An informed guide to the global outbreak, with the latest developments and expert advice about prevention and treatment. |
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Alarming spikes across the U.S. |
States in the South, West and Southwest are seeing upticks in their coronavirus case counts — and in some cases setting records — as a troubling pattern emerges in areas that began lifting restrictions earlier than others. |
South Carolina, which was among the last states to issue stay-at-home orders and among the first to start reopening, recorded its highest number of new cases in one day — 840 — on Sunday. One representative from the state, Tom Rice, a Republican, announced today that he had the virus. |
“It’s not just the number of states that have growth, but it’s also the rate of growth we’re seeing,” our colleague Mitch Smith, who has been helping with The Times’s coronavirus tracking project, told us. |
The Sun Belt has seen particularly alarming surges. In Arizona, which reopened pools and gyms in recent weeks, hospitals have been urged to activate emergency plans to handle a flood of Covid-19 patients. In Texas, cases are rising rapidly around the largest cities, including Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. |
Some officials have attributed the rise in cases to expanded testing, but in the Sun Belt at least, the percentages of positive tests and hospitalizations have also increased, suggesting more transmissions. |
Some areas are working to reverse their upward trends. The governors of Utah and Oregon recently announced pauses to their states’ reopenings. In Nashville, the mayor has said the city will wait to enter the next phases of lifting restrictions. |
“This virus isn’t going away,” Mitch told us. “It’s going to be something that we just have to watch really closely for the foreseeable future.” |
From the epicenter: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York called on local officials to enforce social-distancing rules after widespread reports of violations over the weekend. He warned that if people continued to flout the rules, the state could suspend or roll back reopening plans in some areas. |
While the number of cases may seem low, the authorities have desperately tried to keep the virus out of the crowded metropolis of 21 million people, and this was the first cluster of cases reported in eight weeks. Containment measures in Beijing have tended to be strict — local officials shut down the market, along with residential buildings in the surrounding neighborhood, and are in the process of testing 90,000 nearby residents. |
The Communist Party treated the outbreak as an embarrassing affront, but an epidemiologist said that China should get used to the idea that there will be fresh outbreaks even as the overall number of cases trends downward. As of Sunday, Beijing has recorded 499 cases of the virus and nine deaths. |
What else we’re following |
- Recent retractions from respected medical journals are alarming scientists who fear that the rush for research on the virus has opened the door to fraud, and threatened the credibility of prestigious publications.
- Illnesses and deaths from preventable diseases like measles have skyrocketed in many poor countries after mass immunization efforts were halted because of the coronavirus.
- Covid-19 patients, through federal aid packages, are supposed to be largely exempt from paying for their care, but mistakes are leaving some with eye-popping bills.
- American-made social media conspiracy theories about the virus are getting amplified by Russia.
- A nurse forced to say goodbye to her mother over a video call shares the personal toll of the virus in this New Yorker video.
- Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, have accepted at least $50 million in virus aid meant for small businesses.
- Next year’s Oscars ceremony, originally scheduled for February, will be delayed until April 25 because of the pandemic.
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| My husband and I do origami with our twin grandchildren twice a week. All four of us select what items to make and follow YouTube videos simultaneously. We are 8,000 miles apart, but doing such things together makes us feel connected. |
| — Bharati Kotwal, Pune, India |
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