Republicans Begin New Relief Talks as Hopes Fade for Rapid Recovery

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With the U.S. economic outlook dimming, talks on a new round of stimulus get underway.

With the failure by the United States to control of the coronavirus clouding hopes for a rapid economic rebound, Republicans gathered in Washington on Monday to begin discussing their opening proposal for the next federal stimulus bill.

The talks got underway as the virus spreads rapidly in wide areas of the country, forcing some state and local officials to shut some businesses again. Unemployment remains stubbornly high after a spring that saw record numbers of Americans sign up for food stamps. And many leading business leaders are steeling themselves for a prolonged disruption.

Some of the items being discussed have a special urgency for the nation’s millions of unemployed workers: expanded benefits of an additional $600 per week are set to expire at the end of this month, and the parties remain far apart on whether to extend them.

The top two congressional Republicans, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, met with President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at the White House on Monday to try to smooth over their differences. Congressional Republicans were infuriated when the administration moved over the weekend to block billions of dollars that Republicans had included in their draft proposal for testing and tracing efforts and to fund federal health agencies.

People familiar with the deliberations said that Senate Republican leaders and Trump administration officials had coalesced around a $1 trillion total price tag for the bill, which Mr. McConnell hopes to release this week, but that its final contents were still very much in flux.

The bill is an opening bid from the Republican side, and its overall cost is almost certain to grow in negotiations with Democrats, who have called for significant aid to help state and local governments avert massive layoffs of public employees amid plunging tax revenues.

Ideas set to be presented to senators during Republican lunches on Tuesday break the $1 trillion package into three buckets. One would appropriate additional aid to small businesses. A second would give money to schools and hospitals. The third would include an estimated $400 billion for a new round of stimulus checks to individuals, a scaled-back extension of expanded unemployment benefits, tax breaks for small businesses and some version of the payroll tax holiday that Mr. Trump has pushed for.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday sketched out his views on what should be included in the relief package, emphasizing the need to help families and small businesses as well as to provide funds to help schools reopen in a safe manner.

“With the president having turned his back on the problem, people are looking to Congress for the support they need to keep their heads above water,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

The statement also said that “not one penny” should go toward tax cuts for the richest Americans. And Congress, Mr. Biden said, should require that relief for businesses not be used to outsource jobs.

He also said the next aid package should include funds to prevent layoffs of teachers and help schools with reopening safely, along with additional aid to help states and local governments. (On Friday, Mr. Biden released a plan for safely reopening schools.)

Even as the outbreak has worsened in many states, Mr. Trump has been pressuring schools to reopen for in-person instruction in the fall, and has threatened to withhold federal funding from the growing number of school districts opting for remote learning instead.

It remains unclear how school funding will be structured in the Republican proposal, with some Republicans in support of giving more money to schools that are reopening, but reluctant to penalize those who have not done so. One person familiar with the discussions said that funding levels would most likely allocate around $70 billion to elementary and secondary schools, with at least $20 billion set aside for colleges and universities, though the person cautioned that the funding had not yet been finalized.

European leaders agree on a landmark $857 billion stimulus package to fight the virus-induced recession.

After nearly five days of intense haggling, European Union leaders stepped up early on Tuesday to confront one of the gravest challenges in the bloc’s history, agreeing to a landmark spending package to rescue their economies from the ravages of the pandemic.

The 750 billion euro ($857 billion) stimulus agreement, spearheaded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, sent a strong signal of solidarity even as it exposed deep new fault lines in a bloc reshaped by the British exit.

The deal was notable for its firsts: European countries will raise large sums by selling bonds collectively, rather than individually; and much of that money will be handed out to member nations hit hardest by the pandemic as grants that do not have to be repaid, and not as loans that would swell their national debts.

Those extraordinary steps reflected a difficult consensus: that the scale of crisis facing the member states required groundbreaking measures to ensure the bloc’s legitimacy, stability and prosperity. But the lengthy negotiations in Brussels were notable, too, for their exceptional rancor — and it was clear that the pooling of resources and sovereignty had come at a cost.

Teachers’ unions sue Florida’s governor over order requiring schools to reopen despite virus surge.

Teachers’ unions sued Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday over his administration’s emergency order pushing schools to fully reopen next month even as coronavirus cases in the state are surging.

The suit, which appears to be the first of its kind across the country, sets up a confrontation between unions and politicians that could change the trajectory of school reopening over the coming weeks. In other parts of the country, including California and parts of Texas, many large school districts have concluded in recent days that it is not safe to hold in-person classes. But Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has been pushing for things to be different in Florida, which is home to five of the country’s 10 largest districts.

Earlier this month, Mr. DeSantis’s administration ordered schools across the state to reopen five days a week starting in August. His edict came as President Trump called for schools to reopen nationwide and threatened to cut federal funding for districts that did not teach in person.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, and its local affiliate, the Florida Education Association, accused Mr. DeSantis of violating a Florida law requiring that schools be “safe” and “secure.” (An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the A.F.T. as the nation’s largest union.) The unions, along with parent and teacher plaintiffs, asked a state court in Miami to block the governor’s reopening order and allow local school superintendents and health departments to have full control over reopening decisions.

Mr. DeSantis distanced himself from the executive order on Monday, noting at a news conference that it had been issued by the state’s department of education, not by him. “You know, they have a board and they do different things,” he said.

The order was signed by Richard Corcoran, the state’s commissioner of education, a former speaker of the Florida House who was tapped for the position by Mr. DeSantis when he was governor-elect and who was officially appointed by the board.

But Mr. DeSantis has urged schools to reopen for in-person instruction. “If fast food and Walmart and Home Depot — and I do all that so I’m not, like, looking down on it — but if all that is essential, then educating our kids is absolutely essential,” Mr. DeSantis said this month. “And they have been put to the back of the line in some respects.”

On Monday, Florida became the eighth state where at least 5,000 people with the virus have died after it added a daily tally of 90 deaths. The state also added 10,347 cases.

Public health experts have said districts should consider reopening only if they are in a region with a positive test rate at or below 5 percent. Miami-Dade County has recently reported positivity rates more than four times greater than that threshold, and the plaintiffs argue that it would be among the most dangerous places in the state to reopen schools.

U.S. Roundup

Trump announces he’s reviving the virus daily briefing as cases continues to surge.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he is bringing back the daily coronavirus briefings that he halted in April, a tacit acknowledgment that the public health crisis that he has sought to put behind him is still ravaging much of the country.

With cases and deaths on the rise, Mr. Trump told reporters that he would probably hold the first of the new series of briefings on Tuesday at 5 p.m. He attributed his decision to revive them not to the increasing threat of the virus, but to the fact that the briefings had high television ratings.

“I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching in the history of cable television. There’s never been anything like it,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a previously unannounced meeting with congressional Republicans. “It’s a great way to get information out to the public as to where we are with the vaccines, with the therapeutics.”

The original briefings over the course of weeks from March to April were made-for-television events, with scientific information provided by public health experts often overshadowed by a confrontational president castigating governors, lawmakers, China, reporters and others he deemed insufficiently grateful to him for his leadership. He used them to defend his administration’s response to the virus and promote a pet drug as a possible treatment over the advice of his own experts.

He eventually quit holding the briefings after he was mocked widely for suggesting that people might be able to counter the virus by ingesting or injecting bleach, an offhand comment that sent public health agencies scrambling to warn the public not to try such an approach because it could be fatal.

But in recent weeks, the surge of cases, particularly in the South and West, has frustrated Mr. Trump’s effort to diminish the seriousness of the continuing pandemic. The United States now records more than twice as many cases each day as it did during the height of the daily briefings, and the number of deaths, which had fallen substantially, has begun to rise again as well.

Mr. Trump, who has generally resisted wearing masks in public or strongly endorsing their use despite the advice of federal health officials and pleas from some governors, posted a picture of himself in a mask on Twitter on Monday, writing “many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”

Even as hospitals fill up and governors reverse decisions to reopen, Mr. Trump has continued to insist that the virus would simply vanish on its own.

“It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right,” Mr. Trump said in an interview aired on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend. “Because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.”

Elsewhere in the United States:

• Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky limited social gatherings to 10 people on Monday, a day after the state reported its highest number of new coronavirus cases. “We don’t want to become Arizona or Florida,” Mr. Beshear said. He also issued a recommendation that people returning from states with positivity rates of 15 percent or higher quarantine themselves for 14 days.

• Gov. Gavin Newsom of California provided a snapshot of a state in flux a week after he announced the biggest statewide rollback yet of efforts to lift restrictions on the world’s fifth largest economy.

• Minnesota, which on Monday reported 900 new cases, a single-day record, also reported its first virus-related death of a child, according to the state’s health department. The department said the child was 5 years old or younger, but did not list the exact age.

• Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago is rolling back some of the city’s reopening rules. Starting Friday, bars will once again be banned from serving alcohol indoors; services like shaves and facials that require people to take off their masks will be banned; indoor fitness classes will be limited to 10 people; and property managers will be asked to limit guests to five per unit to prevent parties.

• Kansas announced on Monday more than 1,000 new cases, a single-day record, while Alaska reported its own single-day record with 137 new cases.

• As cases spike across Florida, the virus appears to have caught up with the residents of the Villages.

• The Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a new dashboard on Monday with regularly-updated data on hospital capacity.

Potential vaccines from Oxford and a Chinese company have triggered immune responses, studies find.

Two potential vaccines against the virus from Oxford University and the Chinese company CanSino have triggered immune responses in hundreds of humans without dangerous side effects, according to two studies published on Monday in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Although short of proving efficacy at preventing infection, the results are the most promising indication yet of progress toward a vaccine that could end the pandemic.

A third potential vaccine, from the American biotechnology company Moderna, has also elicited immune responses in 45 people who have received it, according to a study released last week.

All three potential vaccines are moving into larger tests, known as Phase III trials, aiming to show their effectiveness at preventing the diseases.

The Oxford vaccine, which is being produced in partnership with the British-Swedish drug giant AstraZeneca, is already in large Phase III tests in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, where more than 10,000 participants have already received doses. (An earlier version of this article described AstraZeneca incorrectly as a British-Swiss company.)

Another Phase III test involving 30,000 participants in the United States is set to begin next week, along with a parallel test of the Moderna vaccine. The CanSino vaccine has also passed safety tests and is heading for an efficacy trial in Brazil.

Exactly when any of those tests may deliver results remains hazy.

“Seeing these responses means that people should be optimistic that this vaccine will be useful,” said Prof. Adrian Hill of Oxford, one of the scientists developing the vaccine. “But there is no guarantee until you have shown efficacy in humans because you can’t know what you don’t know.”

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Hong Kong, once a model for virus control, is grappling with a new wave.

Hong Kong once seemed like a model for how to control the virus.

But a new wave of infections in recent days, peaking at 108 new cases on Sunday, has put the city on edge. Hospitals are now seeing more cases a day than they ever have during the pandemic. More important, health officials are unable to determine the origin of many of these cases, despite having a robust contact tracing system.

As governments around the world look to relax rules put in place to combat the virus, Hong Kong’s experience provides a cautionary tale.

In other pandemic related developments around the world:

• The World Health Organization expressed alarm on Monday over the growing number of cases among Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. As of July 6, more than 70,000 cases have been reported among them, and more than 2,000 deaths. Indigenous communities in both urban and remote areas are at risk, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general.

• India announced a record 40,000 cases on Monday.

• Tati, the discount department store in Paris more visited than the Eiffel Tower, is shutting. The pandemic has dealt the store a final blow after a long decline, its owners say.

• Without tourists on beaches, workers in Bali are returning to farming and fishing.

• A small study of hospitalized virus patients in Britain has identified a promising new treatment for the illness. Synairgen, a Britain-based biotechnology company, said on Monday, with initial results showing that an inhaled form of a commonly available drug can reduce the odds of patients requiring intensive care.

• President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said the police would arrest people for not wearing masks in public. “We have to ask our police to be more strict,” he said. “Catch them. A little shame or put them on notice forever.”

• Air passengers to China must provide a negative Covid-19 test result before boarding the flight, the aviation authority said. The test must be completed within five days of the trip.

1,400 students arrived to take the ACT college admission, but the sites were closed.

In yet another virus-related disruption of American education, some 1,400 high school students showed up to take the ACT college admission test on Saturday, only to discover their testing sites had been shut down, according to the ACT.

The thwarted tests, at 21 locations nationally, were the latest frustration for students hoping to complete college applications in a year marred by closed campuses and rocky transitions to online instruction.

Fearing the spread of a virus that continues to rage in much of the country, school districts have shut down classrooms and standardized testing companies have canceled numerous dates for the ACT and the SAT.

Still, with fall deadlines for college applications drawing closer, many students had signed up for Saturday’s tests, even though many colleges had announced they would waive the use of those scores this year.

In a statement on Monday, ACT Inc., the nonprofit organization that administers the test, noted that more than 88,000 students at some 1,100 sites successfully took the exam on Saturday. Test takers had been warned to check the ACT website for updates, but not all the cancellations made it onto the site, according to the statement.

“We know that some sites canceled up until late Friday night, including some we were unaware of, resulting in unprocessed communications to students,” the statement said. The organization said it was still investigating what caused the unannounced cancellations.

ACT said it would follow up with students to offer refunds and new opportunities for testing.

Three historically Black colleges and universities in Atlanta decide to call off in-person classes.

Three prominent historically Black colleges and universities in Atlanta — Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University — said Monday that the worsening outbreak had forced them to reverse course on their plans to reopen for in-person instruction.

All three announced that they would teach online-only in the coming semester, citing the rapidly deteriorating public health crisis.

“It pains me deeply now to deliver the news that in the past two weeks, the health crisis has worsened considerably in the state of Georgia, the city of Atlanta, and in Fulton County, in which Spelman and the Atlanta University Center are located,” Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College, wrote in a letter to first-year students, announcing that instruction this fall would be virtual.

The president of Morehouse, David A. Thomas, noted in a letter explaining the decision that there were only 20 known cases in Fulton County, where the college is, in March when students were sent home — but “now, there are more than 12,000.”

And the president of Clark Atlanta University, George T. French Jr., noted that since the end of June, when he announced plans to welcome freshmen and sophomores back to campus, “the number of Covid-19 cases has increased exponentially.”

SPORTS AND CULTURE ROUNDUP

N.F.L. players say #WeWantToPlay but have questioned training camp safety.

On Monday, rookies from the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans became the first of thousands of N.F.L. players to report to training camp.

The league’s insistence on sticking to the pledge to start its season on time comes as cases are rising in dozens of states, including California, Florida and Texas, which together are home to eight N.F.L. teams.

The owners and the N.F.L. Players Association have worked for months to find ways to bring players back together as safely as possible. On Monday, the league and the union agreed on daily player testing for the virus for at least the first two weeks of training camp.

Some of the league’s biggest stars — including Patrick Mahomes and J.J. Watt — had started a social media campaign using the hashtag #WeWantToPlay as part of their efforts.

In other sports and culture developments:

• Major League Baseball will start its shortened season this week, but there will be no fans in the stands. The Washington Nationals announced that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious disease expert — will throw out the ceremonial first pitch on Thursday, which is opening day.

• Warner Bros. announced on Monday that it was abandoning its release date for Christopher Nolan’s film “Tenet” of Aug. 12, the one-time marker for when Hollywood hoped moviegoing would return in earnest.

• None of the 346 N.B.A. players tested for the coronavirus over the past week have returned “confirmed” positive tests, the league announced Monday. The next major step for the N.B.A. arrives Wednesday, when four scrimmages will be played to enable the league to start staging games.

• The California Interscholastic Federation announced that high school sports will not begin until December or January. The federation said in a news release that it was regularly monitoring the guidance of organizations including the state Department of Public Health and local county health departments — agencies that its member school districts follow “with student health and safety at the forefront.”

• The usually tourist-packed Berkshires confronts a season without Tanglewood, the music festival that anchors its summers.

Governments seem surprised that Google virus app, promising privacy, can collect location data.

When Google and Apple announced plans in April for free software to help alert people of their possible exposure to the virus, the companies promoted it as “privacy preserving” and said it would not track users’ locations. Encouraged by those guarantees, Germany, Switzerland and other countries used the code to develop national virus alert apps that have been downloaded more than 20 million times.

But for the apps to work on smartphones with Google’s Android operating system — the most popular in the world — users must first turn on the device location setting, which enables GPS and may allow Google to determine their locations.

Some government officials seemed surprised that Google could detect Android users’ locations while Switzerland said it had been pushing Google to alter the location setting requirement. Some Android users in Europe also said they felt misled by their governments.

Pete Voss, a Google spokesman, said the virus alert apps that use the company’s software do not use device location. The apps use Bluetooth scanning signals to detect smartphones that come into close contact with one another — without needing to know the devices’ locations at all.

The Android location requirement underscores a troubling power imbalance between governments and two tech giants that dominate the mobile market, some security and privacy experts said.

N.Y.’s governor threatens to close bars and restaurants over the lax enforcement of crowds.

As New York City entered a limited fourth phase of reopening on Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo threatened to roll back the reopening of city bars and restaurants after a weekend that saw crowds partying outside in Astoria in Queens and elsewhere.

If lax local enforcement of social distancing and open-container laws continued, Mr. Cuomo said, he would step in, adding that his warning applied to parts of Long Island and upstate New York, too.

Mr. Cuomo’s warning came as New York City became the last part of the state to move into Phase 4, which allows some outdoor institutions like zoos and botanical gardens to reopen, with limits.

Concerns about the threat of another outbreak moved officials to maintain the ban in the city on indoor businesses that have been allowed elsewhere in the state: gyms, malls, movie theaters, museums and indoor dining. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that the city did not have “a set timeline” on when these indoor activities could resume, or a deadline on a decision.

Gatherings of up to 50 people are now allowed in the city, as well as indoor events at houses of worship operating at one-third of maximum capacity. Outdoor film production and professional sports without audiences can also resume.

Reporting was contributed by Geneva Abdul, Matt Apuzzo, Ian Austen, Peter Baker, Ken Belson, Alexander Burns, Emily Cochrane, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Michael Cooper, Monica Davey, Jason DeParle, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Lalena Fisher, Selam Gebrekidan, Maggie Haberman, Javier C. Hernández, Shawn Hubler, Drew Jordan, Thomas Kaplan, David D. Kirkpatrick, Juliana Kim, Christoph Koettl, David Leonhardt, Eric Lipton, Iliana Magra, Jonathan Martin, Tiffany May, Jeffery C. Mays, Heather Murphy, Andy Newman, Adam Nossiter, Tariq Panja, Richard C. Paddock, Sean Piccoli, Natalie Reneau, Dana Rubinstein, Kai Schultz, Eliza Shapiro, Natasha Singer, Mitch Smith, Kaly Soto, Nicole Sperling, Marc Stein, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Jim Tankersley, David Waldstein, Haley Willis, Noah Weiland, Will Wright and Muyi Xiao.