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Phoenix has a testing crisis, and FEMA refuses to help, the mayor says.
Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix said on Sunday that with cases and death counts soaring in Arizona, testing sites in her city and surrounding Maricopa County are overwhelmed, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has rebuffed her pleas for help.
She raised the issue on the ABC program “This Week,” saying that it “feels like they’re declaring victory while we’re in crisis mode.”
In an interview later in the day, Ms. Gallego, a Democrat, said she had been trying since April to get more testing resources for Phoenix, both from FEMA and from the private sector. But testing, she says, remains woefully inadequate, especially for those who lack health insurance.
“We are the largest city not to have received this type of investment,” Ms. Gallego said, noting that FEMA had set up testing sites in Houston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. “And you can see it in the increasing rate of positives.”
More than 20 percent of tests in Arizona are coming back positive now, she said. “Public health officials tell me that when you’re doing the appropriate amount of testing, it should be around 2 percent,” she said.
An aide to the mayor said that FEMA had responded to the city’s most recent request by saying the agency was “getting out of the testing business.” Maricopa County officials were told the same thing when they asked FEMA for help, the mayor said.
Cases have doubled in Arizona in recent weeks; more than 3,400 new cases were announced Sunday. The state marked a record on Saturday with 3,182 confirmed and suspected virus hospitalizations.
“I hope they understand what it’s like out here,” Mayor Gallego said. “I wish I could have the president with me as people fill their cars with gas so they can wait in lines for eight hours, while they’re sick and it’s 110 degrees outside,” to get a test.
“This is not just a Phoenix problem,” she said. “I think many communities and people across both parties would like to see the federal government play a role.”
Vice President Mike Pence, who visited Phoenix on Wednesday, said last week that testing was readily available to anyone in the country who needed it. His office referred questions to FEMA, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We do have one hopeful note,” Ms. Gallego said Sunday afternoon. After she raised the issue on TV, she said, “The White House reached out and said they’re interested in more information, and would try to see what they can do.”
Health experts push back on Trump’s false claim that 99 percent of U.S. infections are ‘totally harmless.’
Public health experts and officials on Sunday disputed President’s Trump’s characterization of the seriousness of the coronavirus.
In an Independence Day speech on Saturday at the White House, Mr. Trump sought to dismiss widespread criticism of his administration’s slow and ineffective response to the virus. He repeated his false claim that an abundance of testing made the country’s cases look worse than they were, and he asserted that 99 percent of the nation’s cases were “totally harmless.”
Cases have risen steeply in recent weeks, and infections announced across the United States last week totaled more than 330,000 — a record high that included the five highest single-day totals of the pandemic. On Sunday, more than 40,000 new cases had been announced nationally by evening.
On Sunday, the former F.D.A. commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said that “certainly more than 1 percent of people get serious illness” if they are infected. Speaking on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” he estimated that when all cases were counted, including asymptomatic ones, between 2 and 5 percent of infected people become sick enough to require hospitalization.
Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, sidestepped repeated questions about that statement on three television news shows. “I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” he said at one point.
Dr. Hahn told CNN’s Dana Bash that it’s “too early to tell” if it’s safe for Republicans to hold their convention in Jacksonville, Fla., next month. “We’ll have to see how this unfolds in Florida and elsewhere around the country,” he said.
Even some Republicans pushed back at the president’s assertions.
“The virus is not harmless,” Miami’s mayor, Carlos Giménez, said on “Face the Nation,” noting that positivity rates in Miami-Dade County — the share of coronavirus tests that come back positive — were now above 20 percent. Florida has reached record highs for new cases several times in the past 10 days, reporting more than 11,400 new cases on Saturday alone, according to a New York Times database. More than 10,000 new cases were announced in Florida on Sunday, and the state has now had over 200,000 total cases.
Mr. Trump and other administration officials have also highlighted the country’s declining death rate.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said improvements in care may have caused the decline, but also described deaths as a “lagging indicator.”
“By the time somebody gets infected, it takes a couple weeks before they get hospitalized and get really sick, and another week or 10 days before they die, ” he said.
He also said that many of the people now being infected were younger adults and less likely to develop severe illness.
Studies that have calculated the death rate based on broader antibody testing that takes silent cases into consideration suggest an infection death rate of less than 1 percent, Dr. Jha said.
“It’s always tricky to do this in the midst of a pandemic,” Dr. Jha said. “There are a lot of factors that go into it. But let’s say you took 1,000 Americans at random who were all infected. Our best guess is that between six and 10 would likely die of the virus.”
And the death rate does not capture all of the harm caused by the disease. As many as 15 to 20 percent of known Covid-19 patients may require hospitalization, and of the group admitted, 15 to 20 percent are transferred into intensive care, according to some estimates.
And many who have recovered are still struggling to regain their pre-disease lives, and may face long-term health issues.
In Texas, caseloads soar, hospital beds dwindle, and political divisions sharpen.
Hospitals in Austin, Texas, could be “overrun” within two weeks if current trends hold, Mayor Steve Adler warned on Sunday.
“If we don’t change the trajectory, we are within two weeks of having our hospitals overrun,” the mayor said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” He said intensive care units could fill up even sooner, perhaps within 10 days.
Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, issued the same two-week warning in an appearance on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” noting that roughly one in four virus tests in the city was now positive and that the demand for testing was exceeding capacity.
The virus is spreading rapidly in Texas, one of the first states to lift stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses. It has broken daily records for new cases several times in the past week. More than 195,000 cases have been identified over the course of the pandemic in the state, which hit a single-day high on Wednesday with more than 8,100 new cases.
Travis County, Austin’s home, has confirmed more than 11,000 cases since the pandemic began, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Harris County, Houston’s home, has reported 35,913.
But the virus has moved beyond Texas’ generally liberal cities, reaching into the deep-red regions of the state that have resisted aggressive public health regulation.
In Lubbock, more people tested positive in the last three weeks than in the previous three months combined. Two months ago, on the day that Gov. Greg Abbott began to reopen the state, the city recorded eight positive tests. On Wednesday, there were 184.
Mayor Adler said that the most important thing about the order Governor Abbott signed on Thursday making masks mandatory in most counties was that people would now be getting the same guidance from both state and local officials.
“It’s the messaging,” he said. “It’s the singular voice from both parties saying to our community, ‘This is important, you have to do it, it works.’”
Many conservative Texans do not share that view, including some of the state’s top leaders. On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared himself tired of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor. “I don’t need his advice anymore,” Mr. Patrick said.
That sentiment was echoed outside a popular, newly opened hamburger restaurant in Wolfforth, just outside Lubbock, where even Mr. Abbott, a Republican, came under harsh criticism. “It seems like he’s been influenced by Fauci and the left,” Mark Stewart said.
But in the biggest cities in Texas, Governor Abbott’s directives don’t go far enough.
“I’m sure a mask order will make some difference, and I’m grateful that that’s happened now,” Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat who is effectively the chief executive of Harris County, said on the ABC program “This Week.” “That said, as long as we’re doing as little as possible and hoping for the best, we’re always going to be chasing this thing, we’re always going to be behind.”
Some Texans are worried about a political event on the horizon: The executive committee of the state’s Republican Party voted on Thursday to go ahead with an in-person convention in Houston next week. In response, the Texas Medical Association said it would withdraw from the event as an advertiser.
“With or without masks, an indoor gathering of thousands of people from all around the state in a city with tens of thousands of active COVID-19 cases poses a significant health risk,” the organization’s president, Dr. Diana L. Fite, said in a statement on Friday.
Even Mr. Patrick said that holding an in-person convention in Houston was not a good idea, citing the risks of exposing people to Covid-19. But he added that he respected the vote of the committee. “I will be there,” he said in a statement in Friday.
The fullest look yet at the racial inequity of the coronavirus.
Early numbers had shown that Black and Latino people were being harmed by the coronavirus at higher rates, but new federal data — made available after The New York Times sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — reveals a clearer and more complete picture: Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in a widespread manner that spans the country, throughout hundreds of counties in urban, suburban and rural areas, and across all age groups.
Latino and African-American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, according to the new data, which provides detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties. And Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows.
The disparities persist across state lines and regions. They exist in rural towns on the Great Plains, in suburban counties, like Fairfax County, Va., and in many of the country’s biggest cities.
“Systemic racism doesn’t just evidence itself in the criminal justice system,” said Quinton Lucas, who is the third Black mayor of Kansas City, Mo., which is in a state where 40 percent of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16 percent of the state’s population. “It’s something that we’re seeing taking lives in not just urban America, but rural America, and all types of parts where, frankly, people deserve an equal opportunity to live — to get health care, to get testing, to get tracing.”
Global Roundup
Masks are now mandatory in Iran.
As the Iranian government battles a new wave of the virus, the authorities have, for first time since the pandemic began, ordered citizens to cover their faces in public.
The new rules took effect on Sunday.
A day earlier, President Hassan Rouhani urged businesses to refuse service to customers not wearing masks. And he said any government employee who showed up at work without one would be sent home and marked down as absent for the day.
In Tehran, the capital, municipal officials said the police, security forces and public transportation authorities would crack down on people violating the mask rule.
On Sunday, Iran marked its highest number of deaths, 163 people, from the virus in a single day since the pandemic started, according to the health ministry. Eighteen of the country’s 31 provinces are on a state of high alert for Covid-19, with nine declared as red zones, a spokeswoman for the ministry said.
A doctor overseeing pandemic patients at Tehran’s designated hospital for the disease said all the beds there were full.
But it remains to be seen if Iranians will adhere to the new rules.
Iran briefly imposed a lockdown during its annual New Year holiday period in early April and opened the country for business in early May. Since then, the majority of Iranians have resumed ordinary life — and then some.
While large gatherings such as weddings and funerals were still considered prohibited, a lavish Cinderella-themed wedding in the Lavasan hills near Tehran drew the ire of local officials. There were said to be 120 actors and 65 employees of the wedding hall re-enacting the fairy tell.
The health ministry said the groom had been arrested.
In other news around the world:
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People crossing into Mexico from Lukeville, Ariz., over the weekend hit a roadblock briefly put up on the main road leading south from the border by residents fearful of the virus, The Associated Press reported. An inspection checkpoint set up near the border crossing will continue to operate to “safeguard the health of our community,” a local mayor, José Ramos Arzate, said in a statement. He noted that Arizona has an “accelerated rate of Covid-19 contagion,” and said people from the United States should be allowed in only for “essential matters.”
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In rewarding Tokyo’s first female governor, Yuriko Koike, with a second term on Sunday, voters appeared to be endorsing her highly visible leadership during the pandemic. The sprawling metropolis has avoided the kind of death toll seen in other big cities. But a recent resurgence in cases in Tokyo has made clear that her challenge is far from over. Even as Ms. Koike, 67, cruised to victory on Sunday, with exit polls by the Japanese news media showing her winning 60 percent of the vote, Tokyo reported 111 new infections, its fourth straight day over 100.
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Croatia’s ruling party came first in a general election on Sunday despite criticism over the country’s recent handling of the pandemic. Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s center-right party, the Croatian Democratic Union, had its best showing in more than a decade.
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A military plane carrying Canadian troops to Latvia as part of a NATO mission turned around midflight after the military learned that someone who might have come in contact with the passengers tested had positive for the virus. About 70 passengers and aircrew members were on board the flight Thursday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
How deadly is the coronavirus? Scientists are searching for a definitive answer.
More than six months into the pandemic, the coronavirus has infected more than 11 million people worldwide, killing more than 525,000. But despite the increasing toll, scientists still do not have a clear answer to one of the most fundamental questions about the virus: How deadly is it?
A firm estimate could help governments predict how many deaths would ensue if the virus spread out of control. The figure, usually called the infection fatality rate, could tell health officials what to expect as the pandemic spreads in densely populated nations like Brazil, India and Nigeria.
In poorer countries, the number could help officials decide whether to spend more on oxygen concentrators and ventilators, or on measles shots and mosquito nets.
At present, countries have very different case fatality rates, which measure deaths among patients known to have had Covid-19. In most cases, that number is highest in countries that have had the virus the longest.
According to data gathered by The New York Times, China had reported 90,294 cases as of Friday and 4,634 deaths, a case fatality rate of 5 percent. The United States, which has had a record number of new daily cases six times in the past two weeks, has had 2,811,447 cases and 129,403 deaths, about 4.6 percent.
Ten sizable countries, most in Western Europe, have tested bigger percentages of their populations than the United States has. Their case fatality rates vary wildly: Iceland’s is less than 1 percent, New Zealand’s and Israel’s are below 2 percent. Belgium, by comparison, is at 16 percent, and Italy and Britain are at 14 percent.
Before last week, the World Health Organization had no official estimate for the infection fatality rate. Instead, it had relied on a mix of data sent in by member countries and academic groups, and on a meta-analysis done in May by scientists at the University of Wollongong and James Cook University in Australia.
Those researchers looked at 267 studies in more than a dozen countries and then chose the 25 they considered the most accurate, weighting them for accuracy, and averaged the data. They concluded that the global infection fatality rate was 0.64 percent.
That percentage of the world’s population equals 47 million people, including two million Americans.
Other recent scientific developments:
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A six-gene segment of the human genome that increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus was inherited from Neanderthals, according to a new study. The variant is common in Bangladesh, and may explain why Covid-19 patients of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate in Britain. Only 8 percent of Europeans carry it, and it is almost completely absent in Africa.
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Researchers reported new evidence that a variant of the virus that has come to predominate in much of the world did so partly because it is more transmissible than other variants. The variant carries a mutation that stabilizes the virus’s spike proteins, which it uses to infect human cells. While the report notes that the findings aren’t definitive, the lead author, Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist, said, “It is the dominant virus in the world, it only took about a month for that to happen, and it’s now the one we should be looking at.”
In Australia, thousands are told they can’t leave their homes, effective immediately.
The Australian state of Victoria has locked down nine public housing towers in Melbourne, its capital, telling about 3,000 residents that they must not leave their homes for any reason for at least five days.
The strict quarantine — which is the first of its kind in Australia during the pandemic and is being monitored by hundreds of police officers — started immediately on Saturday afternoon after 23 coronavirus infections were found in 12 of the towers’ households. Public health officials said everyone in the towers would be tested over the next few days.
“There is a lot of intermingling of the people between those towers for work, for family, for community events,” said Dr. Paul Kelly, Australia’s acting chief medical officer.
He called the towers “vertical cruise ships” with the potential to cause a major surge in cases at a time when Australia’s infections are already rising because of an outbreak across several Melbourne suburbs.
Some residents of the towers objected to being quarantined without notice. Abdi Ibrahim, who lives there with his five children, including 7-month-old twins, told The Australian that the lockdown had been imposed so quickly that it gave him no time to buy groceries for his family. He also had to cancel his Sunday shift at a logistics company.
“If I don’t work, I don’t get paid,” he said, adding: “We are so isolated — you know what I mean, it’s like a prison.”
Officials said they would provide tower residents with food, cash compensation and rent relief.
As the towers were being locked down, officials also added two more Melbourne postal codes to the 10 others already under stay-at-home orders, affecting a total of more than 300,000 people. Unlike residents of the towers, people in these areas are allowed to leave their homes for work or education, exercise, medical care, caregiving or shopping for essential supplies.
Australia’s total case count remains relatively small, but public health officials have become increasingly alarmed by the outbreak in Melbourne. About 200 new cases emerged in and around the city over the past two days, a growth rate not seen since March.
Voters endorse Tokyo governor’s handling of the pandemic by re-electing her.
In rewarding Tokyo’s first female governor, Yuriko Koike, with a second term on Sunday, voters endorsed her highly visible leadership as the sprawling metropolis has avoided the kind of spiraling death toll from the coronavirus seen in other world capitals.
But a recent resurgence in cases in Tokyo has made clear that her challenge is far from over.
Even as Ms. Koike, 67, cruised to victory on Sunday, with exit polls by the Japanese news media showing her winning 60 percent of the vote, Tokyo reported 111 new infections, its fourth straight day over 100.
The creeping increase in cases has started to raise anxieties that the capital may have to reinstate elements of the nearly two-month state of emergency that it emerged from at the end of May. That growing caseload was felt in the election on Sunday, as voter turnout dipped below 35 percent.
During the emergency period, in which the government issued voluntary requests for businesses to limit operations and residents to stay home, Ms. Koike made herself the face of Tokyo’s response to the virus. She anchored near nightly news conferences to deliver daily test figures and advice on how to avoid infections.
In contrast to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who often appeared stiff in front of the news media, Ms. Koike was a much more relaxed presence when she appeared in conversation with Japan’s most famous YouTube star, Hikakin.
“Seeing her face on television every day made me feel comfortable,” Yuki Matsuura, 70, said as she voted in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo. “I think that she is doing the best that she can in a very difficult situation.”
A large-scale study in Britain will look at lasting effects on those who survive Covid-19.
Some survivors of Covid-19 have a long road to recovery even after discharged from the hospital, and the illness can leave long-lasting effects that are just beginning to be recognized and understood. It is still too early to know the trajectory for these patients, but scientists are beginning research that could predict those effects, and have an impact on how doctors treat the illness.
In Britain, the National Institute for Health Research, the University of Leicester and university hospitals in the city of Leicester have started a study of about 10,000 patients, which the university says makes it the largest of its kind in the world.
“As we continue our fight against this global pandemic, we are learning more and more about the impact the disease can have not only on immediate health, but longer-term physical and mental health too,” Matt Hancock, the health secretary said, in a statement on Sunday.
Chris Brightling, a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester and chief investigator for the study, said that “it is vitally important that we rapidly gather evidence on the longer-term consequences of contracting severe Covid-19 so we can develop and test new treatment strategies for them and other people affected by future waves of the disease.”
Mr. Hancock told the BBC on Sunday that long-term effects are a “really serious problem for a minority of people who’ve had Covid, thankfully not me,” describing them as a “post-viral fatigue syndrome.”
‘Farming never stops’: Migrant workers in the U.S. fear the virus but toil on.
An estimated 22,000 seasonal workers tend and harvest crops in New Jersey, nicknamed the Garden State for its robust agriculture industry. Many of these laborers follow the ripening crops up the Eastern Seaboard, starting in Florida, where migrant living quarters have been ravaged by the coronavirus, and working their way north to Maine.
Making life even more perilous, they have been deemed essential workers — exempt from stay-at-home orders and a 14-day quarantine rule in New Jersey for people coming from states where the virus is spreading quickly. Each influx of workers brings the risk of a fresh outbreak.
Barring rain, they work seven days a week.
In New Jersey, 3,900 farmworkers had been tested as of Thursday and 193 were positive for the virus, according to the state’s Department of Health. Of these, 14 who had nowhere to remain isolated were placed into quarantine at a state-run field hospital at the Atlantic City Convention Center.
“It’s a little dangerous,” said Felix Nieves, 56, a supervisor at Atlantic Blueberry Company in Hammonton. The 1,300-acre farm is considered the biggest blueberry producer in the Northeast.
The first round of testing at Atlantic Blueberry was done early in the season, before most workers arrived. Three of the first 56 people tested were found to have the virus.
Atlantic Blueberry purchased 3,000 bandannas and gave each worker two — one to wear, one to wash — and hung fire-retardant cloth between beds in the dormitories where hundreds of laborers live during the season. The farm also bought additional buses to create extra space on the shuttles that run to and from the fields.
“Farming never stops,” Mr. Nieves said. “The fruit will not wait for this to pass.”
China’s grip on the medical-supply industry grows more indomitable.
Alarmed at China’s stranglehold over supplies of masks, gowns, test kits and other essential tools for tackling the coronavirus, countries around the world have set up their own factories to cope with both this pandemic and future ones.
When the outbreak subsides, those factories may struggle to survive. But China has laid the groundwork to dominate the market for protective and medical supplies for years to come.
Before the pandemic, China was already exporting more respirators, surgical masks, medical goggles and protective garments than the rest of the world combined, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated.
Beijing’s coronavirus response has only added to that dominance. It increased mask production nearly 12-fold in February alone. It can now make 150 tons per day of the specialized fabric used for masks, said Bob McIlvaine, who runs a research and consulting firm in Northfield, Ill. That is 15 times the output of U.S. companies even after they ramped up production this spring.
“The Chinese have been successful weaving global personal protection equipment dominance with supply-chain command and control,” said Omar Allam, a former Canadian trade official trying to establish production of in-demand N95 medical respirators in his country.
American companies have been reluctant to make big investments in fabric manufacturing because they worry that demand for masks will be temporary. Yet officials across the country are increasingly calling for the wearing of face coverings in public.
“It is a huge mistake,” Mr. McIlvaine said, “to assume that the market will disappear.”
The global economy has slowed, but green energy powers on.
Two hours by boat from the seaside town of Lowestoft on the east coast of England, over 100 giant windmills loom more than 500 feet above the sea. High atop the new towers, technicians in red-and-black protective suits have been working to hook them up to the British power system.
Britain has been under various stages of lockdown since March. But work on this wind farm, called East Anglia One, has charged ahead. Contractors rented holiday cabins and reached agreements with hotels near Lowestoft, the operations base, so that they could house some of the offshore workers there and keep them isolated. Workers were taken out by boats to the wind farm for 12-hour day and night shifts.
Producers of clean energy are pushing hard to get their projects up and running; they want to make money on their investments as soon as possible. And while the virus has reduced demand for electricity overall — the oil and gas industry in particular has been rocked by plummeting prices — renewable power tends to win out over polluting energy sources because of low costs and favorable regulatory rules.
The green energy industry suffered major setbacks during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. But analysts say that businesses have consolidated since then, and the industry has continued to bring down costs. The turbines at East Anglia One are 15 times as powerful as those installed in the first offshore wind farms almost 30 years ago, and so they produce much more revenue per unit.
“The outlook for renewables looks really quite resilient, despite all the Covid restrictions,” said Sam Arie, a utilities analyst at UBS, an investment bank. “We have seen a few companies with minor interruptions,” he added. “But relative to other sectors the impacts here have been very limited.”
How to discuss safety expectations with potential guests.
When it’s time to invite people over or arrange a play date, hosts face tough conversations with friends, neighbors and family on their standards for avoiding coronavirus infection. Here are some strategies to help.
Reporting was contributed by Pam Belluck, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Nellie Bowles, Keith Bradsher, Chris Cameron, Damien Cave, Emily Cochrane, Farnaz Fassihi, Jacey Fortin, Robert Gebeloff, J. David Goodman, Maggie Haberman, Rebecca Halleck, Hikari Hida, Makiko Inoue, Annie Karni, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Iliana Magra, Sapna Maheshwari, Apoorva Mandavilli, Donald G. McNeil, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Bryan Pietsch, Roni Caryn Rabin, Stanley Reed, Motoko Rich, Rick Rojas, Mitch Smith, Lucy Tompkins, Tracey Tully, Hisako Ueno, Elizabeth Williamson, Will Wright and Carl Zimmer.