COVID-19 News from Around the Web

Google and its parent company, Alphabet, will keep employees working from home until at least June of 2021 because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, the company said in a statement Monday to CBS MoneyWatch. The technology giant had previously planned to bring workers back to its offices beginning in January. Its new policy makes Alphabet the first major U.S. corporation to definitively extend its work-from-home timeline so far into the future. Pichai decided to let employees work from home longer in part to accommodate those who are parents, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Many workers with children face the prospect of juggling their jobs with helping their kids attend school from home in the fall and well into the academic year if local schools don't revert to in-person learning.

Senate Republicans are moving to cut the expiring $600 weekly federal unemployment bonus to $200 a week in a new coronavirus aid package they released Monday. The $200 flat benefit would last for about two months as states make the transition to a system that would grant unemployed people 70 percent of the wages they made before they lost their jobs.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, has tested positive for the coronavirus — making him the highest-ranking official to test positive so far. The White House said O’Brien has mild symptoms and “has been self-isolating and working from a secure location off site.” Officials did not respond to questions about the last time the president and O’Brien had contact, but the White House insisted that “There is no risk of exposure to the President or the Vice President” and that the “work of the National Security Council continues uninterrupted.”

There will be no preseason games for the National Football League this year, according to an open letter published Monday by Commissioner Roger Goodell. The mandate comes as every aspect of sporting world has been affected by coronavirus. Earlier this year, the NFL had to hold its draft virtually to avoid the spread of the virus. The season is set to begin in September. "The NFL in 2020 will not look like other years," Goodell wrote. "Players and coaches will be tested for the virus regularly, including every day for a while. Preseason games have been canceled."

With daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths still on the rise, the coronavirus pandemic is not slowing down in the US. More Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 than at almost any other point in the pandemic, a grim indicator that the coronavirus pandemic is not slowing down in the US. On July 23, 59,846 people across the United States were in the hospital after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data reported by the Covid Tracking Project, just below the peak of 59,940 reached on April 15, when the New York City area was the epicenter of the US outbreak. (As the Covid Tracking Project notes, the national and state hospital data are erratic and incomplete at the moment, and reported totals may continue to shift.) What’s clear is that Covid-19 has migrated across the country to many more regions in the three months since. In the spring, hospitalizations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast, but now more than half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients are in the South. The West has also seen the number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients double since April, while the Northeast now accounts for fewer than 5,000 of the nearly 60,000 current hospitalizations. The current total is likely an undercount. Two states, Kansas and Hawaii, do not report current hospitalization data, and some states may temporarily not be reporting full hospitalization numbers because of a recent change in the reporting system ordered by the Trump administration. “The hospitalization number is the best indicator of where we are,” Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Vox. “We’re going to go to new heights in the pandemic that we haven’t seen before. Not that what we saw before wasn’t horrifying enough.”

Florida on Sunday became the second state after California to overtake New York, the worst-hit state at the start of the U.S. novel coronavirus outbreak, according to a Reuters tally. Total COVID-19 cases in the Sunshine State rose by 9,300 to 423,855 on Sunday, just one place behind California, which now leads the country with 448,497 cases. New York is in third place with 415,827 cases. Still, New York has recorded the most deaths of any U.S. state at more than 32,000 with Florida in eighth place with nearly 6,000 deaths. On average, Florida has added more than 10,000 cases a day in July while California has been adding 8,300 cases a day and New York has been adding 700 cases.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Carolina pushed past 80,000 Sunday. The increase of 1,412 is the fewest new cases in more than two weeks, according to numbers released by the Department of Health and Environmental Control. Weekend numbers can sometimes vary because of delayed reporting. The number of new deaths confirmed from the respiratory illness rose by 25 to 1,436. More than 700,000 tests have now been conducted in the state. Of the 7,500 total tests reported Sunday, 15.6% were positive. That’s lower than in recent days, but South Carolina continues to have one of the highest positivity rates among the states, a key indicator that the state may not be doing enough testing to control the virus.

An alarming spike in U.S. coronavirus cases is prompting McDonald's to require customers to wear face masks at all of its more than 14,000 domestic-market restaurants, the company announced Friday. The policy takes effect on Aug. 1. The U.S. now has more than 4 million known coronavirus cases; 1 million infections were diagnosed in just over two weeks. Because face masks and other precautions have become a subject of contention in the U.S., the restaurant chain says it will help employees get "de-escalation training." The goal, according to McDonald's, is to help restaurant workers respond productively when customers are unwilling or unable to wear a mask. "In those situations where a customer declines to wear a face covering, we'll put in place additional procedures to take care of them in a friendly, expedited way," say McDonald's USA President Joe Erlinger and Mark Salebra, chair of the National Franchise Leadership Alliance. Those who come into a restaurant without a mask will be offered one, a McDonald's representative told NPR via email. If they refuse masks, customers will be directed to "a designated pick-up spot a safe distance from other customers."

Lang Holland, the chief of police in tiny Marshall, Arkansas, said he thinks the threat of the coronavirus has been overstated and only wears a face mask if he’s inside a business that requires them. He doesn’t make his officers wear them either. So the day after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed an order requiring masks to be worn in public throughout Arkansas, Holland made it clear his department wasn’t going to enforce the mandate in the Ozarks town of about 1,300, calling it an unconstitutional overreach. “All I’m saying is if you want to wear a mask, you have the freedom to choose that,” said Holland, who said he supports President Donald Trump. “It should not be dictated by the nanny state.” Holland is among a number of police chiefs and sheriffs in Arkansas and elsewhere who say they won’t enforce statewide mask requirements, even within their departments. Some say they don’t have the manpower to respond to every mask complaint, treating violations of the requirement as they would oft-ignored minor offenses such as jaywalking. Others, including Holland, reject the legal validity of mask requirements. The pushback is concerning to health officials, who say a lack of enforcement could undermine what they say is a much-needed and simple step that can be taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

If Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are hospitalized and killed by the coronavirus at far higher rates than others, shouldn’t the government count them as high risk for serious illness? That seemingly simple question has been mulled by federal health officials for months. And so far the answer is no. But federal public health officials have released a new strategy that vows to improve data collection and take steps to address stark inequalities in how the disease is affecting Americans. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stress that the disproportionately high impact on certain minority groups is not driven by genetics. Rather, it’s social conditions that make people of color more likely to be exposed to the virus and — if they catch it — more likely to get seriously ill. “To just name racial and ethnic groups without contextualizing what contributes to the risk has the potential to be stigmatizing and victimizing,” said the CDC’s Leandris Liburd, who two months ago was named chief health equity officer in the agency’s coronavirus response. Outside experts agreed that there’s a lot of potential downside to labeling certain racial and ethnic groups as high risk. “You have to be very careful that you don’t do it in such a way that you’re defining a whole class of people as ‘COVID carriers.’” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. But while sometimes highlighting the disproportionate toll the virus has had on certain racial and ethnic groups, the CDC is being careful not to categorize them as high risk or meriting higher priority for certain health services. Indeed, in May, the CDC took down guidelines it had posted that said minorities without symptoms should be among those prioritized for coronavirus testing. Government officials later said the posting had been a mistake. Last month, the CDC revised its list of which Americans are at higher risk for severe COVID-19 illness, adding pregnant women and people with certain underlying conditions. Race and ethnicity were left out. On Friday, the CDC issued a racial equity strategy document vowing better data collection on how the virus is impacting minorities. It also calls for improvements in testing, contact tracing, and safely quarantining, isolating and treating minorities at risk. The agency also said it will take steps to diversify the public health workforce responding to the epidemic.

Merry Collins lost her job as a home health aide in Dallas after the coronavirus outbreak hit. Before she started getting $600 a week in extra federal unemployment benefits, she got behind on the rent. And in June her landlord took her to court to evict her. "The first day the courts opened here in Dallas," she says, "that's when they filed for eviction." Collins sounds winded. She has trouble breathing because she's been struggling to recover from COVID-19. She tested positive for the coronavirus. She's a single mom caring for a disabled teenage son who also became sick with the virus. Merry Collins has been fighting COVID-19 and the threat of eviction at the same time. She's been boxing up her belongings in her Dallas apartment and worries she could be evicted soon. "I'm scared," she says. But she says her landlord has kept trying to evict her, even though she has told the owner about her health problems and that she's now getting the unemployment benefits and could work out a plan to catch up on the rent. But now that the benefits are ending, Collins doesn't know what to do. Upward of 25 million Americans who've lost their jobs have been getting those extra unemployment benefits. That $600 per week has helped many to afford to pay their rent and other bills. But that federal money stops this weekend.

The United States might have more COVID-19 testing capacity than any other country. So why have we seen laboratories overwhelmed and many patients again waiting a week or more for results? At the heart of the crisis is a reliance by public and private labs on automated testing equipment that locks them in to using proprietary chemical kits and other tools made by a handful of manufacturers. The result: as infection rates spike nationwide, many labs aren’t running anywhere near capacity because of supply-chain bottlenecks, according to Reuters interviews with 16 hospital, state, commercial and academic labs and an analysis of state and city procurement plans.