COVID-19 News from Around the Web

The recovery from America's jobs crisis seems to have hit a roadblock, and weekly claims for unemployment benefits are proof of that. Another 1.2 million Americans filed for first-time jobless benefits last week on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Department of Labor reported on Thursday. That was down from the prior week's 1.4 million claims. First-time jobless claims peaked at 6.9 million in the last week of March and then declined for four months. But around mid-July, they reversed directions and rose again. That's not a good look for a labor market that desperately needs to recover after millions of workers were displaced by the pandemic. But last week offered hope that claims could head lower once again. Rising Covid-19 infections across the country have stalled the reopening of the economy and have made it harder for people to return to work. In addition, money from government's paycheck protection program, which allowed companies to hire back workers, is running out. Continuing claims for benefits, which count people who have applied for government aid for at least two weeks in a row, came in at 16.1 million on a seasonally adjusted basis. And those numbers are only regular jobless benefits and don't include the pandemic assistance the government rolled out over the past months.

Though 33 states now have face mask mandates, Gov. Pete Ricketts says his state of Nebraska will not be joining them. On Monday, Ricketts doubled down on his conviction that a statewide mask mandate would be too “heavy-handed.” “I don’t want to make it a crime,” he said at a press conference. Ricketts’s resistance comes as his office is challenging mask ordinances in Lincoln and Lancaster County that have already gone into effect. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have called his failure to pass a statewide mask order a “dereliction of duty.” “I would die for my students. Please don’t make me,” read a teacher’s sign at a recent protest across from Ricketts’s office. Though the science on the effectiveness of masks for reducing the spread of the coronavirus is more established now than it was early in the pandemic, mandatory masking is still a new and contentious idea. Public health experts and unions are calling for a national mandate to protect the most vulnerable, but President Donald Trump has said he opposes it, telling CNN, “No, I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don’t believe in that, no.” Popular support for mask-wearing is growing: A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted from July 26-27 found that 82 percent of Americans would support a national mask mandate. Yet mask-wearing has also been correlated with partisan identity, and many Americans still refuse to wear them in indoor public settings such as grocery stores, even in states and cities where mandates are in place. Some are even using fake exemption cards to try to get out of wearing a mask where it is now required.

Kansas counties that have mask mandates in place have seen a rapid drop in cases, while counties that only recommend their use have seen no decrease in cases, the state’s top health official said Wednesday. Dr. Lee Norman, the state health department’s top administrator, said Wednesday that overall statewide the numbers of new cases is favorable, but that the reduction of new cases is entirely in the counties that require masks be worn in public spaces. After Gov. Laura Kelly put a mask mandate in place last month, 15 counties stayed with the mandate while 90 counties abandoned it, Norman said at a news conference Wednesday.

Top U.S. infectious disease official Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday that he doesn’t think the United States will have to go back into “shutdown mode” in order to contain the spread of COVID-19. “We can do much better without locking down,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at an event hosted by Harvard University. He said Americans should wear masks, keep physically distanced, shut down bars, wash their hands and favor outdoor activities over indoor ones in order to help stop transmission of the virus.

“It’s like we’re flying blind”: The US has a Covid-19 data problem. And fall is fast approaching. Six months into America’s battle with Covid-19, we still can’t really see the enemy. There isn’t good real-time data on where the virus is and who it is infecting. Our diagnostic testing is at an all-time high, but it’s still missing the vast majority of infections. We don’t have systematic surveillance programs like we do for the flu to fill in the gaps, and we don’t have good metrics that tell us how well the virus is being contained. We’re particularly in the dark about what’s happening in many minority communities, which have lower testing rates than white communities. We don’t have good foresight into the future either: As the response to the pandemic grows more fractured, and the policies less consistent and more politicized, it’s getting harder to model. “It’s like we’re flying blind,” says Sarah Cobey, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Chicago. To extend the metaphor: When airplane pilots can’t see out their windows, they can rely on their instruments to guide them through a storm. But with the pandemic “we don’t even have that,” Cobey says. “We don’t even have good numbers to be staring at to guide our flying.”

U.S. testing for the coronavirus is dropping even as infections remain high and the death toll rises by more than 1,000 a day, a worrisome trend that officials attribute largely to Americans getting discouraged over having to wait hours to get a test and days or weeks to learn the results. An Associated Press analysis found that the number of tests per day slid 3.6% over the past two weeks to 750,000, with the count falling in 22 states. That includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Iowa where the percentage of positive tests is high and continuing to climb, an indicator that the virus is still spreading uncontrolled. Amid the crisis, some health experts are calling for the introduction of a different type of test that would yield results in a matter of minutes and would be cheap and simple enough for millions of Americans to test themselves — but would also be less accurate.“There’s a sense of desperation that we need to do something else,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute.

Rep. James Clyburn said Wednesday the COVID-19 crisis is “much, much worse” than the 2008 Great Recession because the U.S. is without a national strategy to contain the coronavirus. “Our entire economy is at stake,” Clyburn told The Associated Press in a Newsmakers interview. The third-ranking House Democrat said he’s hopeful that negotiators on Capitol Hill can reach an agreement soon on a new virus aid package. But he said it’s a direr situation than the financial crisis more than a decade ago. “We’ve got a health care crisis wrapped into an economic crisis, and they are so interwoven,” Clyburn said. “You can’t solve the economic crisis without solving the health care crisis, and the problem we’ve got is that we do not have a national plan to deal with this virus.” Clyburn said, “That’s not the way you run a national government.” As the virus crisis scrambles the summer political conventions, Clyburn said he won’t be attending the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, which officials said Wednesday will be almost entirely virtual. But he said it’s not appropriate for President Donald Trump to use the White House as the backdrop to accept the Republican Party’s nomination, as Trump has suggested.

A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom. In the first half of 2020, SARS CoV 2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID 19—infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID 19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens. Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump was flanked in the White House briefing room by a team of public health experts in a seeming portrait of unity to confront the disease that was ravaging the globe. But as the crisis has spread to all reaches of the country, with escalating deaths and little sense of endgame, a chasm has widened between the Republican president and the experts. The result: daily delivery of a mixed message to the public at a moment when coherence is most needed. Trump and his political advisers insist that the United States has no rival in its response to the pandemic. They point to the fact that the U.S. has administered more virus tests than any other nation and that the percentage of deaths among those infected is among the lowest. “Right now, I think it’s under control,” Trump said during an interview with Axios. He added, “We have done a great job.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that he has received death threats and his daughters have been harassed as a result of his high-profile statements about the coronavirus pandemic. "Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing," Fauci said. Fauci, who plays a key role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, didn't reveal any more details about the threats and harassment. But he said he and his wife, and his three daughters, who live in three separate cities, are weathering the stress. "I wish that they did not have to go through that," Fauci said. He made his comments Wednesday during an online forum sponsored by Harvard University that CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta moderated.

Facebook and Twitter announced Wednesday that they have removed a video of President Trump shared on his Facebook page and Twitter account because it contained "false claims" about the coronavirus. The video was a clip of a phone interview Mr. Trump did with Fox News on Wednesday morning in which he pushed for schools to reopen for in-person learning and falsely claimed children are "almost immune" to the virus. "This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation," a spokesperson for Facebook said. A Twitter spokesperson also confirmed the video "is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation," and added that @TeamTrump, the official Twitter account for Mr. Trump's campaign, would not be able to tweet again until they delete the tweet with the video.

Ordinarily when people lose their job, they spend less money. But something unusual happened this spring, when tens of millions of people were suddenly thrown out of work by the coronavirus pandemic. At first, their spending did go down, just as you would expect. But it quickly rebounded, once people started to receive unemployment benefits, which the federal government had boosted by $600 per week. Jobless people who received those benefits wound up spending more on the whole than they had before the pandemic. "Unemployment benefits have been absolutely transformative for the households that have been able to receive them during this crisis," said Peter Ganong, who studied the spending patterns along with colleagues from the University of Chicago and the JPMorgan Chase Institute. "It actually turns out that they're helping to sustain the U.S. economy as a whole." That could be an important consideration as Congress debates whether to renew some form of extra aid for the unemployed as part of a new coronavirus relief package.

An estimated 5.4 million American workers lost their health insurance from February through May, one study finds. Nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 27 million in total are at risk of losing coverage during the coronavirus pandemic, and could be left struggling with COVID-19 or other illnesses along with a lack of income that can make paying medical bills nearly impossible. "We're seeing an unprecedented loss in jobs, and what's going to come along with that, is unfortunately the loss of health insurance as well," Kaiser Executive Vice President Larry Levitt told CBS News' Michelle Miller. He said the loss of health insurance is "particularly risky" during a pandemic, when people are at a heightened risk of "getting infected and potentially severely ill." "People who don't have health insurance hesitate to seek medical attention, worrying about the big medical bills they may face," Levitt said. Those losses mean Americans with preexisting conditions, like Georgia resident Rodney Watts, are left without coverage or work when they need it the most.

Amy Scott had always said she wanted to teach high school until the day she died. Then the coronavirus appeared, making the risk of dying because she was in the classroom all too real. With COVID-19 now ravaging her home state of Florida, she is calling time on her 45-year teaching career. "I had told my husband that I wanted to drop dead in the classroom because I love teaching — it's who I am. It gives me energy, ideas and creativity. But I am not willing to die for it," said Scott, 69, who until June taught at Coral Reef High School in Miami. Amy Scott, a high school teacher in Florida who is choosing to retire because of COVID-19, said she still loves teaching, "But I am not willing to die for it." In choosing to walk away, meanwhile, she is like other U.S. workers who are opting to retire rather than stay in jobs that could expose them to the virus. According to a July study from the University of Chicago, the share of Americans who retired rather than remain in the labor force shot up 7 percentage points between January and April.