Reopening the economy isn’t as simple as making a pronouncement. The CDC has been forced to take a back seat, and experts are worried. And the world is entering a period of high-stakes experimentation. Catch up on what’s happening at home and everywhere:
- As of this morning the world is approaching 3.9 million confirmed cases. Deaths total more than 270,000 and nearly 1.3 million have recovered. In the U.S., we’re at nearly 1.26 million confirmed cases. Nearly 76,000 people have died, and another 195,000 have recovered.
- In the weeks before states around the country issued lockdown orders this spring, Americans were already hunkering down. That suggests that official pronouncements will have limited power to open the economy back up. And a new poll finds that a large majority of Americans don’t want to reopen the country too soon. For example, Montana’s governor said schools can reopen. But few school districts actually did. Meanwhile, President Trump praised the governor of Texas for reopening the state. That reopening comes despite Texas failing to meet the administration’s recommended benchmarks.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly found its suggestions for fighting the coronavirus outbreak taking a back seat to other concerns within the Trump administration. That leaves public health experts outside government fearing the agency’s decades of experience in beating back disease threats are going to waste.
- The rollout of the first and only treatment for COVID-19 is being criticized by doctors across the country as confusing, unfair and marred by incomplete medical information.
- The coronavirus outbreak in New York City became the primary source of infections around the United States, researchers have found.
- The outsized infection rate among Hispanics in some states could hobble efforts to quash the spread of Covid-19, prompting states like Oregon to step up testing and take emergency measures.
- With coronavirus testing still lagging behind targets, health officials are searching for other ways to assess the spread of the outbreak. One possibility? Looking at what we flush.
- Most people infected with the novel coronavirus develop antibodies in response. But scientists don't know whether people who have been exposed to the coronavirus will be immune for life, as is usually the case for the measles, or if the disease will return again and again, like the common cold.
- Across the country, free and charity clinics are facing challenges as the need for them will only grow larger, as more people lose their job-based insurance and struggle to pay their bills.
- For a group of Brooklyn Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan is a blur: They fast during daylight hours, pray repeatedly, and every night go to Manhattan’s Herald Square, where in the shadow of Macy’s they provide food for as many as 200 people.
- The world is entering a period of high-stakes experimentation, with cities and countries serving as open-air laboratories for how to most safely and effectively reopen amid the coronavirus.
- More than four out of five of the working poor in the global labor force have been hit by workplace closures, according to the International Labor Organization, which says 1.6 billion workers in the informal economy “stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed.”
- The death toll from COVID-19 in the worst hit part of Brazil’s remote Amazon region may be three times the official count.
- Coronavirus canceled his Mount Everest climb, so a Seattle man will climb his porch steps 5,683 times to ‘summit’ #AtHomeEverest.
- These minimalist cartoons explore the day-by-day paradoxes of life under lockdown.