Coronavirus Updates: Trump Hosts July 4 Event at White House

With infections climbing, most Fourth of July celebrations are muted. But not in D.C.

After delivering a divisive speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday night, President Trump is hosting a Fourth of July event in Washington on Saturday, again waving away objections from some officials and public health experts who were worried the virus could spread through the events’ crowds.

Ahead of the White House’s celebration, tables and chairs “for hundreds” were set up on the South Lawn, said Judd Deere, a spokesman, adding that social distancing “will be observed” and that face masks will be offered, but not required.

There were few masks in the crowd at the White House as President Trump walked out to the celebration and gave his address where he repeated the themes from the previous evening.

“We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children or trample on our freedoms,” Mr. Trump said, referring to growing calls to remove statues perceived as symbols of racism and oppression. The demands increased during the widespread demonstrations against police brutality that followed the May 25 death of George Floyd while he was in the custody of the Minneapolis police.

The protesters, Mr. Trump said, were “not interested in justice or healing.”

Speaking to an audience that included front-line workers trying to combat the coronavirus, Mr. Trump bragged about his administration’s response, though the country’s death toll has climbed higher than his original predictions and local officials have warned against hosting a large gathering for Independence Day this year.

Mr. Trump claimed that an abundance of testing made the country’s infections look worse than they were because they “show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless.” And he raised expectations for a vaccine “long before the end of the year.”

More than 53,000 new daily cases were reported in the country on Friday, according to a New York Times database. That figure exceeded all previous daily counts aside from the 55,595 new cases on Thursday, the first time the number had passed 50,000.

Cases are trending upward in 39 states, and regularly reaching new single-day records. Florida announced more than 11,400 new cases on Saturday, its fourth record in 10 days and the second time in three days that the daily count was over 10,000. South Carolina hit a record on Friday only to break it on Saturday with more than 1,850 new cases. The state’s positivity rate — the percentage of overall coronavirus tests that come back positive — has hovered around 20 percent this week, up from about 10 percent in early June.

Across the country, officials urged Americans to scale back their Fourth of July plans. Washington’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, was among them. Earlier in the week, she had criticized the White House’s plans, according to The Associated Press, saying, “We’ve communicated to them that we do not think this is in keeping with the best C.D.C. and Department of Health guidance.”

As many as 80 percent of community fireworks displays in large cities and small towns have been canceled over fears that large gatherings could worsen the already alarming outbreaks happening across dozens of states. New coronavirus cases have increased 89 percent in the United States in the last two weeks.

In New York City, instead of the usual hourlong fireworks extravaganza, Macy’s has been running five-minute displays in undisclosed locations across the five boroughs throughout the week. A grand finale on Saturday, also at an undisclosed location, will be televised.

In Los Angeles County, the public health department ordered beaches closed and fireworks shows canceled. The police in Chicago were seen dispersing crowds gathered by waterfronts in defiance of an order to keep beaches in the city closed, according to a report from ABC.

In Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward Counties had already announced that they were closing beaches for the Fourth of July weekend. A countywide curfew, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., in Miami-Dade went into effect on Friday.

During his event at Mount Rushmore on Friday, Mr. Trump barely mentioned the pandemic as he spoke to a packed, largely mask-free crowd, casting his effort to win a second term as a battle against a “new far-left fascism” that seeks to remake the nation’s heritage.

The pandemic’s reach was still apparent, however: Before the event, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Mr. Trump’s eldest son and a top fund-raising official for the Trump re-election campaign, tested positive for the coronavirus.

As Houston’s hospitals near capacity, they feel the echoes of New York City.

As coronavirus cases in Texas have soared to new heights in recent days, a number of hospitals in Houston have seen a steep rise in caseloads, filling intensive care units, overburdening staff, and straining testing capacity and the availability of other medical services. Protective gear, and other medical devices for testing and treating patients have been scarce.

Our correspondent Sheri Fink went behind the scenes at Houston Methodist, a top-ranked system of eight hospitals, and found that the staff is armed with the most up-to-date understanding of how to treat patients with Covid-19, and prepared with hindsight to avoid some of the mistakes that hospitals in New York made as they scrambled to handle a cascading outbreak in March.

Many of Houston’s hospitals have already begun beefing up staff, and getting workers trained to handle patients as efficiently as possible. Some have also taken steps to keep elective procedures running to avoid the massive financial losses hospitals around the country faced earlier in the year when they adapted to focus nearly exclusively on patients with the coronavirus.

“What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one,” Dr. Mir M. Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said to his medical team before rounds. “It’s really a terrible kind of sinking feeling. But we’re not truly back at square one, right? Because we have the last three months of expertise that we’ve developed.”

With a number of advantages on their side, many hospitals in the city hope to be able to weather the recent surge while keeping deaths to a minimum. To date, Harris Country which contains most of the Houston metro area and has recorded the highest number of cases in Texas over all, has held its death count to 387.

Local governments in hard-hit states are taking aim at newly imposed restrictions.

Several states that were previously reluctant to impose broad public safety measures have reacted to the country’s growing surge of cases by moving to adopt them, particularly in anticipation of Independence Day celebrations on Saturday.

But while some people will gather for a traditional celebration, others will be assembling to protest the new restrictions.

Arizona had strongly resisted sweeping regulations on businesses and individuals, making it one of the most cavalier states regarding Covid-19. But as cases there have skyrocketed and its intensive care beds have filled to near capacity, Arizona’s leaders have been rethinking their hands-off approach.

At least 91,894 cases of coronavirus have been recorded in Arizona to date, reached a single-day high of 4,797 new cases on June 30, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

On Monday, Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order prohibiting gatherings of more than 50 people and pausing reopenings of bars, gyms, and movie theaters. The governor’s office has also allowed local jurisdictions to set stricter limits of their own, including ordinances requiring masks. Maricopa County — which has averaged more than 2,500 new cases over the last week — passed its own regulations requiring face coverings in public.

Other localities are also seeing resistance to statewide measures.

In Kansas, the Board of Sedgwick County Commissioners voted not to mandate that people wear masks in public but just to recommend it, despite a statewide mask ordinance issued by Gov. Laura Kelly.

“It’s probably the most innocuous, painless, relatively speaking, intervention we can do,” Dr. Garold Minns, the county’s public health officer, said at a commission meeting, voicing support for the state initiative. Still, county officials decided that individuals had the ability to make responsible decisions without government-imposed rules, especially if residents could maintain a six-foot distance.

Some Texas counties have pushed back on Gov. Greg Abbott’s mask-wearing mandate, announced Thursday, under which residents could be fined up to $250 for noncompliance. In Nacogdoches County, Sheriff Jason Bridges made clear that his office would not be issuing citations for those who didn’t wear masks. “We are not keeping a database of people who wear a mask and who are not. I mean we don’t have the time or the energy to do that,” Mr. Bridges said.

The pandemic led to limits on evictions, but vulnerable tenants now face life on the street.

When the U.S. economy ground to a halt this spring, economists warned that an avalanche of evictions was looming. The federal government and many states rushed to ban them temporarily, placing moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures to relieve financial pressure on landlords.

But 20 states, including Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and Wisconsin, have since lifted their restrictions, and researchers have tracked thousands of recent eviction filings in places where data is available. Eviction bans in nine other states and at the federal level are set to expire by the end of the month.

All told, Amherst College anticipates that nearly 28 million households are at risk of being turned out onto the streets because of job losses tied to the pandemic.

Even in places with ordinances barring evictions, the protections have been of little help to unauthorized immigrants, who fear that complaining to the authorities about their landlord could lead to a consequence worse than homelessness: deportation.

Immigrant and renter advocates in cities across the country say they are being inundated with complaints about landlords pressuring tenants to pay rent money. They say landlords use harassment, illegal fees for late payments or repairs, or simply change the locks as a way to force out vulnerable renters.

Norieliz Dejesus is a program manager with the organization Chelsea Collaborative, in Chelsea, Mass., a hub for incoming migrants from Eastern Europe and Central America.

“I had one tenant whose landlord wants her out by the end of the month,” Ms. Dejesus said, “The tenant explained the new laws. The landlord acknowledged the new laws and was like, ‘I don’t care — you have to leave.’”

The W.H.O. suspends two drug studies, including one on hydroxychloroquine, over possible safety issues.

The World Health Organization on Saturday formally suspended its evaluation of two high-profile drug candidates in clinical trials designed to identify treatments effective against the coronavirus.

The W.H.O. formally adopted the recommendations of a steering committee and dropped the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine from its Solidarity trial, as well as the drug combination lopinavir/ritonavir, first developed as an antiviral against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

Hydroxychloroquine was promoted by the Trump administration as a preventive and treatment for Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. But neither hydroxychloroquine nor lopinavir/ritonavir has shown benefits in hospitalized Covid-19 patients. In clinical trials, both drugs have failed to reduce deaths among those with severe symptoms.

And though neither drug appeared to increase the risk of death, the W.H.O. report cited possible safety issues associated with both treatments.

A similar clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine, led by the National Institutes of Health, was halted in June, based on recent evidence of the drug’s lackluster performance. Just days prior, the Swiss drugmaker Novartis had discontinued its own hydroxychloroquine clinical trial after it was unable to enroll the 440 participants it needed.

The F.D.A. has also revoked emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat hospitalized Covid-19 patients, and now cautions against using the drug, which has been linked to reports of serious heart rhythm problems, blood and lymph system disorders and other side effects.

The W.H.O.’s decision applies only to its studies involving patients hospitalized with Covid-19, leaving open the possibility for further evaluation of hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir in infected patients who have not yet been admitted to the hospital, or as a treatment to prevent those exposed to the coronavirus from getting sick. In the United States, clinical trials studying both drugs continue.

The Solidarity trial is also continuing its explorations of two other treatment strategies: one involving remdesivir, an antiviral that has been shown to speed recovery in patients hospitalized with Covid-19, and a second that combines lopinavir/ritonavir with interferon beta-1a, which decreases inflammation.

Iraq’s health care system is nearing breakdown.

Iraq’s caseload has increased eightfold in the last month, rising from about 250 new cases daily to 2,000 at the end of June. Deaths have increased as well, with about 100 people dying daily compared to fewer than 50 daily a month ago.

And signs are piling up that the country’s health care system is on the verge of breaking down.

The director of public health for Najaf Province, Dr. Radwan al-Kindi, said: “I am tired, so tired. We have 250 doctors, nurses and paramedics in quarantine or in the hospital because they have Covid.” He listed close colleagues who had been infected, ending with “and now my bodyguard just tested positive.” He knows he could well be next.

Already 1,000 doctors, most of them mainstays at hospitals around the country where they are exposed to the virus, are infected, according to the head of the Iraqi doctor’s union, Dr. Abdul Ameer al-Shimmeri. There were already relatively few medical staff willing to work directly with infected patients. Now the situation is dire.

“We are in crisis and we have no control over the virus,” Dr. al-Shimmeri said. “There is an absence of preventative equipment for doctors. Most of them are paying for their own and using it more than once.”

Oxygen is in such short supply that a prominent Shiite cleric and politician tweeted about Iraq’s fourth-largest city: “Nasiriyah can’t breathe.”

The country’s number of confirmed cases is at least 56,000 but could be more because labs are having difficulty handling the number of samples that come in. Some doctors complain that it takes 11 days or more to get test results, which are delayed by a lack of staff and the volume of tests.

Mohammed Ghanem, who runs the busy lab at Sadr Medical City Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, said, “Most of my staff is sick, so I am trying to train new staff, but they do not have experience.”

The newest U.S. challenge is, quite simply, impatience.

In North Carolina, the governor vetoed efforts by lawmakers to reopen skating rinks, bowling alleys and amusement parks. In Alaska, new workplace clusters are emerging, social distancing is on the decline and contact tracers are overwhelmed. And in Kansas, state and local leaders are squabbling over whether masks are required.

“Early on, people who tested positive usually had a short list of close contacts,” Dr. Joe McLaughlin, Alaska’s state epidemiologist, said in a statement. “Now, as people are mixing more with others, it’s not uncommon for someone who tests positive to have had dozens of close contacts, sometimes too many to name and call.”

The struggles in those three states, all of which set single-day case records on Friday, exemplify the challenges officials across the country face as cases surge. Unlike the first spike in March and April, when most places were on lockdown, case numbers are now exploding after many Americans have returned to their routines and grown frustrated with restrictions.

In Kansas, where more than 780 cases were announced on Friday, residents have heard mixed messages from their leaders. This week, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, ordered residents to wear masks in public. Commissioners in Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita, then voted to make Ms. Kelly’s mask mandate a recommendation, not a requirement. But on Friday, the Wichita City Council convened in a special meeting and approved a mask mandate, effective immediately, with the possibility of fines for those who refuse.

“We have a shot of avoiding another shut down, of ensuring our kids have school & protecting folks,” Mayor Brandon Whipple of Wichita said on Twitter after the city’s mask rule was approved.

Similar whiplash was seen in North Carolina, where the Republican-controlled Legislature passed bills that would have curtailed business restrictions enacted by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. But Mr. Cooper stepped in and vetoed the measures, meaning roller skating rinks and bowling alleys, along with some other businesses, must remain closed.

“Opening these higher-risk facilities would spread Covid-19 and endanger the state’s flexibility to open the public schools,” Mr. Cooper said in a veto statement.

Scientists plan to ask the W.H.O. to warn that the virus can spread through the air.

An international group of 239 experts is calling on the World Health Organization to recognize that the coronavirus can be spread through the air, especially in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation.

In an open letter the researchers plan to publish, they say there is clear evidence that the virus can be transmitted by microdroplets, called aerosols. The W.H.O.’s official guidance discounts aerosols as a major form of transmission, saying the virus is spreading mostly through larger respiratory droplets that don’t travel far.

But most of the recent research suggests the scientists are correct, with enormous implications for how people should protect themselves. For example, ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air, aim to provide clean outside air, and add powerful filters or ultraviolet lights that can destroy the virus.

Health care workers may need to wear N95 masks that filter the smallest respiratory droplets whenever they care for Covid-19 patients.

“If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” said Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who sits on the W.H.O.’s infection control committee. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

Even in its latest update on the coronavirus, released June 29, the W.H.O. said airborne transmission of the virus was possible only after medical procedures that produced aerosols, or droplets smaller than 5 microns. Proper ventilation and N95 masks are only of concern in those circumstances, according to the guidance.

Dr. Benedetta Allegranzi, the W.H.O.’s technical lead for infection prevention and control, said the evidence for the virus spreading by air was unconvincing.

“Especially in the last couple of months, we have been stating several times that we think airborne transmission is possible but certainly not supported by solid or even clear evidence,” she said. “There is a strong debate on this.”

Global Roundup

Thailand has gone 40 days without community transmission — and longer without foreign tourists.

Thailand on Saturday marked 40 days without any locally transmitted cases of the coronavirus, a feat that mirrors those of regional counterparts, like Vietnam and Laos.

Earlier this year, it didn’t look so promising for a country that was one of the most popular tourist destinations on Earth. In mid-January, Thailand confirmed the first case of the coronavirus outside of China, in a visitor from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the outbreak first emerged.

Foreign tourists continued to arrive for months, until Thailand shut its airports to most international flights in early April. But even before the flight lockdown, many Thais were vigilant about wearing face masks. Social greetings in the country aren’t of the hug and kiss variety, perhaps creating fewer opportunities for the virus to spread. So far, Thailand has recorded fewer than 3,200 cases of the coronavirus, with 58 deaths.

With local transmission seemingly under control, schools reopened on July 1. The country’s notorious nightlife has revved up again, with entertainers required to wear face masks with their often brief costumes. This weekend, Thais began traveling by the millions for a four-day holiday, crowding airports and train and bus stations that had been largely empty for three months.

But with limits on international visitors still in place, Thailand’s tourism-dependent economy is likely to suffer the worst hit of any regional economy this year. A maximum of 200 foreigners are being allowed in to Thailand each day.

Other coronavirus news from around the world:

• Two weeks after Spain lifted a state of emergency and began allowing in visitors from European countries, the authorities in Catalonia have imposed a lockdown on 200,000 residents in the Segria area to curb a rise in coronavirus cases. The authorities have also set up a field hospital in the city of Lleida, east of Barcelona, to help handle a coronavirus caseload that has more than doubled in a week. Elsewhere, new clusters have emerged in Granada, a refugee camp in Málaga Province and Galicia.

• A senior adviser to Afghanistan’s president died from the coronavirus late Friday as the country grapples with the virus’s spread amid a lack of reliable data and an overwhelmed health sector. The adviser, Mohammad Yousuf Ghazanfar, was a presidential envoy for economic development and poverty alleviation. Although experts say Afghanistan’s official numbers are not even close to an indication of the true spread, the country’s health ministry has recorded 32,000 positive cases and over 800 deaths.

• Pubs across England reopened on Saturday, three and a half months after being shuttered for the first time in the country’s history. The pubs were allowed to resume business at 6 a.m., an hour chosen because the authorities aimed to prevent a rush of late-night crowds that might accompany a midnight reopening. During Britain’s lockdown, pubs served to-go drinks but were forbidden to welcome patrons inside.

• Although Paris’s official Pride march was postponed until November because of the pandemic, several organizations planned to hold a smaller version in the French capital on Saturday. Organizers said they intended to give it a political tone and speak out against the “silent capitalization” of Pride events.

• The Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world, moved to reopen on Saturday, giving exclusive access to front-line workers who aided in the city’s coronavirus response.

The Supreme Court rejects Illinois Republicans’ request to hold big political gatherings.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Saturday rejected a request from Illinois Republicans to allow large political gatherings, including a Fourth of July picnic, leaving them without a reprieve from an order from the state’s governor barring most gatherings of more than 50 people.

In their emergency application to the Supreme Court, the Illinois Republican Party and other Republican groups said the order from Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, interfered with their First Amendment rights.

The application said Mr. Pritzker had drawn unconstitutional distinctions by exempting religious services but not political gatherings from his order. The First Amendment, they said, prohibits the government from discrimination based on the content of speech unless it can meet a demanding standard of review.

Judge Sara L. Ellis of the Federal District Court in Chicago rejected the Republicans’ request for an injunction. “The Constitution,” she wrote, “does not accord a political party the same express protections as it provides to religion.”

A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, refused to stay Judge Ellis’s ruling while the case moved forward.

Justice Kavanaugh, the justice who oversees the Seventh Circuit, denied the Republicans’ application without comment.

‘Are we prepared for this hurricane season? The answer is no.’

Ten months after Hurricane Dorian pulverized the northern Bahamas, the islands are still struggling to recover, even as this year’s hurricane season begins. But rebuilding, always a slow process, has been hampered even further this year by the coronavirus.

“That brought rebuilding efforts to a complete halt,” said Stafford Symonette, an evangelical pastor whose house on Great Abaco Island was severely damaged during the hurricane — and remains that way. “You still have a lot of people in tents and temporary shelters.”

The Bahamas — like other hurricane-prone countries in the Caribbean and North Atlantic — now find themselves at the convergence of a devastating pandemic and an Atlantic hurricane season that is expected to be more active than usual.

The pandemic has crippled economies in the region, many of which depend heavily on tourism. It has forced the reallocation of diminished government resources to deal with the public health crisis. And it has meant that, in the event of a major storm, evacuation centers and shelters could turn into dangerous vectors of coronavirus contagion.

These mounting challenges have overwhelmed many of the region’s governments and relief agencies, which are scrambling to make arrangements before the next big storm.

“Are we prepared for this hurricane season?” said Ronald Sanders, ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United States and to the Organization of American States. “The answer is no. And I don’t care who tells you we are.”

“The reality,” he added, “is that we are in dire straits.”

For theaters resuming live performances, the pandemic means ad-libbing.

The pandemic has shuttered Broadway through the end of the year (at least), and the United States’ big regional theaters and major outdoor festivals have mostly pivoted to streaming. But many theaters are still finding ways to present live performances before live audiences.

Of course, there is social distancing. Also, in some places, masks. Temperature checks. Touchless ticketing. Intermissionless shows. Lots of disinfectant. And at the Footlights Theater, in Falmouth, Maine, actors will perform behind plexiglass.

But these precautions mean there is dinner theater in Florida, street theater in Chicago, and drive-in theater in Iowa.

“Our commitment is to do live theater — there’s a huge difference between that and seeing something on a computer screen,” said Susan Claassen, managing artistic director of Invisible Theater in Tucson, Ariz., a state that has emerged as a Covid-19 hot spot.

There are also financial reasons for continuing: Some theaters say they cannot survive a year without revenue.

“We’d rather go down creating good theater than die the slow death behind our desks,” said Bryan Fonseca, the producing director of Fonseca Theater Company in Indianapolis. The company plans to stage “Hype Man,” a three-character play by Idris Goodwin, outdoors, for 65 mask-wearing patrons.

“I am hopeful and also very cautious,” Fonseca said, “careful that I don’t create a problem.”

And in New York City, Food for Thought Productions, a company that presents staged readings of one-act plays, plans to restart in a private club on July 13, with attendees required to have taken coronavirus tests.

“If we can prove that we can do this safely,” said Susan Charlotte, the founding artistic director, “maybe other groups can do safe theater as well.”

Staying safe in parks, playground and other public spaces.

Experts say socially distant outdoor activities, like swimming or running along the shore, are some of the safer ways to re-engage with the world. Here are tips for venturing out.

Reporting was contributed by Hannah Beech, Choe Sang-Hun, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Caitlin Dickerson, Fatima Faizi, Tess Felder, Sheri Fink, Peter S. Goodman, Annie Karni, Rachel Knowles, Adam Liptak, Apoorva Mandavilli, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Raphael Minder, Zach Montague, Aimee Ortiz, Michael Paulson, Elian Peltier, Alissa J. Rubin, Kirk Semple, Mitch Smith and Elizabeth Williamson.