Here’s what you need to know:
- The latest numbers on jobless claims and the deficit could further the standoff on the next stimulus bill.
- Distrust of the president hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe.
- The number of new state unemployment claims in the U.S. fell below one million last week for the first time in months.
- The U.S. reports its highest single-day virus death toll of the month.
- New Zealand has a fresh outbreak. Can it beat the virus again?
- In their debut as running mates, Biden and Harris attack Trump’s handling of the virus.
- In China, two people who had seemingly recovered from the virus tested positive again.
The latest numbers on jobless claims and the deficit could further the standoff on the next stimulus bill.
Efforts to reach an agreement on another pandemic stimulus package could get even tougher after weekly new jobless claims fell below one million for the first time since March and the federal budget deficit continued to hit record highs, reaching $2.8 trillion in July — two major elements that could shift the negotiating landscape.
Republicans and Democrats have been at odds over how much to spend on another round of stimulus aid, with Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, pushing for at least $2 trillion and the White House insisting on staying around $1 trillion.
Democrats have insisted that much more than $1 trillion is needed for humanitarian and economic reasons. Republicans have objected to that price tag, with some lawmakers and White House officials saying the economy is beginning to recover and doesn’t need that level of support, and others saying that the United States cannot afford to keep piling on debt.
Those positions could further harden given that weekly jobless claims, which had been above one million for months, fell below that number last week, with 963,000 people filing first-time claims for benefits under regular state unemployment programs. On Thursday, Ms. Pelosi doubled down on the Democrats’ position, saying that they would not agree to a stimulus package unless it provided at least $2 trillion of additional aid.
The Treasury Department said on Wednesday that the budget deficit had reached a historic high of $2.8 trillion, in large part because of spending from the first $2.2 trillion pandemic package that lawmakers approved in March.
Even before those numbers were released, some Republicans in Washington were already saying they hoped no additional aid would be forthcoming because of the ballooning deficit.
“From my standpoint, the breakdown in the talks is very good news. It’s very good news for future generations,” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said in an interview on Friday with Breitbart News. “I hope the talks remain broken down.”
But economists warn it is too early to withdraw aid, especially given that the virus has not abated and the pace of rehiring has slowed. Millions of Americans remain out of work and much of the spending power from the last stimulus package has run out, including an extra $600 per week in unemployment aid.
“It remains quite stunning that Congress has yet to agree on a fresh round of relief legislation with so many Americans hurting financially,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economist at Bankrate.com.
Distrust of the president hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe.
In June, as the coronavirus crisis appeared to hit a lull in the United States, teachers and parents across the country finally began feeling optimistic about reopening schools in the fall. Going back into the classroom seemed possible. Districts started to pull together plans. Then came a tweet.
“SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” President Trump declared on July 6, voicing a mantra he would repeat again and again in the coming weeks, with varying degrees of threat, as he sought to jump-start the nation’s flagging economy.
Around the same time, caseloads in much of the country started to climb again. In the weeks since, hundreds of districts have reversed course and decided to start the school year with remote instruction.
By some estimates, at least half of the nation’s children will now spend a significant portion of the fall, or longer, learning in front of their laptops.
Rising infection rates were clearly the major driver of the move to continue remote learning. But Mr. Trump’s often bellicose demands for reopening classrooms helped harden the view of many educators that it would be unsafe.
“If you had told me that Trump was doing this as a favor to the schools-must-not-open crowd, I’d believe you,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Indeed, as the president has pushed for schools to reopen, parents have largely moved in the other direction. A recent Washington Post poll found that parents disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of school reopening by a two-thirds majority. And a new Gallup poll shows that fewer parents want their children to return to school buildings now than did in the spring.
Across the country, tension among unions, school officials, local authorities and governors over who should call the shots has led to mixed messages about whether students will be attending in-person classes, with many districts only weeks, or even days, away from scheduled reopenings.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Teachers Aren’t Ready to Reopen Schools
The president and some parents are demanding schools reopen for in-person learning — but teachers and unions are resisting that call.On Wednesday, New York City’s bid to become the only major district to bring students back into physical classrooms hit a snag. The city’s influential principals’ and teachers’ unions called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to delay the start of in-person instruction by several weeks before phasing students back into buildings throughout the fall. Students are scheduled to return to classrooms one to three days a week starting Sept. 10.
On Thursday, Mr. de Blasio announced that all of New York City’s roughly 1,300 public school buildings will have a full-time, certified nurse in place by the time schools are scheduled to physically reopen.
The announcement fulfills a major safety demand made by the city’s powerful teachers’ union, which has said its members should not return to schools until there is a nurse in every building. The union has also demanded that the city upgrade outdated ventilation systems and create a clearer protocol for testing and tracing in schools.
The number of new state unemployment claims in the U.S. fell below one million last week for the first time in months.
The number of Americans filing for state unemployment benefits fell below one million last week for the first time since March. But layoffs remain exceptionally high by historical standards, and the pace of rehiring has slowed.
The Labor Department on Thursday reported that 963,000 people filed first-time claims for benefits under regular state unemployment programs last week. Another 489,000 applied under the federal program that covers independent contractors, self-employed workers and others who don’t qualify for regular state unemployment insurance.
Unemployment filings have fallen sharply since late March, when nearly 6.9 million Americans applied for benefits in a single week. But the numbers still dwarf those in any previous recession: Before the coronavirus pandemic, the worst week on record was in 1982, when 695,000 people submitted claims.
Initial weekly unemployment claims,
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Regular claims fell under one million last week for the first time since mid-March
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Initial weekly unemployment claims, both regular and those under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program
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first time since mid-March
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Unlike the temporary layoffs that dominated in the first weeks of the crisis, most of the new job losses are likely to be permanent.
“It’s even more frightening now,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “There’s no silver lining of quick recalls like the higher levels that we saw back in March.”
And the broader economic recovery has lost momentum. Employers brought back 1.8 million jobs in July, the Labor Department reported last week, well below the 4.8 million in June. More timely data from private-sector sources suggests that the slowdown has continued in August, and economists warn that it could worsen now that key federal programs to help households and businesses weather the pandemic have expired.
A $600 federal boost to unemployed workers’ weekly state checks ran out at the end of July, and negotiations between the White House and Democrats to reinstate it have come to a stop. Many jobless Americans have seen their weekly income slashed by half or more. State unemployment benefits vary widely: In Massachusetts, some workers can receive more than $900 a week, while in Mississippi, the maximum benefit is just $235. Benefits tend to be less generous in states with larger Black populations.
Key Data of the Day
The U.S. reports its highest single-day virus death toll of the month.
Officials across the United States reported at least 1,470 deaths on Wednesday, the highest single-day total yet in August, according to a New York Times database, and a reflection of the continued toll of the early-summer case surge in Sun Belt states.
More than half the deaths reported on Wednesday were spread across five states that saw some of the most dramatic case spikes in June and July. Texas reported more than 300 deaths Wednesday. Florida more than 200. And Arizona, California and Georgia all reported more than 100 each.
Even as the number of new cases has fallen from its late July peak, deaths have remained persistently high. For more than two weeks, the country has averaged more than 1,000 deaths a day, more than twice as many as in early July.
The last six weeks have marked a tragic reversal of months of progress in reducing deaths. By early summer, deaths had declined to fewer than 500 per day, far below the peak of more than 2,000 daily in April. But even as death reports reached their nadir, the rebound was already being predicted because of the Sun Belt outbreaks.
Because some people do not die until weeks after contracting the virus, reports of additional deaths can remain high even after new case reports start falling. Arizona, where case numbers have been falling for weeks, posted one of its highest daily death totals on Wednesday. Though new cases are showing sustained growth in only two states, deaths are trending upward in 14.
With the exception of three days this summer, Wednesday’s death total was the country’s highest since late May. The figure was higher on each of those three days because a single state reported large numbers of backlogged deaths from unspecified days. Tuesday’s death toll of 1,450 had also been the highest since late May, excluding the three anomalous summer days.
New Zealand has a fresh outbreak. Can it beat the virus again?
As the week began, New Zealanders were celebrating 100 days without community spread of the coronavirus. Now residents of the country’s largest city, Auckland, are back under lockdown as health officials battle a fresh outbreak.
Four new cases in Auckland were reported on Wednesday, and by Thursday the cluster had grown to 17. Epidemiologists are now racing to solve the mystery of how the virus found its way back into the isolated island nation.
One theory is that it entered through cargo and spread through a cold storage warehouse where some of the infected New Zealanders worked. But epidemiologists say that is a long shot because human-to-human contact was the most likely source.
Another focus is quarantine facilities for returning travelers — the source of a recent outbreak in Melbourne, Australia.
Either way, New Zealand is rolling out a huge testing, contact tracing and quarantine blitz that aims to quash Covid-19 for the second time.
“Going hard and early is still the best course of action,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Thursday, at what will once again be a daily coronavirus news briefing. “We have a plan.”
Many other places — including Australia, Hong Kong and Vietnam — have confronted second waves after early triumphs. But New Zealand has responded with a level of urgency and action that it hopes will be a model for how to eliminate a burst of infection and rapidly reopen.
Michael Baker, an epidemiologist who was a leading proponent of New Zealand’s efforts to eliminate the virus, said that the country’s prior success, and the sustained elimination of the virus in places like Taiwan and Fiji, suggested room for optimism. He said the latest outbreak could be small and quickly brought under control.
“The government moved incredibly fast and decisively with the lockdown,” he said. “If there are any undetected chains of transmission, they will peter out.”
New Zealand has at least learned what not to do from its neighbor and rival, Australia, where 800 people who had tested positive in Melbourne were recently found not to be at home during random checks from officials. Australia’s missteps have also led New Zealand to focus on quarantine facilities, which is how the virus moved from travelers to the community in Melbourne — through hotel workers who interacted with guests and then carried it home.
In their debut as running mates, Biden and Harris attack Trump’s handling of the virus.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris vowed on Wednesday to lead the United States out of the coronavirus crisis during their first appearance together as running mates, drawing attacks from President Trump.
Ms. Harris, whom Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday as his running mate for the Democratic ticket, made clear that part of her campaign role would be demonstrating her skills as a prosecutor to build a case against Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, methodically detailing what she cast as the administration’s failures in combating the coronavirus, reopening the economy and creating conditions under which schools could reopen safely this fall.
“Let me tell you, as somebody who has presented my fair share of arguments in court, the case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open-and-shut,” she said.
Mr. Trump defended his administration’s response to the virus, citing the number of tests that have been administered and bragging about the government’s efforts to ramp up production of ventilators to help gravely ill patients.
“We have better testing than any country in the world,” he said, adding that “when you look at the job that we’ve done compared to others, we’ve done a great job.”
In an appearance in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris laid out the staggering toll that the coronavirus crisis has taken on every facet of American life, suggesting that they will try to make the election a referendum on Mr. Trump’s handling of the outbreak.
“This virus has impacted almost every country, but there’s a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation,” Ms. Harris said. “It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously from the start. His refusal to get testing up and running. His flip-flopping on social distancing and wearing masks. His delusional belief that he knows better than the experts.”
In China, two people who had seemingly recovered from the virus tested positive again.
A 68-year-old woman in the Chinese province of Hubei, where the global coronavirus outbreak was first detected, tested positive again this month after recovering from a case of the virus recorded in February, officials said. Another man who had recovered from an infection in April was also found to be an asymptomatic carrier in Shanghai this week.
The two cases, which came months after their original diagnoses, have revived concerns about mysterious second-time infections that have baffled experts since the early days of the pandemic, with some blaming testing flaws.
The authorities in Jingzhou, a city near Wuhan, the original epicenter of the outbreak, said on Wednesday that the woman had tested positive again on Aug. 9, after having recovered for several months from a virus infection first recorded in early February. The nucleic acid test results for her contacts were all said to be negative.
“There have been very few reports of cases of possible ‘relapses’ or second-time Covid-19 infections, and we still don’t fully understand the risk of this,” said Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. “But we would expect that some infected persons could be vulnerable to reinfection, particularly as time passes.”
“It’s a feature of other respiratory infections that we can be reinfected with similar viruses throughout our lives, and it is unlikely that a Covid-19 infection (or a vaccination) would provide lifelong immunity against a subsequent infection,” Dr. Cowling added. “What we have not yet understood is the duration of immunity.”
Other experts have said it is highly unlikely that the coronavirus would strike the same person twice within a short window, and reports of reinfection may instead be cases of drawn-out illness, with the virus taking a slow burn even months after their first exposure.
global roundup
In Germany, the number of new cases is rising, and testing hits a snag in one state.
Germany’s daily infections rose to a level not seen since the country successfully flattened the curve in May, with the country reporting 1,445 new cases on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, the state of Bavaria, which had promised free tests to all returning holiday travelers, was under scrutiny for failing to deliver timely results.
Cases have slowly risen over the past few weeks as holidaymakers return from heavily affected areas and schools restart. In August alone, there have been six days when Germany has registered more than 1,000 new cases.
The growth is especially noteworthy because it is linked not to a single cluster, but to a general rise of infections in the population. Five districts, including one in central Berlin, reported more than 25 cases per 100,000 in the past week, according to figures released Wednesday. The seven-day reproduction value is at 1.04, meaning more people are becoming infected than are recovering.
Also on Wednesday, the Bavarian authorities admitted that they had failed to promptly deliver 44,000 test results to returning travelers. Among those were 900 positive tests for the virus. The state has set up free testing centers in airports and some major train stations. The state’s governor, Markus Söder, called the breakdown in transmitting test results “really, really annoying.”
Jens Spahn, the country’s health minister, warned that many of the new infections are seen in young people. The average age of infected people was 34 last week, the lowest it has been since the beginning of the pandemic.
In other news from around the world:
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President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who offered this week to be “injected in public” with Russia’s coronavirus vaccine to allay concerns about its safety, may be cleared to do so as early as May 1, 2021, his government said on Thursday.
Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said the president would not take part in Russian-funded clinical trials of the vaccine that are expected to begin in the Philippines in October, but that his offer to be a test subject was genuine. Mr. Duterte has previously claimed that gasoline can kill the virus, and advised people to douse themselves and their face masks with it.
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Canada has established a system to divert fresh food left unused because of restaurant shutdowns to food banks and other relief agencies. Marie-Claude Bibeau, the agriculture minister, said on Thursday that the project would prevent about 12 million kilograms of food, including eggs, meat, seafood and vegetables, from going to waste.
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Several cities in China announced this week that they had detected the coronavirus on imported food packaging. Officials in two cities — Wuhu, in eastern Anhui Province, and Xi’an, in central Shaanxi Province — announced separately this week that the virus had been found on the packaging of shrimp imports from Ecuador.
Officials in the southern city of Shenzhen also said on Thursday that a sample of frozen chicken wings imported from Brazil had tested positive. And officials from the coastal city of Yantai, said earlier this week that the virus had been detected on the packaging of imported frozen seafood products, according to state media. The Yantai officials did not specify where the seafood originated.
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The British authorities are seeking a “head of pandemic preparedness” to review the government’s approach and to act on “lessons learned” from the coronavirus crisis. The job offer was posted on the government’s internal website, according to British news outlets. Britain is among the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, and many experts, lawmakers and health care professionals blame the government’s handling of the situation. “This is not a brand-new role,” a government spokesperson said. “This simply reflects an expansion and merging of different teams.”
Greece reports a virus case at one of its overcrowded island migrant camps.
The first coronavirus infection was reported on Thursday in one of Greece’s overcrowded camps for migrants on Aegean islands. A 35-year-old man from Yemen living at the Vial camp on Chios tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday night, a Greek Migration Ministry official said.
The man, who arrived from neighboring Turkey in September, has been hospitalized on the island with mild symptoms. Another 25 camp residents believed to have been in contact with him have been quarantined, the official said.
The Chios infection is not the first in a Greek migrant camp — dozens of cases were reported in April at three facilities on the mainland. But it is the first in an island camp, where overcrowding is the most intense. In the Vial facility, 3,800 people live in a space meant for fewer than one-third that number.
Conditions at the island camps, long criticized as unsanitary and inhumane by human rights groups, have become particularly worrying amid the pandemic. Restrictions on movement are in force, though migrants are allowed to leave the camps between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.
Greece has generally weathered the pandemic better than many of its neighbors, recording around 6,000 cases since late February and just over 200 deaths. But daily case reports have increased sharply in recent weeks, prompting the authorities to reintroduce some restrictions. The country reported 262 cases on Wednesday, its highest figure so far; only 29 of them appeared to be linked to foreign arrivals.
Some conferences postponed college football. Not so fast in the South.
Never was it more publicly clear than this week, five months after the N.C.A.A. and its conferences canceled basketball tournaments in response to the coronavirus crisis, that college sports leaders are sharply divided over the prospect of athletic competitions during a pandemic.
By Wednesday, the Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Southeastern Conferences had all publicly broken with the Big Ten and Pac-12 and reinforced their ambitions to play beginning next month. The Big Ten and the Pac-12 concluded on Tuesday that it was simply too dangerous to try to play sports this fall.
“Reasonable people can disagree on it, and the Pac-12 and the Big Ten are seeing much of the same information that we’re seeing,” Bob Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner, said after his league released its football schedule on Wednesday morning. “But our board believes in our scientists and has come to a conclusion that’s different, and so have the leadership of the SEC and the A.C.C.”
For officials in the SEC, the Big 12 and the A.C.C., the collective home of 14 of the last 15 national champions in football, salvaging a season is the lone route to delivering on what they pledged for players and pulling in the many hundreds of millions of shared dollars that help keep athletic departments, including lower profile sports, afloat. And as skeptics say those goals and needs collide with medical science and the notion of amateur athletics, conference and university officials insist that they would change their approaches if circumstances warranted.
The Big 12 will allow nonconference games in September before advancing to league play on Sept. 26, the day the SEC season is to open.
Does it seem as if everyone’s got it better than you?
A beach house, a suburban home, a home without children, a home filled with family: These days, everyone wants something that someone else has. You are not alone if you are filled with “quarantine envy.” Here are some ways to deal with it.
Reporting was contributed by Ian Austen, Alan Blinder, Ben Casselman, Damien Cave, Emily Cochrane, Katie Glueck, Jason Gutierrez, Mike Ives, Thomas Kaplan, Niki Kitsantonis, Elian Peltier, Amy Qin, Christopher F. Schuetze, Eliza Shapiro, Mitch Smith, Deborah Solomon, Serena Solomon and Elaine Yu.
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Coronavirus Live Updates: New Zealand Races to Trace Source of New Outbreak - The New York Times
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