COVID-19 News from Around the Web

After a surge in coronavirus cases following Memorial Day, doctors and public health experts fear Alabama will see another spike after this weekend’s July Fourth holiday celebrations. Barbecues, parades and any large gathering have the potential to spread the virus. In the hopes of avoiding another surge, health officials pleaded with people to use caution by avoiding large crowds and wearing masks over their mouths and noses while in public spaces.

The United States will know by the end of the year or the beginning of 2021 whether a coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious diseases doctor, said Monday. Multiple vaccine candidates are being studied, and "if things go the way it looks like they're going, one of these will enter phase 3 at the end of July," he said, referring to the final phase of clinical trials needed to determine whether a drug works. Other vaccine candidates will enter phase 3 trials after July, and "we hope that by end of this year, or the beginning of 2021 we will at least have an answer whether the vaccine or vaccines - plural - are safe and effective," Fauci said.

Five days into July, 250,000 new coronavirus cases were reported across the United States, with no sign the numbers will get any better. Ten states have already notched record single-day highs in the number of cases since the start of the month. "The current state is really not good," Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked about the pandemic. He cited record-breaking cases. "Within a period of a week and a half, we have almost doubled the number of cases." He noted that we are "still knee deep in the first wave of this. And I would say this would not be considered a wave, it was a surge, or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline... that really never got down to where we wanted to go."

The United States may soon record as many as 100,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day if the current trajectory of the outbreak is not changed, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, warned on Tuesday. The number of new cases is currently hovering around 40,000 per day. Fauci’s remarks, made during an appearance before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, came as the number of new cases in some Southern and Southwestern states has soared. Some states that had moved to reopen businesses and activities quickly in response to frustration with lockdowns are finding themselves forced to dial back on some moves. California has closed bars in some counties, for instance, and New Jersey announced this week that it would not reopen indoor dining as planned.

The European Continent on Tuesday reopened to visitors from 14 countries but not the U.S., where some of the states that pushed hardest and earliest to reopen their economies are now in retreat because of an alarming surge in confirmed coronavirus infections. … The EU extended its ban on visitors not just from the U.S. but from China and from countries such as Russia, Brazil and India where infections are running high. Britain dropped out of the EU in January and maintains its own rules, requiring arriving travelers to go into 14-day self-quarantine. President Donald Trump suspended the entry of most Europeans in March.

The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, said Monday. The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S. “We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”

In Republican circles -- with the notable exception of the man who leads the party -- the debate about masks is over: It’s time to put one on. As a surge of infections hammers the South and West, GOP officials are pushing back against the notion that masks are about politics, as President Donald Trump suggests, and telling Americans they can help save lives. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, on Tuesday bluntly called on Trump to start wearing a mask, at least some of the time, to set a good example. “Unfortunately, this simple, lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you do,” Alexander said.