COVID-19 News from Around the Web

The pandemic is taking a big toll on Americans' psyches: A new government report found that about 41% of adults surveyed in late June "reported an adverse mental or behavioral health condition." That's a big rise from 2019. For example, the data shows that the number of Americans suffering from an anxiety disorder had tripled by late June compared to the same time last year, and the number of those with depression had jumped fourfold. The findings, based on surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from June 24-30, also show that "one quarter of [survey] respondents reported symptoms of trauma- and stressor-related disorder." About 1 in every 10 survey respondents also said they'd started or increased their use of alcohol or illicit drugs during the pandemic, said a team led by Rashon Lane, of the CDC's COVID-19 Response Team.

New data from around the U.S. confirms that drug overdoses are spiking during the coronavirus pandemic, rising by roughly 18%. Reports collected in real time by the Washington, D.C.-based group ODMAP — the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program, located at the University of Baltimore — also found a significant spike in the number of fatal overdoses. "Overdose clusters have shifted from traditional centralized urban locations to adjacent and surrounding suburban and rural areas," said ODMAP program manager Aliese Alter. The organization compared reported overdoses, fatal and nonfatal, in the weeks leading up to coronavirus quarantine measures and in the weeks after.

The U.S. logged the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in two weeks, a new NBC News tally showed Thursday, but widespread testing shortages raised concerns that the figures coming out of the hardest-hit states might not be presenting a true picture of this deadly pandemic. The 1,424 fatalities reported Wednesday were the highest since July 28, when 2,218 deaths were reported, the figures showed. And it was the twelfth time in the last 16 days that the death toll exceeded 1,000.

Black Americans are becoming infected with the coronavirus at a rate three times that of whites and they are twice as likely to die from COVID-19, according to a new report from the National Urban League, based partly on data from Johns Hopkins University. A key focus of Thursday's report is the impact of the pandemic and how the disease has followed the contours of the larger society in falling especially hard on Blacks, Latinos and Indigenous people.

White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said he is not pleased with the current state of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. U.S. public health officials are beginning to see a “disturbing” uptick in the rate of coronavirus tests that come back positive in some regions of the nation, Fauci said during a National Geographic panel moderated by ABC News Correspondent Deborah Roberts, which aired on Thursday. “Bottom line is, I’m not pleased with how things are going.” “We certainly are not where I hope we would be, we are in the middle of very serious historic pandemic,” he added.

The U.S. push to fire up its economy in the middle of a pandemic remained stalled last week with signs the lapse of emergency unemployment benefits and business grants may have begun taking a toll. Hiring at small businesses, shifts worked across a range of industries, credit card spending and even gasoline demand that typically grows through the summer remained flat and mired far below the levels a year ago. Initial filings for unemployment insurance did fall below 1 million for the first time since the March onset of the coronavirus-driven economic downturn, and the number of people continuing to collect benefits fell 604,000 to 15.486 million in the week ending August 1.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was blocking Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure in a new coronavirus relief bill, a bid to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic. Congressional Democrats accused Republican Trump of trying to damage the struggling Postal Service to improve his chances of being re-elected as opinion polls show him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Trump has been railing against mail-in ballots for months as a possible source of fraud, although millions of Americans - including much of the military - have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without such problems.

Joe Biden is calling for everyone in the United States to wear a mask, well into the fall. "Every single American should be wearing a mask when they're outside for the next three months, at a minimum," Biden said Thursday afternoon in remarks in Wilmington, Del. "Every governor should mandate mandatory mask-wearing. The estimates by the experts are it will save over 40,000 lives." His comments came after a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic with his new running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, and public health experts. … Biden has long been consistently wearing a mask and encouraging others to do so. But he's never been so explicit about mandates and a timeline.

The Food and Drug Administration is encouraging Americans to avoid hand sanitizers contaminated with 1-propanol, a toxic and potentially life-threatening alcohol when ingested. Wednesday's announcement comes on the heels of the agency's mid-June warning about hand sanitizers containing methanol, a type of wood alcohol that can be toxic when absorbed through the skin. As of Aug. 13, the FDA's list of specific hand sanitizer products to avoid, due to either 1-propanol or methanol, was up to 149 items.

Yes, some face masks are more protective than others. But that doesn’t mean wearing neck gaiters — stretchy pieces of fabric that people, especially runners, pull up to cover their nose and mouth — is worse than wearing no masks at all, as some recent news articles have suggested. These news articles were based on a study published Aug. 7 in the journal Science Advances, in which researchers tested a novel method for evaluating the effectiveness of face masks. In other words, it was a study conducted to test a methodology. However, the researchers did explore some mask effectiveness in a "proof-of-principle" test, to evaluate whether they could use this particular method to measure mask effectiveness. To do that, they had a handful of participants try out multiple types of masks.

Churches in California and Minnesota, backed by a conservative legal group, filed lawsuits this week against the governors of their states challenging restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus outbreak that they contend are violations of religious liberty. They’re the latest in a long series of legal challenges, many of them in California, pitting clerics and houses of worship who believe they should be exempt from certain restrictions on public gatherings against governors who insist the measures are needed to rein in the pandemic. Most of the suits have been rebuffed; some have succeeded.

U.S. hotel demand likely won’t see a full recovery until 2023, according to a new forecast from travel data company STR and consultant Tourism Economics. The two firms said Thursday they expect average hotel occupancy of 40% this year, slowly climbing to 52% in 2021. That’s down from a healthy 66% in 2019. U.S. hotels have been busier this summer in beach locations like Norfolk, Virginia, where occupancy stood at 67% last week, STR said. Big cities and Hawaii have been slower to recover. Hotel occupancy in Oahu, Hawaii, stood at 20% last week, STR said.

Dentists are fighting tooth and nail to get back to business amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization released its new recommendation that people should put off "routine" check-ups in areas where the virus is spreading until more is known about coronavirus transmission risk during dental procedures. The American Dental Association fired back and said that it "strongly disagrees" with the guidance and argued that with the appropriate personal protective equipment, patients and professionals can safely operate.

President Trump’s coronavirus task force warns that Georgia continues to see “widespread and expanding community viral spread” and that the state’s current policies aren’t enough to curtail COVID-19. The task force “strongly recommends” Georgia adopt a statewide mandate that citizens wear masks, joining a chorus of public health officials, Democrats and others who have warned that Gov. Brian Kemp’s refusal to order face coverings has plunged the state into deeper crisis and will prolong recovery. “Current mitigation efforts are not having a sufficient impact,” the report said. Businesses, such as nightclubs, bars and gyms, currently open with some restrictions in Georgia, should be closed in the highest risk counties, the report said.

This Board of Trustees in suburban South Carolina is like thousands of school boards nationwide, where members are tackling a simple but hefty question — do we return to school amid a pandemic? — with no right or even good answers, in the face of inconsistent testing and a near-constant increase in confirmed coronavirus cases. Behind that question is pressure. Pressure from teachers and bus drivers and janitors, scared to return to work but in need of a paycheck. Pressure from parents and guardians, who need to return to their own jobs but fear for their children’s safety. Pressure from a president who declares on Twitter “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” but whose administration provides little tangible guidance for doing so.