U.S. Nears 60,000 New Daily Covid-19 Cases: Live Updates

The world sets a record for new virus cases, as daily infections in the U.S. also reach a new high.

The coronavirus pandemic has again reached a new global record for infections reported on a single day: The World Health Organization announced that 228,102 new cases had surfaced around the world on Friday, a day after a New York Times database reported 223,116 new cases.

It was the fifth time this month that the global daily number had surpassed 200,000.

The biggest source of new infections, the United States, on Friday surpassed 60,000 new cases for the first time — setting a single-day record for the seventh time in 11 days, as worsening outbreaks continued in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona. With some U.S. numbers still to be reported, more than 61,000 new infections had been announced Friday evening.

The other nations showing the largest daily increases in cases were Brazil, Mexico, India, and South Africa.

“There is a lot of work still to be done, from countries where there is exponential growth to places that are loosening restrictions and now starting to see cases rise,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., said at a briefing Friday.

The growth in cases in the United States has continued to accelerate at alarming rates, even as other early hot spots curbed the spread of the virus. And deaths were on the rise across the nation, after months of declines.

Italy set its single-day record for new cases on March 21 with 6,557, but it now reports fewer than 200 a day. Spain, which was averaging 8,000 new cases a day during its peak in April, now averages a little over 400 a day. And Britain, which was averaging 5,500 new cases a day in mid-April, now averages 537.

In the United States, on the other hand, the outbreak is getting worse. Officials had hoped that the virus had reached its peak in the country in the spring, when it set a single-day record of 36,738 new cases on April 24. New cases did begin to decline after that, but continued to average more than 20,000 a day. And as states have eased restrictions and allowed more businesses to reopen, new cases have exploded in recent weeks.

The contrast between the United States and the early European hot spots was underscored when, as hospitals across the American South and West were being flooded with virus patients, a hospital in the hard-hit province of Bergamo, Italy, which was once the center of the global outbreak, reported that its intensive care unit had no Covid-19 cases for the first time in 137 days.

A rising death toll in the United States has raised fears after months of declines.

Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Tennessee all set single-day death records this week. The seven-day death average in the U.S. reached 608 on Thursday, up from 471 earlier in July, but still a fraction of the more than 2,200 deaths the country averaged each day in mid-April, when the outbreak in the Northeast was at its worst.

Some health experts cautioned that it was too early to predict a trend from only a few days of data. But on Friday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, struck a tone different from President Trump’s in recent days, saying that she expects to soon see an increase in deaths.

Citing the nation’s recent increase in cases, Dr. Birx said during a panel on the virus organized by the International AIDS Society: “We have not seen this result in increased mortality, but that is expected as the disease continues to spread in some of our large metro areas where comorbidities exist.”

As cases in Texas soar, the governor warned the state may return to lockdown.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signaled on Friday that he may have to impose a new economic “lockdown” if the state is unable to reverse the record-setting caseloads and hospitalizations that have made Texas a leading U.S. hot spot in the pandemic.

In an interview with KLBK-TV in Lubbock, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, bluntly predicted that “things will get worse” and said that he may be forced to take steps even more drastic than the statewide face-mask requirement that has angered members of his own party.

“I made clear that I made this tough decision for one reason: It was our last best effort to slow the spread of Covid-19,” he said. He added that if those efforts fail, “the next step would have to be a lockdown.”

Texas reported record high numbers of daily cases four times this week, announcing more than 10,900 on Thursday. Nearly a tenth were in Hidalgo County, near the border with Mexico.

The face-mask order, issued just before the Fourth of July weekend, was one of a series of orders rolling back the state’s gradual economic reopening plan that began on May 1 but was followed by a surge in Covid-19 cases.

In an effort to blunt the impact on Texas health facilities, the U.S. government has begun deploying federal medical assistance teams to hospitals, some of which have been pushed to capacity levels and beyond.

“They’re critically needed,” said Mayor Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio, which is receiving assistance from both state and federal teams brought in to bolster hospital staffs. Other teams are being assigned to Austin, Dallas and McAllen as well as to smaller rural cities, Mr. Nirenberg said.

Much of the recent surge in new U.S. cases has been driven largely by states in the South and the West that were among the first to ease restrictions.

In Florida on Friday, officials announced 11,433 new cases, nearing the single-day record it reported July 4. The state also reported 93 new deaths, a day after setting its single-day record with 120. In Miami-Dade County, data reported on Thursday showed that 33.5 percent of virus tests had come back positive; on Friday, it was reported at 27.8 percent. The county has indicated that it aims to be at or below 10 percent.

In Alabama on Friday, the state reported 36 new deaths, a single-day record. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster said Friday that the sale of all alcoholic drinks in restaurants and bars would be banned beginning Saturday night.

New single-day case records were set Friday in Utah, which reported more 760, and Montana, which reported 127. Other states that were hit hard early are bracing for rebounds.

Atlanta officials want people to stay home again, but Georgia’s governor says that’s only a “guidance.”

As Georgia hit a record for cases, Atlanta officials said Friday that they were preparing to shift back to “phase one” guidelines that call for residents to largely stay at home.

The move comes as Georgia reported more than 4,000 new confirmed cases, its largest single-day increase so far. The majority of the state’s cases have been concentrated in the counties making up the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who said that she had tested positive earlier this week, issued a mask mandate in the city on Wednesday and added further limits on large gatherings. It is unclear when the return to phase one would begin.

The growing intensity of the virus in Georgia was also underscored on Friday after Gov. Brian Kemp announced that the state was once again transforming a convention center in Atlanta into makeshift medical center as hospitals were filling with patients.

But Ms. Bottom’s decision has revived tensions between her and the governor, as Mr. Kemp’s office released a statement on Friday describing her action as “merely guidance — both nonbinding and legally unenforceable.”

“As clearly stated in the governor’s executive order,” the statement said, “no local action can be more or less restrictive, and that rule applies statewide.”

The two officials had been at odds earlier over the virus response as she publicly challenged Mr. Kemp’s decision to begin reopening the state, which she argued was premature and stood to have perilous consequences.

The superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, Dr. Lisa Herring, released a recommendation on Facebook Friday that the schools should conduct classes virtually rather than in person when they open next month. Schools nationwide have been grappling with how to reopen and if it can be done safely. And President Trump threatened this week to cut off federal funding to districts that do not reopen their classrooms.

Ohio and other states that had been making progress see the virus coming back.

The virus is surging in some states that had been making progress after battling earlier outbreaks: On Friday, Ohio reported 1,525 new cases, exceeding the previous single-day record it had set back in April.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio called the state’s recent increase in cases and hospitalizations “significant” at a news conference on Thursday, and ordered people in several more hard-hit counties to wear masks. The average number of new cases a day there this month is twice what it was last month. The state has recorded more than 62,000 cases and 3,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to a Times database.

Other states are also seeing the virus rebound. Louisiana has been seeing an average of more than 1,000 new cases a day this month for the first time since April. Iowa is reporting an average of more than 400 cases a day this month for the first time since May.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York warned Friday that the state would see a spike in cases because of the spread in other states, weeks after the state managed to rein in its outbreak, which killed more than 30,000 people in the state.

“We are going to go through an increase. I can feel it coming,” he said in a radio interview. “There is a certain inevitability to it. It’s going to come back.”

Under a recent order, travelers from 19 states with rising infection rates are supposed to quarantine for two weeks when visiting New York. But Mr. Cuomo said even that might not be enough to stop the virus from seeping into New York: “It’s like catching water in a screen.”

California plans to release up to 8,000 more prisoners.

Up to 8,000 people could be released from California prisons by the end of August under new rules announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration on Friday in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The move comes amid growing criticism of Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, for not ordering more people released earlier, even as the coronavirus has ravaged prisons in the state, infecting at least 5,837 prisoners and killing more than 31, according to state data.

The situation at San Quentin State Prison, outside of San Francisco, is particularly dire: nearly half of the facility’s roughly 3,300 prisoners have tested positive for the virus.

Among the people who could be released are prisoners deemed “high-risk” if they were to become infected with the coronavirus because of medical conditions and those who have less than a year remaining in their sentence. But many people who fall into those categories will remain in prison, however, because they do not fit other criteria, such as having been deemed to have a “low risk for violence.”

People will be released from prison on a rolling basis as their situation is reviewed under the new criteria.

The California prison system said in a statement that the total population has already declined by about 10,000 people in response to the pandemic. About 108,000 people are held in state-run prisons, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The San Quentin prison, where the outbreak is the worst, remains at 110 percent of its capacity.

Donald Specter, the executive director of the Prison Law Office, said Mr. Newsom was moving in the right direction, but had acted too slowly and, in his latest move, did not go far enough to keep people from dying of the coronavirus in prisons.

Facing a third wave of virus cases, Hong Kong shuts its schools.

Hong Kong, which has been lauded for its aggressive handling of the outbreak, is confronting a third wave of infections, and on Friday shut down its school system.

The city of seven million people has reported more than 1,400 cases and just seven deaths during the outbreak. The widespread use of face masks when the epidemic first broke out — a legacy of the SARS epidemic that ravaged the city in 2003 — was credited with helping contain the virus. Authorities also forced all new arrivals to undergo a strict two-week quarantine. From mid-April through June, Hong Kong recorded very few locally transmitted infections.

But on Friday officials reported 38 new cases — 32 of which were transmitted locally — prompting the city to shut down schools starting Monday. The practical impact will be limited since most schools go on summer break the week after.

The city’s education secretary, Kevin Yueng, said he was concerned about the surge in local cases, noting some of them involved schools.

“After consideration and listening to expert’s advice, we decided that all kindergarten, primary school, secondary schools can start the summer holiday from next Monday,” he said.

The third wave, which comes after a second wave of infections surged in March and was contained by May, was a setback for a city that had largely returned to normal, with its many restaurants enjoying packed crowds and workers returning to their offices in recent months.

The latest spike in cases included local clusters linked to a nursing home and diners, causing the Chinese territory to also announce new social-distancing rules following a period of relaxation.

A war of words between Trump and Fauci is playing out through interviews with the news media.

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, are continuing to spar over the government’s response to the coronavirus, arguments playing out in media appearances over the past week.

One of the points of contention is the seriousness of the disease caused by the virus, which has been spreading across the country at its fastest pace yet. Mr. Trump has argued that it is mostly harmless.

“There were no tests for a new virus, but now we have tested over 40 million people,” Mr. Trump said in a speech on July 4. “But by so doing, we show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless.”

In an interview with The Financial Times that was published Friday, Dr. Fauci said he was not sure of the source of the data the president was referencing.

“I’m trying to figure out where the president got that number,” Dr. Fauci said. “What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1 percent. And he interpreted, therefore, that 99 percent is not a problem, when that’s obviously not the case.”

“Even if it doesn’t kill you, even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital, it can make you seriously ill,” Dr. Fauci said. And he called the pandemic “the big one.”

On Thursday night, during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump suggested Dr. Fauci was not credible.

“Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” Mr. Trump said. “A lot of them said, ‘Don’t wear a mask, don’t wear a mask,’” he added. “Now they are saying, ‘Wear a mask.’ A lot of mistakes were made, a lot of mistakes.”

Mr. Trump was referring to initial guidance early on during the pandemic against wearing a face covering for health precautions. Experts now encourage face masks, and in some parts of the country, wearing them is mandated. Mr. Trump has largely abstained from donning a face covering, and the issue has become contentious across the country.

Earlier on Thursday, Dr. Fauci told FiveThirtyEight that the political divisiveness in the country is hurting the response to the pandemic.

“You know, from experience historically, that when you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it,” Dr. Fauci said. “So I think you’d have to make the assumption that if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”

U.S. Roundup

Cases in the U.S. military have more than doubled in one month.

In one month, cases in the U.S. military have more than doubled, according to Pentagon data, a disturbing surge that mirrors a similar trend seen across the country.

On Friday, Pentagon statistics reported 16,637 cases in the entire military. On June 10, that number was just 7,408. Three people have died since March, including a sailor on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which returned to port in the United States earlier this week. More than 380 service members have been hospitalized.

The trend is likely tied to the military’s persistence on continuing exercises, training courses, and deployments. Increased testing could also be a factor. Late last month more than 80 students at a survival course, known as SERE, tested positive.

In Australia, where more than a thousand Marines recently started their annual months-long deployment in Darwin, at least one Marine was found to have the virus, according to a Marine news release on Friday. And on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, docked in San Diego, nearly a dozen sailors have tested positive and around 100 have been isolated.

In other news from around the United States:

• Mr. Trump had been scheduled to hold a rally on Saturday in New Hampshire, one of just two states experiencing declines in cases. Officials there had still been concerned, but on Friday, Mr. Trump postponed the rally, citing an incoming tropical storm.

• A battle between the Trump administration and some of America’s top universities escalated on Friday, with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seeking a court order to protect foreign students from losing their visas, and the president threatening the tax-exempt status of institutions that he claimed indoctrinate students. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and universities in California have also sued the administration.

• Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, signed an order requiring people in the state to wear masks in indoor public spaces and in crowded outdoor areas, and requiring businesses to turn away people without masks. It is punishable by a $500 fine, but no term of confinement.

• Nevada’s governor also said that as of 11:59 p.m. on Friday, the state will close bars in some counties. Bars in Las Vegas and Reno that don’t serve food will be affected by the restrictions.

• Mississippi recorded more than 1,000 new cases Friday. On Thursday, Gov. Tate Reeves signed a new executive order requiring people in 13 counties to wear masks in public and limit indoor gatherings to 10 people. At least 26 Mississippi lawmakers had been diagnosed with the virus, including the House Speaker and the lieutenant governor (Mr. Reeves tested negative).

• The Los Angeles teachers union called on the Los Angeles Unified School District on Friday to keep campuses closed when the semester begins on Aug. 18 and to focus on preparing for distance learning in the fall, the union said in a statement. United Teachers Los Angeles said that the spike in infections, paired with a lack of resources from state and federal governments for schools to increase public health measures, would not allow schools to reopen safely..

• San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey, a six-time All-Star and a former National League most valuable player, announced that he was opting out of Major League Baseball’s abbreviated season because he and his wife, Kristen Posey, had recently adopted twin daughters who were born prematurely and he did not want to endanger their health by increasing his chances of exposure to the virus. By skipping the 60-game season scheduled to start July 23, Posey, 33, could forfeit nearly $8 million, which the Giants are not required to pay him.

• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s executive order requiring residents to wear masks in public indoor spaces and on public transit took effect 5 p.m. Friday. The order came the same day a circuit court judge ruled that the Democratic governor’s social distancing mandates do not apply to any of Kentucky’s 500 agritourism businesses. The decision marked another attempt by the state’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican who intervened in the case, to limit the governor’s authority. Kentucky has seen a recent uptick in cases and 647 deaths since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times database.

Is your state doing enough virus testing?

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

In hard-hit South Africa, deeply important burial traditions have been upended by the pandemic.

In March, South Africa imposed one of the world’s most severe lockdowns in response to the coronavirus, restricting travel between provinces. This disrupted a deeply important cultural practice for many Black residents in Cape Town: returning the bodies of family members to the neighboring Eastern Cape Province for burial.

The new rules around travel for funerals are so complex, and add so much extra expense, that they have become practically insurmountable for many families, according to funeral directors and community leaders in Cape Town.

For some poorer families, the rules are forcing a choice between breaking tradition and breaking the law.

“It’s a big trauma,” said Chris Stali, the director of a funeral parlor in Khayelitsha, the informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town where Mr. Mweli lived while working in the city.

While South Africa is now attempting to reopen, and is easing some restrictions, the rules around funerals are still in place. Attendance at funerals is capped at 50, and overnight vigils and body viewings are banned.

The regulations have been felt especially acutely in Cape Town, the initial epicenter of the country’s outbreak. South Africa now ranks 13th in the world for coronavirus cases and is experiencing an enormous rise.

In other news from around the world:

• An outbreak in Tokyo’s nightlife districts pushed Japan’s capital to another daily record on Friday as it recorded 243 new cases. Gov. Yuriko Koike said at a news conference that about three-quarters of the cases were among people in their 20s and 30s and that the overwhelming majority of them exhibited mild symptoms. Japan has been relatively successful in containing the virus, even after lifting a state of emergency at the end of May.

• Australia will halve the number of citizens and residents permitted to return home each week — to 4,000 from about 8,000 — to ease pressure on quarantine facilities, Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday. The border has been closed to everyone except returning citizens and permanent residents since March, but a fresh outbreak is now surging through Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city.

• Britain dropped a 14-day quarantine for travelers coming from 75 countries, including most of the European Union on Friday. The list of countries does not include the United States. If a traveler arrives from a country that’s not on the exempt list, they are required to go straight to wherever they are staying and quarantine for 14 days without visitors.

• China’s customs authority on Friday said it had suspended imports from three Ecuadorean companies after the coronavirus was detected on a container and on packages of frozen shrimp from Ecuador, China’s state broadcaster reported. China has increased its inspection and testing of food imports after an outbreak in Beijing last month and reports that traces of the virus were found on a cutting board used for imported salmon. China has also already suspended imports from 23 meat producers, including Germany’s Tönnies, American meat giant Tyson, Brazil’s Agra and the United Kingdom’s Tulip because of outbreaks at their plants, Bi Kexin, a senior Chinese customs official, said Friday.

• Journalists with Al Jazeera are under investigation by the Malaysian police for sedition and defamation after the news network broadcast a documentary showing a military-style crackdown on undocumented migrant workers over coronavirus fears.

A study finds each Covid-19 death affects an average of nine close family members.

As the daily number of deaths from the coronavirus rises in some of the nation’s most populous states, signaling a possible end to months of declining death totals nationally, each death will affect an average of nine close family members, according to research published on Friday.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aimed to look at what researchers call the “bereavement multiplier” in an effort to understand how many lives can be directly touched by pandemic-related fatalities. The researchers suggest that their findings could help gauge the long-term emotional and societal impact, or “mortality shock,” from the sudden burst of deaths.

The data, which drew from prior work on the number of connections among family members, was compiled by four researchers, two from Pennsylvania State University and one each from the University of Southern California and the University of Western Ontario.

The study found that African-Americans, with larger kinship networks, will likely suffer a slightly higher bereavement multiplier of 9.18 close relatives for each person who dies of Covid-19, while each white American who dies will leave behind on average 8.86 grieving relatives.

A close relative, for purposes of the study, was defined as a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. The authors reflected on the fact that the pandemic has taken its gravest toll on older Americans.

“Unsurprisingly, most young Americans who have a relative die will experience a grandparent’s death,” the authors wrote. “Conversely, adults ages 30 to 40 are most likely to lose a parent, whereas older adults are most likely to experience a sibling’s or spouse’s death.”

‘Like a time bomb’: How U.S. immigration officials helped spread the virus.

As lockdowns and other measures have been taken around the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has continued to move detainees from state to state and deport them. And with them, the virus.

An investigation by The Times, in collaboration with The Marshall Project, reveals how unsafe conditions and scattershot testing helped turn ICE into a domestic and global spreader of the virus — and how pressure from the Trump administration led other countries to take in sick deportees.

Thirty immigrant detainees described cramped and unsanitary detention centers where social distancing was nearly impossible and protective gear almost nonexistent.

“It was like a time bomb,” one Cuban immigrant held in Louisiana said.

The Times spoke to at least four people who had been deported — to El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and India — and who had tested positive for the virus shortly after arriving from the United States.

The governments of 11 countries have confirmed that hundreds of deportees returned home from the United States with the virus. ICE said last week that it was still able to test only a sampling of immigrants before sending them home.

Much is still unknown about how the virus affects pregnant women.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report last month on pregnant women with Covid-19, suggesting that they might be at higher risk for severe illness. While the study had a large sample size, more than 8,000 women, it raised more questions than it answered, and the results were difficult to interpret.

With so many new details about the virus emerging, Christina Caron, a reporter who covers parenting for The New York Times, asks: why do we still know so little about how the virus affects pregnant women and their babies?

The C.D.C. reported that pregnant women with the virus were more likely to be hospitalized, admitted to an intensive care unit and put on a ventilator than infected women who are not pregnant. But researchers lacked data to say whether the pregnant women were hospitalized because of labor and delivery, or because of complications from Covid-19.

And the data on whether or not infected pregnant women were admitted to intensive care units, or required mechanical ventilation, was missing for about 75 percent of the patients.

Despite the caveats of the C.D.C. study, it remains a “signal” that pregnant women could be more susceptible to severe symptoms, said Allison Bryant, M.D., a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ working group on Covid-19 and pregnancy. She added that “it’s not super surprising given what we know about other respiratory illnesses like flu.”

Researchers in other countries have found similar signals.

Data gathered from the U.K. Obstetric Surveillance System showed in May that 10 percent of 427 pregnant women with the coronavirus admitted to hospitals between March 1 and April 14 needed respiratory support. Three of them died from complications of Covid-19.

Air travel in the age of coronavirus: a visual diary.

The photographer Moris Moreno flew from Seattle to Boston in June with his family, and documented his journey to show how the virus has changed air travel. His trip isn’t representative of all flights, but it shows how masks, social distancing and protective plexiglass have become part of the flying experience.

Here’s what you need to know about flying now.

Reporting was contributed by Yuriria Avila, Brooks Barnes, Alan Blinder, Gillian R. Brassil, Dan Bilefsky, Julia Calderone, Michael Cooper, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, Hailey Fuchs, Shane Goldmacher, J. David Goodman, Kevin Granville, Kimon de Greef, Maggie Haberman, Mohammed Hadi, Rebecca Halleck, Anemona Hartocollis, Barbara Harvey, Shawn Hubler, Makiko Inoue, Mike Ives, Miriam Jordan, Annie Karni, Emily Kassie, Gwen Knapp, Gina Kolata, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Isabella Kwai, Jasmine C. Lee, Michael Levenson, Cao Li, Peter Luhanga, Apoorva Mandavilli, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Barbara Marcolini, Alex Leeds Matthews, Sarah Mervosh, David Montgomery, Morris Moreno, Benjamin Mueller, Judith Newman, Richard C. Paddock, Elian Peltier, Elisabetta Povoledo, Adam Rasgon, Stanley Reed, Motoko Rich, Matt Richtel, Rick Rojas, Mitch Smith, Farah Stockman, Eileen Sullivan, Jim Tankersley, Maria Silvia Trigo, Noah Weiland, Will Wright and Elaine Yu.

A push notification misstated the span of time in which the United States set a seventh single-day record in coronavirus cases. It was 11 days, not 10.