patient had a second case of Covid-19 infection which was diagnosed 4.5 months after the first episode,” University of Hong Kong researchers said Monday in a statement.
The report is of concern because it suggests that immunity to the coronavirus may last only a few months in some people. And it has implications for vaccines being developed for the virus.
The 33-year-old man had only mild symptoms the first time, and no symptoms this time around. The reinfection was discovered when he returned from a trip to Spain, the researchers said, and the virus they sequenced closely matched the strain circulating in Europe in July and August.
“Our results prove that his second infection is caused by a new virus that he acquired recently rather than prolonged viral shedding,” said Dr. Kelvin Kai-Wang To, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Given that there are millions of cases worldwide, it is not unexpected that a few, or even a few dozen, people might be reinfected with the virus after only a few months, experts have said.
Doctors have reported several cases of presumed reinfection in the United States and elsewhere, but none of those cases have been confirmed with rigorous testing. Recovered people are known to shed viral fragments for weeks, which can cause tests to show a positive result in the absence of live virus.
But the Hong Kong researchers sequenced the virus from both rounds of infection and found significant differences in the two sets of virus, suggesting that the patient was infected a second time.
Common cold coronaviruses are known to cause reinfections in less than a year, but experts had hoped that the new coronavirus might behave more like its cousins SARS and MERS, which seemed to produce longer-lasting immunity of a few years.
EDUCATION ROUNDUP
Zoom fixes partial outages that disrupted the first day of virtual classes for many U.S. students.
The video call service Zoom reported partial outages on Monday morning, causing problems on the first day of remote classes for many schools in the United States.
Zoom said it began receiving reports of users being unable to start or join meetings at about 8:50 a.m. on the East Coast, as working and school hours began. About two hours later, the company said that it was “deploying a fix across our cloud,” and at about 12:45 p.m. it said “everything should be working properly now.”
As the pandemic has kept students out of classrooms and workers out of offices, Zoom has quickly become critical infrastructure for many school districts, companies and local governments. The partial disruption in service, which lasted approximately four hours in some areas, adds another element to the contentious debate over how to safely and effectively resume learning this fall.
The Atlanta school district, which serves about 50,000 students, was among those affected by the outage. “We are working to resolve the issue and will provide an update when restored,” the district said on Twitter on Monday morning. “Parents and students will hear from their local school regarding next steps and alternative ways for virtual learning.”
And students and professors at Penn State University reported a “widespread outage” of Zoom service on its campus on Monday morning, urging students to download Zoom’s desktop client as a possible workaround.
The website DownDetector, which tracks outages at social media companies and tech companies, showed significant outages in major cities around the country — including New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco. The site reported more than 15,000 outages by about 10 a.m. Eastern time. Many courthouses also rely on Zoom to conduct hearings, city councils govern through virtual meetings, and the police face reporters in video news conferences.
Michigan’s Supreme Court said on Monday that “virtual courtroom proceedings are being affected by a widespread Zoom outage in the U.S. and beyond that is preventing courts being able to start and join meetings,”
Here are other key education developments:
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Following months of pressure to set up outdoor classrooms in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that principals can apply by this Friday to create outdoor classes in their schoolyards. The city’s public school system, the nation’s largest, is scheduled to reopen in just under three weeks in a hybrid model, leaving schools little time to move classroom infrastructure outdoors. The city will prioritize 27 neighborhoods badly hit by the virus with schools that do not have usable outdoor space. The mayor had previously raised concerns about outdoor learning, saying it might not be possible on days when it was raining, too hot or too cold. On Monday, he said that outdoor learning “won’t work everyday” because of bad weather, but that it was still a good alternative for many schools.
336 socially distanced Republican delegates gather to renominate Trump for president.
After tests and temperature checks, 336 Republican delegates representing 50 states, five territories and Washington, D.C., gathered in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday and officially renominated President Trump. It was the only in-person event of either political party’s quadrennial convention.
Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, spoke ahead of the in-person roll call in a socially distanced ballroom inside the Charlotte Convention Center. She attempted to frame the incumbent president as the empathetic candidate on the ballot, compared to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The Democratic National Convention last week, Ms. McDaniel said, “was short on substance, but it was a masterpiece in fiction about President Trump’s record and what he has accomplished for the American people.”
Outside of the convention hall, public health officials in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, continue to fight to contain the spread of the virus, with an average of 1,100 new cases a day over the past week, according to a New York Times database.
Just six representatives from each state and territory are in the room, masked and seated at a distance from one another. Each speaker is required to wear a mask before he or she reaches the podium, and the microphone will be cleaned between speakers, according to a person briefed on the protocols.
Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke to the delegates, and Mr. Trump plans to appear every night during the convention.
Despite the precautions in place inside the convention hall, photographs of crowds gathered by the stage while Mr. Trump spoke showed people not social distancing, some wearing masks and some without.
The F.D.A. approves plasma treatment, as Trump claims the agency is undercutting him.
The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday gave emergency approval for expanded use of antibody-rich blood plasma to help hospitalized coronavirus patients, allowing President Trump, who has been pressuring the agency to move faster to address the pandemic, to claim progress on the eve of the Republican convention.
Mr. Trump cited the approval, which had been held up by concerns among top government scientists about the data behind it, as welcome news in fighting a disease that has led to 176,000 deaths in the United States and left the nation lagging far behind most others in the effectiveness of its response.
At a news briefing, he described the treatment as “a powerful therapy” made possible “by marshaling the full power of the federal government.”
The decision will broaden use of a treatment that has already been administered to more than 70,000 patients. But the F.D.A. cited benefits for only some patients. And, unlike a new drug, plasma cannot be manufactured in millions of doses; its availability is limited by blood donations. Mr. Trump urged everyone who has recovered from the virus to donate plasma, saying there is a nationwide campaign to collect it.
Mr. Trump has portrayed his demands to cut red tape and speed approval of treatments and vaccines as a necessary response to a public health emergency.
But Sunday’s announcement came a day after he repeated his unfounded claim that the F.D.A. was deliberately holding up decision-making until after the election, this time citing a “deep state.” That accusation exacerbated concerns among some government scientists, outside experts and Democrats that the president’s political needs could undermine the integrity of the regulatory process, hurt public confidence in safety and introduce a different kind of public health risk.
No randomized trials of the sort researchers consider most robust have yet shown benefit from convalescent plasma. But the F.D.A. said the data it had so far, including more than a dozen published studies, showed that “it is reasonable to believe” that the treatment “may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of Covid-19 illness in some hospitalized patients,” in particular those who receive it early.
On Monday, the World Health Organization was cautious about endorsing the use of plasma to treat those who are ill, Reuters reported, saying evidence it works remains “low quality.”
The C.D.C. predicts that the total death toll across the country could pass 200,000 by Sept. 12. In May, Mr. Trump predicted the total number of deaths from the virus would be about 100,000.
White House officials have been urging speedy approval not just of Covid-19 treatments, but of vaccines. Their public statements that a safe and effective vaccine could be just around the corner have alarmed scientists who fear that White House pressure will result in premature approval timed to increase the president’s re-election chances.
In a July 30 meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, top administration officials suggested that emergency approval for a vaccine might be granted before Phase 3 trials in the United States are complete, perhaps as early as September, according to two people briefed on the discussion. Such a move would be highly unusual and most likely prompt more concern about whether the administration was pressuring the F.D.A. to approve drugs for political purposes.
Senior administration officials disputed the account of the meeting, saying Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were either being misquoted or had been misunderstood on every major point.
In Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin announced this month that a billion doses of a vaccine for the new coronavirus would soon be rolled out, but Russian health officials have found themselves on the defensive because the vaccine has not been tested in late-stage, large, randomized control trials.
By skipping such trials, Russia is potentially endangering people to score propaganda points, health experts warn.
Global roundup
Europe limited mass job losses for a few months, but now a wave is coming.
When European countries ordered businesses to close and employees to stay home as the coronavirus spread, governments took aggressive steps to shield workers from the prospect of mass joblessness, extending billions to businesses to keep people employed.
The layoffs are coming anyway.
A tsunami of job cuts is about to hit Europe as companies prepare to carry out sweeping downsizing plans to offset a collapse in business. Government-backed furlough programs that have helped keep about a third of Europe’s work force financially secure are set to unwind in the coming months.
As many as 59 million jobs are at risk of cuts in hours or pay, temporary furloughs or permanent layoffs, especially in industries like transportation and retail, according to a study by McKinsey & Company.
Governments are warning that millions will soon lose paychecks, and the European Central Bank last week said unemployment was likely to surge and stay high even when a recovery from the pandemic unfolds.
“Europe has been successful at dampening the initial effects of the crisis,” said John Hurley, senior research manager at Eurofound, the research arm of the European Union. “But in all likelihood, unemployment is going to come home to roost, especially when the generous furlough programs start to ease off.”
“There’s going to be a shakeout,” he added, “and it’s going to be fairly ugly.”
Compared with the United States, which lost more than 20 million jobs in April alone, the furlough programs in the European Union have prevented unemployment from going off the charts. Britain, Denmark, France and Germany are among the countries that have employed so-called short-work schemes, effectively nationalizing the paychecks of about 60 million private-sector employees.
But even before a recent resurgence of coronavirus cases, the pandemic’s economic damage was growing, and it now appears those expensive government programs postponed, rather than prevented, the pain for some workers. Some companies believe the disruption is the best time to move forward on long-contemplated downsizing.
Airbus, BP, Renault, Lufthansa, Air France, the Debenhams department store chain, Bank of Ireland, the retailer W.H. Smith and even McLaren Group, which includes the Formula One racing team, along with countless smaller businesses, are among those planning cuts that will sweep factory workers, retail employees, and high-paid white-collar workers into the ranks of the unemployed.
In other developments around the world:
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For 40 days, millions of people in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in western China, have been unable to leave their homes after the authorities put in place a sweeping lockdown to fight a resurgence of the coronavirus. Now, with the outbreak seemingly under control but the restrictions still largely in place, many residents are lashing out at the government. They say they are being unnecessarily confined to their homes and denied access to critical services like health care. The mounting anger poses a challenge for the ruling Communist Party, which has long taken a harsh approach in Xinjiang, and in recent years has been widely criticized for leading a draconian crackdown on the region’s Muslim minority.
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Bali, Indonesia’s most vital tourist destination, has abandoned its plan to allow tourists from other countries starting Sept. 11 amid an uptick in virus cases, Gov. I Wayan Koster announced. The island will wait at least until the end of the year before opening to foreign visitors. Bali’s economy contracted 11 percent during the second quarter of the year, with about 2,700 tourism workers laid off and another 74,000 on unpaid leave, the governor said.
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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday extended a lockdown in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, until Sunday night. The restrictions had been set to expire on Wednesday, but Ms. Ardern said the extra time was necessary to ensure that a virus cluster in Auckland had been brought under control. Eight new confirmed or probable cases connected to the cluster were announced on Monday, bringing the total to 101. The prime minister also said masks were now mandatory on public transportation nationwide.
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The first volunteer was inoculated with a “made in Italy” vaccine on Monday at Spallanzani hospital in Rome, which specializes in infectious diseases. The vaccine is produced by ReiThera, a biotechnology company based near Rome but headquartered in Switzerland. Francesco Vaia, the medical director of the Spallanzani, said that, if all went well, the vaccine would be produced next spring.
Dozens of virus cases are linked to a nudist camp in the south of France.
Health authorities in France said a virus outbreak at a nudist camp in the southern resort town of Le Cap d’Agde was “very worrying.”
More than 140 people have tested positive in the town, the Agence Régionale de Santé (ARS), France’s health agency, said in a news release on Sunday. They are awaiting results for 310 more tests.
Le Cap d’Agde is known for the camp and a beach that allows nudists. The health agency said the rate of beachgoers testing positive was four times higher than that of people in the village of Le Cap d’Agde generally. The local prefect called on beachgoers to be tested as quickly as possible and for travelers to postpone visits to the city.
Le Cap d’Agde imposed mandatory mask-wearing in parts of the city last week. France, like many other places, does not have a blanket national mask mandate, but local governments can impose them.
France reported 4,897 more confirmed cases on Sunday, around 1,300 more than were reported on Saturday, according to the ARS. France has had more than 242,500 total cases of the virus and more than 30,500 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
U.S. ROUNDUP
Why are the numbers of U.S. cases decreasing? Because restrictions are working, experts say.
After cases surged in June and July, the number of new reported cases in the United States began to level off, then drop, though the infection rate remains one of the world’s highest.
Of the states that are driving the decrease, all have at least some local mask mandates. And most have paused or reversed statewide reopening policies, again closing bars, gyms and theaters.
Many of the states with the biggest decreases per million people also had some of the country’s worst outbreaks in July.
Experts said that the drop in reported cases could not be attributed to the recent drop in testing volume. They explained that decreased hospitalizations and a lower share of positive tests indicated that the spread had most likely slowed.
A July surge in Florida affected young people in particular. Statewide bar closures following earlier reopenings and local mask mandates are among the policies that have helped reverse the trend, said Mary Jo Trepka, chair of the Florida International University epidemiology department. And though Florida is doing better now, the state did surpass 600,000 cases on Sunday.
Arizona and Louisiana have also seen cases drop after taking mask mandates and other measures came into force.
Elsewhere in the U.S.:
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In New York, youth sports that are considered “lower risk,” including tennis, soccer, cross country, field hockey and swimming, may practice and play starting Sept. 21 statewide, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Monday. Teams may not travel to play outside of the school’s region until Oct. 19. Sports with more physical contact that are considered “higher risk,” including football, wrestling, rugby and ice hockey, may practice but cannot play.
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Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, defended his record on Monday, as he testified before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. He said he told some of Mr. Trump’s advisers that the president’s repeated attacks on mail-in voting were “not helpful.” Watch the hearing live as lawmakers raise concerns about postal changes that could complicate mail-in voting.
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After a cripplingly slow vote count in New York’s June primary marred by thousands of disqualified ballots, Mr. Cuomo said on Monday that he would sign a series of executive orders to ease the way amid a pandemic for voters to cast valid absentee ballots in November, as well as potentially increasing election staff statewide. The orders will require local officials to “take steps to be ready to start counting votes ASAP,” after the Nov. 3 election. The governor also will order ballot-return envelopes to be redesigned to make it clear where such envelopes should be signed; a lack of a signature on the return envelope is a common cause of disqualification. Boards of election will also be required to assess their staffing levels, and report any staffing needs, prior to the election, as well as informing voters of deadlines and instructions for getting absentee ballots.
Usain Bolt says he will quarantine as he awaits test results after a surprise birthday party.
Usain Bolt, the Olympic great who won eight gold medals over the course of three Olympics, will quarantine while awaiting results from a coronavirus test he took on Saturday, the sprinter said in an Instagram post on Monday.
“Just to be safe, I’m going to be quarantining by myself,” Mr. Bolt said, adding that he has had no symptoms of the virus.
The Jamaican sprinter, who holds world records in the 100- and 200-meter dash, celebrated turning 34 on Friday at a surprise party. Attendees included his girlfriend, his newborn daughter and the prominent soccer players Raheem Sterling and Leon Bailey. Videos posted by the music news outlet Urban Islandz showed attendees dancing near one another without wearing masks. It was not clear whether any other attendees had tested positive for the virus.
Mr. Bolt said he was responding to reports circulating on social media, stemming from a Nationwide News Network report in his home country, that he had tested positive.
Mr. Bolt’s test coincided with a spike in Covid-19 cases in Jamaica as the island celebrated its independence the week of Aug. 6. Christopher Tufton, the country’s health minister, said at a news conference on Sunday that 1,529 people had tested positive for the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic and 16 had died.
The Trump administration tied billions in hospital aid to compliance with a private vendor.
The Trump administration tied billions of dollars in badly needed coronavirus medical funding this spring to hospitals’ cooperation with a private vendor collecting data for a new Covid-19 database that bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The highly unusual demand, aimed at hospitals in coronavirus hot spots using funds passed by Congress with no preconditions, alarmed some hospital administrators and even some federal health officials.
The office of the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, laid out the requirement in an April 21 email obtained by The New York Times that instructed hospitals to make a one-time report of their Covid-19 admissions and intensive care unit beds to TeleTracking Technologies, a company in Pittsburgh whose $10.2 million, five-month government contract has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
“Please be aware that submitting this data will inform the decision-making on targeted Relief Fund payments and is a prerequisite to payment,” the message read.
The financial condition, which has not been previously reported, applied to money from a $100 billion “coronavirus provider relief fund” established by Congress as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, signed by President Trump on March 27.
The disclosure of the demand is the most striking example to surface of the department’s efforts to expand the role of private companies in health data collection, a practice that critics say infringes on what has long been a central mission of the C.D.C. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services say that the moves were necessary.
The response to the virus in New Mexico is fueling a Republican bid to retake a congressional seat.
When Democrats in New Mexico swept elections just two years ago, flipping the Republican-held congressional district that stretches across more than half the state ranked among their biggest wins.
But in a sign of how tenuous the Democrats’ hold is on some of the House seats they picked up in 2018, especially in districts President Trump carried four years ago, that prize is suddenly in play yet again.
The incumbent, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, is now among the most vulnerable Democrats in Congress in a race that is drawing attention from leaders of both parties, and potentially huge amounts of spending, as Republicans eye an opening to blunt Democratic momentum in parts of the West.
Yvette Herrell, the Republican seeking to oust Ms. Torres Small, is stoking anger over a slump in the oil industry and measures taken by Democrats in New Mexico to fight the pandemic. Shifting blame from Mr. Trump for the pandemic’s economic fallout, Ms. Herrell has grown so critical of New Mexico’s virus mitigation policies that it sometimes seems as if she is running as much against the state’s Democratic governor as Ms. Torres Small.
The cautious pandemic response by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has kept cases from exploding in a poor state that is home to large numbers of people with underlying conditions. New Mexico has had far fewer Covid-19-related deaths on a per-capita basis than neighboring Arizona, one of the first states to reopen in May.
Still, open defiance by sheriffs, business owners and many others of Ms. Lujan Grisham’s policies, which include a statewide mask mandate, can make parts of the district in southern New Mexico feel almost like a different state from Albuquerque and points northward, where many people are wearing masks.
As the U.S. census count wraps up, the pandemic could threaten its accuracy, experts warn.
With the 2020 census into its final stage, more than one in three people hired as census takers have quit or failed to show up.
Many still on the job are going door to door in areas that largely track places where there are elevated rates of coronavirus infections, according to calculations by the National Conference on Citizenship, Civis Analytics and The New York Times.
And with 38 million households still uncounted, state and local officials are raising growing concerns that many poor and minority households will be left out of the count.
Wracked by pandemic and politics and desperately short of time, the last stage of the national population count — a constitutional mandate to tally everyone living in the United States accurately — is unfolding in historic doubt.
The coronavirus and rising mistrust of the government on the part of hard-to-reach groups like immigrants and Latinos already had made this census challenging. But another issue has upended it: an order last month to finish the count a month early, guaranteeing that population figures will be delivered to the White House while President Trump is still in office.
“If the current situation holds, I do not expect a census of the quality that the Census Bureau will even want to release the data,” Kenneth Prewitt, the Columbia University professor who oversaw the 2000 census, said at a University of Virginia forum this month.
The Census Bureau roundly disagrees. “We are sufficiently staffed, with high productivity, and we continue adding people to do the work,” Timothy P. Olson, who manages the census on a day-to-day basis, said in an interview. “I believe we’re in a really good place to complete the data collection by Sept. 30.”
Reporting was contributed by Liz Alderman, Maggie Astor, Gillian R. Brassil, Sheri Fink, Claire Fu, Maggie Haberman, Javier C. Hernández, Annie Karni, Andrew E. Kramer, Sharon LaFraniere, Théophile Larcher, Lauren Leatherby, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jesse McKinley, Richard C. Paddock, Elisabetta Povoledo, Amanda Rosa, Eliza Shapiro, Dera Menra Sijabat, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Katie Thomas, Alan Yuhas and Albee Zhang.
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