Coronavirus Live Updates: Deaths Top 150,000 in the United States

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Coronavirus Live Updates: Deaths Top 150,000 in the United States
By: New York Times News - 07-29-20
Re: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/w...12bed6ea3384a6

Federal officials urged states to take aggressive action to slow the spread of the virus while the president talked up nonexistent “virus-free” areas. Big retailers are mandating masks, but enforcement is an issue.

RIGHT NOWRepresentative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who rarely wears a mask in the Capitol, tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of a planned trip with President Trump on Air Force One.

Here’s what you need to know:

* The virus death toll in the U.S. reaches 150,000.

* Representative Gohmert tests positive ahead of a trip with Trump, prompting concern at the Capitol.

* Trump continues to push reopenings, even as his task force cautions states.

* Here’s where talks on another round of pandemic relief stand.

* There’s a wrinkle in stores’ mask policies: Enforcement.

* A study asserts school closures in the spring saved lives. Experts caution about applying the findings now.

* More than 6,300 cases have been linked to U.S. colleges.

KEY DATA OF THE DAY

The virus death toll in the U.S. reaches 150,000.

More than 150,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, as the rate of deaths continues to rise on the heels of ballooning infections and hospitalizations in many areas.

An average of about 1,000 virus-related deaths a day have been reported over the past week, the worst rate since early June, when the number of people dying seemed to be falling. Now, daily death counts are rising in 24 states and Puerto Rico.

The nation’s overall death toll reached the grim figure on Wednesday, five months after the first reported virus death in the United States in February. The nation passed the 50,000 mark on April 27 and 100,000 on May 27, a milestone whose approach The Times commemorated by filling its front page with names of the dead.

During the early peak of the U.S. epidemic in late April, the national death toll was driven by a surge in New York State, which at the worst was reporting about 1,000 deaths a day, roughly half the national total at that time.

These days, the toll is being felt much more widely across many states, especially in the South, while New York is reporting about 16 deaths a day on average. For example, more than 2,100 deaths have been reported in the past week in Texas, the state with the highest recent death toll relative to its population, followed by Arizona and South Carolina.

The trend in virus deaths generally lags the trend in infections, reflecting the delays between when people test positive, when they die and when those deaths are reported. Daily death tolls kept falling for a while after daily case reports began to climb significantly in June. Since early July, though, the death numbers have been rising, while infection reports have begun to level off at around 65,000 a day.

Representative Gohmert tests positive ahead of a trip with Trump, prompting concern at the Capitol.

Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who has frequently refused to wear a mask in the Capitol, tested positive for coronavirus on Wednesday ahead of a planned trip with President Trump on Air Force One, officials familiar with the matter said.

The results immediately sent a shudder through the Capitol, where Mr. Gohmert has actively participated in multiple congressional hearings this week, including Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee session with Attorney General William P. Barr.

Lawmakers and Mr. Barr were seated more than six feet apart during the hearing, but reporters spotted an unmasked Mr. Gohmert outside the hearing room exchanging words with Mr. Barr and in close proximity to him. He also participated in a hearing held by the Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday, without wearing a mask.

Mr. Gohmert is among a group of House Republicans who have pointedly refused to wear masks in many instances while in the Capitol in recent weeks despite warnings from public health experts and an outbreak in his home state. He told CNN last month that he did not wear a mask because he did not have coronavirus.

“But if I get it, you’ll never see me without a mask,” he said.

Democrats were furious at the news, and both parties spent Wednesday morning scrambling to retrace Mr. Gohmert’s steps. The House Judiciary Committee was waiting for official guidance from Congress’s attending physician. It is a daunting task since Mr. Gohmert is a frequent schmoozer who could have come into close contact with dozens of fellow lawmakers and aides this week alone.

“I’m concerned about the irresponsible behavior of many of the Republicans who have chosen to consistently flout well established public health guidance,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and a member of the Judiciary Committee. He pleaded with Republicans like Mr. Gohmert to put on masks or go home.

Members of Congress have been flying weekly between Washington and their home states — some of which are experiencing serious outbreaks — and they are not required to be tested. Mr. Gohmert only received a test because he was scheduled to be in proximity to the president.

President Trump insisted on Tuesday that large portions of the country were “corona-free” — even though no portion actually is free of the virus — and said that governors should proceed with reopening, despite a new federal report warning 21 states that they were in a “red zone” and needed to take aggressive steps to slow the spread of the virus.

The report, dated Sunday, was shared with state officials by the White House coronavirus task force.

The states in the “red zone” — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin — each had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week.

When the president restarted his daily coronavirus briefings last week after shutting them down in April, he largely hewed to a script, urging Americans to wear masks and practice distancing.

But on Tuesday, he resumed his freelancing and wandering into politically and medically problematic areas. When reporters pressed him on a viral video he had retweeted Monday night that included doctors falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the virus and that masks were unnecessary, Mr. Trump responded: “They’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, and she’s had tremendous success with it.”

When a reporter noted that the physician who spoke of “a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston, also “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens,” Mr. Trump responded, “I know nothing about her,” and abruptly ended the briefing moments later.

Noting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus coordinator, have high approval ratings even as his own have sagged, Mr. Trump added: “And yet, they’re highly thought of — but nobody likes me.”

“It can only be my personality,” he concluded.

Here’s where talks on another round of pandemic relief stand.

* Top Democrats in Congress have indicated they would be unwilling to accept anything less than an extension of the current $600 weekly unemployment insurance benefit.

* That benefit, set to expire this week, is one of the key sticking points in intense negotiations between Democrats and Republicans over another coronavirus relief package to shore up the economy.

* The demand to maintain the current level of unemployment funding appears almost certain to be rejected by a majority of Senate Republicans.

* A $1 trillion proposal by Republicans would not extend the benefit and would instead maintain a flat $200 extra per week above regular unemployment benefits. Eventually, a new system of calculating federal aid would come in that capped benefits at about 70 percent of a worker’s prior income.

* Democrats have been publicly united behind the $3 trillion stimulus proposal the House approved in May. That plan included nearly $1 trillion for state, local and tribal governments and territories, as well as an extension of unemployment benefits and another round of $1,200 direct payments to American families.

Note: More than 6,300 cases have been linked to U.S. colleges.

A Times survey of every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities, revealed at least 6,300 cases tied to about 270 colleges over the course of the pandemic. And the new academic year has not yet begun at most schools.

But: There is no standardized reporting method for cases and deaths at colleges, and the information is not being publicly tracked at a national level. Of nearly 1,000 institutions contacted by The Times, some had already posted case information online, some provided full or partial numbers and others refused to answer basic questions, citing privacy concerns. Hundreds of colleges did not respond at all.

Still, the Times survey represents the most comprehensive look at the toll the virus has taken on the country’s colleges and universities.

Among the colleges that provided information, many offered no details about who contracted the virus, when they became ill or whether a case was connected to a larger outbreak. It is possible that some of the cases were identified months ago, in the early days of the U.S. outbreak before in-person learning was cut short, and that others involved students and employees who had not been on campus recently.

Warning!

Once again, the coronavirus is ascendant. As infections mount across the country, it is dawning on Americans that the epidemic is now unstoppable, and that no corner of the nation will be left untouched.

As of Tuesday, the pathogen had infected at least 4.3 million Americans, killing almost 150,000. Many experts fear the virus could kill 200,000 or even 300,000 by year’s end. Even Mr. Trump has donned a mask, after resisting for months, and has canceled the Republican National Convention celebrations in Florida.

Each state, each city has its own crisis driven by its own risk factors: vacation crowds in one, bars reopened too soon in another, a revolt against masks in a third.

“We are in a worse place than we were in March,” when the virus coursed through New York, said Dr. Leana S. Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner. “Back then we had one epicenter. Now we have lots.”

To assess where the country is heading now, The New York Times interviewed 20 public health experts — clinicians and epidemiologists, historians and sociologists, because the spread of the virus is now influenced as much by human behavior as it is by the pathogen.

Over all, the scientists conveyed a pervasive sense of sadness and exhaustion. Where once there was defiance, and then a growing sense of dread, now there seems to be sorrow and frustration, a feeling that so many funerals never had to happen and that nothing was going well.

“We’re all incredibly depressed and in shock at how out of control the virus is in the U.S.,” said Dr. Michele Barry, the director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University.

Here are other developments from around the globe:

Across the Middle East, celebrations for Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice that marks the end of the hajj this weekend, will be tamer this year. About 2.5 million Muslims from around the world performed the pilgrimage to Mecca last year. This year, Saudi Arabia said it would allow just 1,000 pilgrims, all from within the kingdom.

The federal government in Australia said this week that it would send a specialist medical team usually deployed to disaster zones to help manage an outbreak in the state of Victoria. The state of Queensland said it would bar entry to travelers from Sydney and surrounding regions in New South Wales after recording new cases from travelers who had passed through the city.

Sending patients from hospitals to nursing homes to free up hospital beds early in the pandemic has been described as “reckless” by lawmakers in Britain, the BBC reports. The death toll in British care homes has been a defining scandal of the pandemic for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Also Zimbabwe’s agriculture minister dies of the virus.

About the writer(s): Reporting was contributed by Pam Belluck, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Weiyi Cai, Julia Calderone, Benedict Carey, Michael Corkery, Nicholas Fandos, Lauryn Higgins, Danielle Ivory, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Isabella Kwai, Alex Lemonides, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Claire Moses, Jeffrey Moyo, Sharon Otterman, Jeanna Smialek, Mitch Smith, Eileen Sullivan, Neil Vigdor, and Elaine Yu.

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Note: Let's face it there's no two ways about it - this Virus is here today and will be with us until they can absolutely kill - it with the correct vaccine.

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