Coronavirus Live Updates: Officials Meet on Capitol Hill After $600-a-Week Lifeline for Jobless Expires

Top officials work to break impasse over jobless benefit that helped keep afloat millions of unemployed Americans.

Hours after unemployment benefits for tens of millions of Americans lapsed, administration officials arrived on Capitol Hill on Saturday morning for a rare meeting with top congressional Democrats to discuss a coronavirus relief package and work to break an impasse over new aid as the American economy continues to shudder.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who hosted the meeting with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York in her Capitol Hill suite, emerged from the three-hour meeting — the longest meeting held over the last six days — and said the discussion “was productive in terms of moving us forward,” but they remained far apart on a number of issues. They declined to offer specifics.

Also in attendance were Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. (Mr. Mnuchin observed before entering Ms. Pelosi’s suite that it was “just another working day in the Capitol.”)

Among the largest sticking points in the discussion is a $600 weekly federal jobless benefit that became a lifeline for tens of millions of unemployed Americans, while also helping prop up the economy. The aid expired at midnight as officials in Washington failed to agree on a new relief bill.

Joblessness remains at record levels, with some 30 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits. More than 1.4 million newly filed for state unemployment benefits last week — the 19th straight week that the tally had exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the pandemic.

Nearly 11 percent of Americans have said that they live in households where there is not enough to eat, according to a recent Census Bureau survey, and more than a quarter have missed a rent or mortgage payment.

The benefit’s expiration will force Louise Francis, who worked as a banquet cook at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans for nearly two decades before being furloughed last spring, to get by on just state unemployment benefits, which for her come to $247 a week.

“With the $600, you could see your way a little bit,” said Ms. Francis, 59. “You could feel a little more comfortable. You could pay three or four bills and not feel so far behind.”

The aid lapsed as Republicans and Democrats in Washington remained far apart on what the next round of virus relief should look like.

Democrats wanted to extend the $600 weekly payments through the end of the year, as part of an expansive $3 trillion aid package that would also help state and local governments. Republicans, worried that the $600 benefit left some people with more money than when they were working, sought to scale it back to $200 per week as part of a $1 trillion proposal.

At a White House news conference on Friday, Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, accused Democrats of playing “politics as usual.” At the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi said administration officials “do not understand the gravity of the situation.”

As the deadline neared, Republicans proposed continuing the $600 benefit for one week while talks continued. Democrats rejected the short-term extension.

“When you have a six-day, one-week extension on a provision, it is usually — has always been — to accommodate a legislative topic if you’re on the verge of having an agreement,” Ms. Pelosi said. “Why don’t we just get the job done? Why don’t we just get the job done?”

The virus picks up dangerous speed in the Midwest, and in areas that had seen success.

Across the United States, there is a deepening national sense that the progress made in fighting the pandemic is coming undone and no patch of the country is safe. Instead, the United States is riding a second wave of cases, with the seven-day average for new infections hovering around 65,000 for two weeks.

Progress in some states has been mostly offset by growing outbreaks in parts of the South and the Midwest — and in cities from Mississippi to Florida to California that believed they had already experienced the worst of it.

In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker sounded an unusually somber note this past week as he delivered a warning that reverberated across the state: Even though residents had battled an early flood of coronavirus infections and then managed to reduce the virus’s spread, their successes were fleeting. As of Thursday, the state was averaging more than 1,400 cases a day, up from about 800 at the start of July.

“We’re at a danger point,” Mr. Pritzker said in Peoria County, where the total number of cases has doubled in the last month.

Many states have traced new outbreaks to the loosening of the economically costly restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of the virus.

In California, which has had more than 500,000 coronavirus cases, more than any other state, the reopening has proved disastrous. When the pandemic was ravaging the Northeast in March and April, California kept its daily case count around 2,000. The state is now averaging 8,500 a day.

On Friday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, told Congress he was cautiously optimistic that a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine would be available by the end of the year or early 2021, though the federal government’s ability to speedily immunize most Americans was unclear.

The Rio Grande Valley in Texas is suffering through perhaps the worst current outbreak in the country, with hundreds of new cases and dozens of deaths a day. In more than half of states, outbreaks continue to grow. In Missouri and Oklahoma, cases have grown to alarming levels, with both states now averaging more than 1,000 each day.

Across the country, deaths from the coronavirus also continue to rise. The United States was averaging about 500 a day at the start of July. Over the last week, it has averaged more than 1,000 daily, with many of those concentrated in Sun Belt states.

Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, has been adjusting to a new normal where the only thing certain is that nothing is certain. After cases and hospitalizations seemed to level off and even decrease in recent days, Harris County on Friday broke a single-day record with 2,100 new cases.

“I think to a certain extent, we saw a spike because people were fatigued over it,” said Alan Rosen, who leads the Harris County Precinct One constable’s office. “They were fatigued over hearing about it every day. They were fatigued about being cooped up in their house and being away from people.”

Thousands in Berlin protest Germany’s coronavirus measures.

An estimated 17,000 Germans packed the heart of Berlin on Saturday, defying public health requirements to maintain a safe distance from one another, or cover their noses and faces, before Berlin police moved to break up the demonstration against the country’s efforts to fight the spread of coronavirus.

The protest, under the motto “Day of Freedom” — a title shared by a 1935 Nazi propaganda film by Leni Reifenstahl — was supported by known neo-Nazi groups and conspiracy theorists, along with Germans who say they are fed up with the government-imposed restrictions on public life. Germany enforced a strict lockdown from mid-March that has been lifted in stages since the end of April, but large public gatherings are still banned and requirements for wearing masks on public transportation and in all stores remain.

A majority of Germans support the measures, but public health officials worry that people are becoming more lax, as the past weeks have seen a rise in new infections. On Saturday, 955 new cases were reported, compared with 580 two weeks ago.

Protesters at the demonstration blew whistles, heckled and jeered anyone wearing a mask, and carried the red, white and black flag of the 19th-century German Empire. They also carried signs equating the government-imposed restrictions to the Nazis’ forcing Jews to wear yellow stars. One banner, emblazoned with images of Chancellor Angela Merkel, her health minister and leading German public health officials, as well as Bill Gates, demanded: “Lock Them Up Already!”

Global roundup

South Korea arrests the leader of a church where the virus spread rapidly.

The leader of a secretive religious sect in South Korea was arrested early on Saturday on charges of embezzling church money and conspiring to impede efforts to fight the coronavirus.

The rapid spread of the virus this winter among worshipers of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, a city in the southeast, briefly made South Korea home to the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak outside China. As of Friday, more than a third of the 14,300 coronavirus cases known to the government were members of Shincheonji or their contacts.

Prosecutors say that Lee Man-hee, the church’s founder, failed to fully disclose the number of worshipers and their gathering places. Seven church officials were indicted last month on the same charge.

Mr. Lee, 88, has also been accused of embezzling 5.6 billion won, or $4.7 million, from church funds to build a luxurious “peace palace” north of Seoul. The church has broadly denied all the charges against him. He could face years in prison if convicted.

Intense criticism from the South Korean public forced Mr. Lee to apologize in March.

In a statement on Saturday, the church said that Mr. Lee had never intended to hamper efforts to control the epidemic, and that he had only expressed concern over the scale of government demands for worshipers’ data.

“He has emphasized the importance of disease control and urged the church members to cooperate with the authorities,” the church said. “We will do our best to let the truth be known through trial.”

But parents who accused the church of luring and brainwashing their children with its unorthodox teachings welcomed his arrest on Saturday, calling Mr. Lee a “religious con artist.”

Here are some other developments from around the globe:

• Kuwait on Saturday began to resume some commercial flights after a five-month suspension. It announced that flights would remain suspended from 31 countries, including India, China and Brazil. Flights are also still barred from some countries that were once major hot spots, such as Spain and Italy, but not the United States, which remains a global epicenter. Kuwait, with its relatively small population, has one of the highest infection rates in the world. Its 1,618 cases per 100,000 people is the sixth highest globally, according to a New York Times database.

• Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain announced that lockdown measures that were set to be lifted Saturday would continue for two more weeks, as case numbers in the country rise. Restrictions remain on indoor performances, casinos, wedding receptions and other gatherings, which Mr. Johnson said he knew would come as a “real blow” to some people. But it was necessary to apply the “break pedal,” he said, in order to stem the spread of the virus.

• In Vietnam, the city of Danang plans to test its entire population for the coronavirus, local authorities said, after dozens of cases there showed how the disease can stalk even places that were thought to have eradicated the virus. As the country went more than three months without reporting any local transmission or even a single death from the virus, up to 800,000 domestic tourists flocked to Danang, a coastal city known for its golden beaches. Vietnam has now recorded three deaths and 558 cases, although many are returnees in quarantine.

• As of Saturday morning, Mexico’s confirmed death toll of 46,688 was the world’s third highest behind the United States and Brazil. Britain ranked fourth, with 569 fewer deaths. The number of new reported infections in Mexico has been climbing since May and topped 8,000 on Friday, bringing the country’s caseload to nearly 425,000.

• Officials in Poland are considering new lockdown restrictions after the country reported record numbers of new coronavirus cases for three days in a row. The health minister told a local radio station this could include reducing the number of people allowed to attend weddings, according to Reuters. The country has reported 46,346 total cases and 3,650 deaths.

• 36 crew members aboard a Norwegian cruise ship tested positive for the virus, Hurtigruten, the ship’s operator, said in a statement. None of those who tested positive showed any symptoms, the statement said. According to the company, 387 guests who may have been exposed to infected crew members during two trips on the ship in July will self-quarantine in accordance to Norway’s public health regulations.

A school opened in Indiana. It had to quarantine people within hours.

One of the first school districts in the United States to reopen did not even make it a day before it had grapple with the issue facing everyone trying to get students back into classrooms: What happens when someone comes to school infected with the coronavirus?

Hours into classes on Thursday, a call from the county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana that a student had tested positive.

Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other students, to quarantine for 14 days. It is unclear whether anyone else got infected.

“We knew it was a when, not if,” said Harold E. Olin, superintendent of the Greenfield-Central Community School Corporation, but he was “very shocked it was on Day 1.”

Hundreds of school districts across the country have reversed course on reopening plans in recent weeks in response to rises in infections. Of the nation’s 25 largest school districts, all but six have announced they will start remotely. Despite strong objections from teachers’ unions, some in places like Florida and Texas are hoping to open classrooms after a few weeks if infection rates fall.

Florida, already reeling from the virus, faces a new threat from Hurricane Isaias.

Florida’s Atlantic coast braced for the arrival of Hurricane Isaias on Saturday after the storm raked parts of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and has begun to batter the Bahamas.

Preparations for the storm were complicated by the state’s battle with the coronavirus, which could make evacuating homes and entering community shelters especially risky. Friday was the third consecutive day that Florida set its record for the most deaths reported in a single day, according to a New York Times database.

Mr. DeSantis has said that the division of emergency management had been working at its most active level since March, “allowing them to actively plan for hurricane season even while responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Early in the pandemic, he added, the division created a reserve of protective equipment for hurricane season, including 20 million masks, 22 million gloves and 1.6 million face shields.

A hurricane watch was in effect early Saturday morning from Hallandale Beach to south of Boca Raton, and a hurricane warning from Boca Raton to Brevard County. There could be storm surges up to four feet high.

The storm is then expected to weaken and be off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina on Monday.

Mr. DeSantis said on Saturday that he had declared a state of emergency in every coastal county up the state’s east coast, including Miami-Dade County, which has been among the hardest hit in terms of new cases of the coronavirus per capita, as well as deaths.

Mr. DeSantis said he had also received approval for federal assistance through FEMA from President Trump.

Ten people in India die from drinking hand sanitizer after liquor sales are stopped.

Since the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh closed liquor stores as part of lockdown restrictions about two weeks ago, at least 10 people have died after consuming alcohol-based hand sanitizer, the police said.

The Indian government started easing a national lockdown in late May. But many states have reimposed some restrictions, including Andra Pradesh, where nearly 50,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the last week.

India recorded 57,118 coronavirus infections on Saturday, the country’s health ministry said, bringing its total to 1.7 million. More than 36,000 people have died.

The police in the state said some people who lost access to legal liquor started mixing cheap hand sanitizer with water from roadside taps, soft drinks and milk. The 10 deaths have occurred in the last three days, mostly among poor residents.

In the town of Kurichedu, a man begging at a temple complained of a burning sensation in his stomach, and died as he was being taken to a hospital. Then the number of people complaining of a burning sensation in their stomach started rising, the police said.

“All of them died after consuming sanitizer,” said Siddharth Kaushal, the district’s top police officer. “We are wondering who told these people that a sanitizer can get them high.”

Hundreds die each year in India from consuming poisonous homemade alcohol. In 2015, at least 100 people in a Mumbai-area slum were killed, and in 2008, in one of the largest such episodes in recent decades, more than 170 people died after drinking an illicit home brew in slum areas of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

After India’s strict national lockdown lifted in May, reopened liquor stores were swamped with so many customers that the police in some cities had to control the crowds, according to Agence France-Presse.

The F.D.A. approves new antibody tests.

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized the first coronavirus tests that can give an estimate of the quantity of antibodies present in a person’s blood, the agency announced Friday evening.

Up until now, the so-called serology tests on the market, also known as antibody tests, only indicate whether Covid-19 antibodies are present in the blood, indicating that at some point in the past, the individual had been exposed to the virus.

Many antibody tests are unreliable. The F.D.A. has had to chase after some manufacturers and distributors to get them off the market. There is not yet a scientific consensus as to what level of antibodies are needed to confer immunity, or how long such immunity might last.

The two new Covid-19 serology tests, the ADVIA Centaur COV2G and Attelica COV2G, are from Siemens.

Dr. Timothy Stenzel, the director of the F.D.A.’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health, said in a statement, “Being able to measure a patient’s relative level of antibodies in response to a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection may be useful as we continue to learn more about the virus and what the existence of antibodies may mean.”

“There are still many unknowns about what the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies may tell us about potential immunity, but today’s authorizations give us additional tools to evaluate those antibodies as we continue to research and study this virus.

European stocks gain a sudden allure as the region pins down the virus better than most places.

Europe has a bad reputation with investors. For years, asset managers and bank strategists have characterized the region by its anemic growth rate and shaky political union.

Now a crisis has turned into an unlikely investment opportunity, as the region appears to have handled the pandemic better than some other parts of the world. In the past few months, European assets have staged a comeback.

The euro this week rose to its highest level in more than two years against the U.S. dollar, and the region’s benchmark index, the Stoxx 600, is set for a second straight month of gains greater than those of the S&P 500 index, in dollar terms, according to data from FactSet.

The most important reason for this upswing, analysts say, is that Europe is recording far fewer new cases of the coronavirus. There are still occasional spikes in Europe, and there are some early signs that the infection rate is starting to level off in the United States. But there are about 65,000 new cases each day in the United States, compared with fewer than 10,000 across the Atlantic.

Another significant reason for the increase is politics. When European leaders reached an agreement last week on a 750 billion euro, or $888 billion, recovery fund, it wasn’t the size of the deal that impressed investors, but the fact that it happened after four long nights of negotiations.

The decision to raise money collectively and give grants to the countries hit hardest by the pandemic indicated that there is some political will left to further the project that created the euro two decades ago, despite the exit of Britain from the European Union, budget fights with Italy and concerns about the dismantling of democracy in Hungary.

Controlling screen time in the face of a pandemic.

With remote work, remote school, remote camp and everything else remote, screens are dominating our lives. Here are some ways of thinking about it, whether you want to cut back or simply come to terms with the increased usage.

Reporting was contributed by Hannah Beech, Julie Bosman, Choe Sang-Hun, Emily Cochrane, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Melissa Eddy, Manny Fernandez, Thomas Fuller, Johnny Diaz, Jeffrey Gettleman, Jason Gutierrez, Shawn Hubler, Mike Ives, Sheila Kaplan, Zach Montague, Liliana Michelena, Eshe Nelson, Matt Phillips, Kai Schultz, Eliza Shapiro and Sameer Yasir.