Boston suspended its attempt to resume in-person learning in public schools on Wednesday, citing the city’s rising tide of cases.
After starting the school year remotely for all students last month, Boston began a phased reopening on Oct. 1, allowing about 3,000 high-needs students to attend in-person classes at least two days a week. The next phase, which would have brought kindergartners and pre-kindergarteners back into school buildings, had been scheduled for as soon as mid-October, but was recently delayed.
“I am heartbroken that today we have to close our doors to our highest-need students,” the superintendent, Brenda Cassellius, said. Those students include some students with disabilities, students who have experienced homelessness and students still learning English.
The city’s seven-day average positivity rate for coronavirus testing recently increased to 5.7 percent. The city said that it would welcome back high-needs students when the positivity rate declined to 5 percent or below for two consecutive weeks and would begin the phased return of other students when it declined to 4 percent or below for two consecutive weeks.
Ms. Cassellius urged the community to comply with public health guidance in order to bring the infection rate down. “We need your help,” she said. “Our children are depending on all of us.”
Experts said that closing schools might be the right decision given what looks like a surge in cases, but questioned why the city was not closing anything else or putting forward a larger strategy to curtail transmission.
“Why would you ever have restaurants open for indoor dining while you’re closing schools? It’s wrong on so many levels,” said Dr. Benjamin P. Linas, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Boston University.
“The evidence now is that restaurants drive transmission and schools do not,” he added.
He said the decision to close schools seemed like political expediency, since there is pressure to close schools from the teachers’ union, and pressure to keep other activities going, from businesses and members of the public who have pandemic fatigue.
Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease modeler and assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health, criticized the city for delaying the opening of schools for most students until late October, given that many epidemiologists had predicted a surge in cases as the weather cooled.
“We‘ve squandered the opportunity to have kids in school and feel comfortable about it by delaying school until the end of October,” she said. “I’m just so mad.”
Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey will quarantine himself “through the end of the weekend” after a member of his senior staff tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a statement from his office.
Mr. Murphy made the abrupt announcement in the middle of a news conference, saying he had learned just minutes ago about the staff member’s positive test result. He said he had been in “close proximity” to the staff member on Saturday before the individual tested positive, and he said he has not experienced any symptoms of Covid-19.
Mr. Murphy tested negative for the virus on Monday and Wednesday, according to a statement from his office but it did not specify the kind of tests he took. The statement also said that both Mr. Murphy and his wife would cancel their in-person events and quarantine through the end of the weekend and take another test “before they resume any in-person engagements.”
The negative virus test results so far do not rule out the possibility that Mr. Murphy was infected, as the levels of virus could take days to build in the body. Symptoms of Covid-19 may take up to 14 days to appear.
The staff member who tested positive was Mr. Murphy’s deputy chief of staff for intergovernmental affairs, Mike DeLamater, according to Michael Zhadanovsky, a spokesman for the governor. Mr. DeLamater did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We have begun the contact tracing process to notify everyone who may have come into contact with our colleague during the potential infection window,” Mahen Gunaratna, a spokesman for Mr. Murphy, said in the statement on Wednesday afternoon.
The announcement came as New Jersey, an early center of the pandemic that appeared to have brought the virus under control, is once again seeing a spike in the number of cases. The state over the past week has seen an average of more than 1,000 cases per day, an increase of 49 percent from the average two weeks earlier, according to data compiled through Tuesday.
Several global leaders have been exposed and some tested positive during the pandemic. Earlier this month, President Trump revealed that he had contracted the virus and was subsequently hospitalized with Covid-19. He was just one of an outbreak linked to an event at the Rose Garden that infected other White House officials, senators and members of the Republican Party and his campaign. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was in intensive care in April with the virus and has since returned to work. The leaders of Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia have also contracted the virus.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, had previously criticized Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a fund-raiser at Bedminster, N.J., after a senior Trump aide, Hope Hicks, had tested positive. On Wednesday, Mr. Murphy recalled that criticism after he announced he had been exposed.
“I can’t ask President Trump not to come to Bedminster and do a fund-raiser and have me sit here,” he said.
A California appellate court has ordered San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest penitentiary, to reduce the number of inmates it holds by 50 percent, after the coronavirus tore through the facility this summer, infecting more than 2,200 inmates and killing 28.
The state prison system showed “deliberate indifference” to the safety and health of San Quentin inmates by taking inadequate steps to protect them from the coronavirus, the First District Court of Appeal said Tuesday in a unanimous opinion.
The ruling ordered San Quentin to reduce its population by one-half — to about 1,700 inmates — as a way to protect prisoners from infection. But because nearly all of the state’s prisons are overcrowded, it remains unclear where San Quentin inmates could be sent.
In a statement on Wednesday, a California Department of Corrections spokeswoman said “we respectfully disagree with the court’s determination,” and added that the prison system had sought to stem the virus in a number of ways, including by releasing more than 21,000 inmates.
Inmate transfers appear to be what created the problem in San Quentin to begin with. The prison was free of the coronavirus until late May, when state officials ordered 121 inmates moved there from another state prison, the California Institution for Men in Chino, Calif.
Officials have acknowledged that few if any of those inmates had been tested for the coronavirus in the three weeks prior to the move, nor were they tested on arrival at San Quentin.
Within weeks, San Quentin had a surging virus outbreak, and for several months the prison had the largest coronavirus cluster in the nation, according to a New York Times database.
— Rebecca Griesbach and
A group of conservative health care advocates, policy experts and economists is pressing President Trump to modernize the nation’s public health data infrastructure so that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can once again be the primary collector of information about Covid-19.
In a letter sent to the White House on Monday, the group, which includes former Senator Rick Santorum and other prominent conservatives, took aim at the C.D.C., saying that the agency had failed to “modernize its antiquated and burdensome public health data systems,” despite a series of laws passed by Congress in 2006, 2013 and 2019 requiring it to do so.
“It is shocking that C.D.C. has failed to comply with these laws,” the authors wrote. “Despite fourteen years and billions of dollars spent, C.D.C. has yet to implement a nationwide, modern and uniform information-management and reporting system to help guide policymakers, public health officials and front-line health care workers.”
The letter grew out of a report published in September by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization.
C.D.C. officials were not immediately available for comment. The agency does have a data modernization plan, according to its website.
During a Senate hearing in April, Dr. Robert M. Redfield, the agency’s director, was pressed on the issue by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina. Dr. Redfield was unable to answer whether the C.D.C. had filled any of 30 staff positions created to develop the agency’s disease and public health surveillance capabilities.
The reliability of health care data has become a politically charged issue during the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services, the C.D.C.’s parent agency, stripped the C.D.C. of control over the gathering of hospital information and turned the job over to a private contractor, TeleTracking Inc.
Health experts, including outside advisers to the C.D.C., warned that the move would have “serious consequences on data integrity.” But the department recently extended TeleTracking’s initial $10.2 million, six-month contract.
The Heritage report described the private data collection as a “stopgap measure” that was important but “incomplete.” Joel C. White, an author of the report and a driving force behind the letter, said both “grew out of frustration” that public health officials, policy experts and journalists were relying on nongovernmental sources, like Johns Hopkins University’s Covid-19 dashboard, for coronavirus data.
“Lots of people kept pointing to the C.D.C. as the source of knowledge and truth for the pandemic,” he said, “but no one was pointing to the C.D.C.’s statistics.”
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Wednesday that restrictions would be eased in some hot spots in New York City, while rules would be tightened in other areas.
The changes would allow schools and some businesses that had been shut down in certain areas of Brooklyn and Queens to reopen, while maintaining stringent lockdowns in the hardest hit areas of Brooklyn and Rockland County. Mr. Cuomo added that the Ozone Park neighborhood in Queens would also face restrictions.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Cuomo ordered the targeted restrictions, with schools and nonessential businesses in the hardest hit areas required to shut down. The lockdown — which divided virus hot spots into three color-coded zones of red, orange and yellow — were intended to combat worrisome virus test positivity rates in Brooklyn, Queens and New York City’s northern suburbs, and also imposed tight restrictions on houses of worship and restaurants.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo provided new metrics for how the state will determine changes and updates to the color-coded boundaries. For the most serious restrictions to be lifted, an area in a red zone would have to remain under a virus positivity rate of 3 percent after 10 days, while the rates to leave orange and yellow zones would be 2 percent and 1.5 percent respectively after 10 days. He noted that in less populated areas, the benchmark would be slightly higher as “in a more rural area, you come into contact with fewer people.”
The rules affected many neighborhoods with large populations of Orthodox Jewish residents and sparked an immediate backlash in some areas when they were announced earlier this month.
The governor said the rules for each zone, which allowed schools that fell in yellow zones to remain open and restaurants to operate both indoor and outdoor dining, would not change.
Overwhelmed by a flood of new coronavirus cases, North Dakota is halting its contact tracing efforts, and will instead ask people who test positive to put out the word themselves to their close contacts.
The office of Gov. Doug Burgum said in announcing the move that the state needed to reassign 50 National Guard soldiers from contact tracing to help clear a three-day backlog of people who have tested positive but have not yet been notified or assigned to a case investigator.
“In addition, significant community spread of coronavirus and a lack of compliance with close contact investigations have diminished the effectiveness of contact tracing,” the statement from the governor’s office said.
North Dakota, which had very few coronavirus cases in the spring and summer and never imposed a mask mandate, is being walloped now by the virus. For weeks, it has reported more new cases than any other state, relative to its population, and its hospitals and public health resources have swiftly come under enormous strain.
Other states have also backed away from contact tracing efforts in the face of major surges in infection, said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“They may be the only one that announced it so overtly,” Dr. Nuzzo said. “But this really speaks to the unfortunate truth that when the case numbers get high, it’s not possible for contact tracers to keep up.”
Contact tracing is considered a crucial tool in containing the spread of infectious diseases. But Dr. Nuzzo said a job that was already resource-intensive has gotten a lot harder as states have reopened.
In the spring, when schools were closed and much of the economy was shut down, each infected individual had only about six contacts that investigators needed to reach. But now, with schools and workplaces reopened and people gathering socially again, each new case might require 20 or more calls, she said.
On top of that, many people are deeply reluctant to be identified as a contact and go into quarantine, with the prospect of losing two weeks’ wages and having to scramble for child care and elder care.
“All of these disincentives exist that we have not even begun to try to address,” Dr. Nuzzo said.
The governor’s office said the suspension of contact tracing was intended to be temporary. The state will still conduct case investigations to identify superspreader events and other specific sources of infection, the statement said.
A rash of provocative headlines this week flooded social media platforms with a tantalizing idea: that mouthwash can “inactivate” coronaviruses and help curb their spread.
The idea came from a new study that found that a coronavirus that causes common colds — not the one that causes Covid-19 — could be killed in a laboratory by dousing virus-infected cells with mouthwash. The study’s authors concluded that the products they tested “may provide an additional level of protection against” the new coronavirus.
But outside experts warned against overinterpreting the study’s results, which might not have practical relevance to the new coronavirus that has killed more than 220,000 Americans. Not only did the study not investigate this deadly new virus, but it also did not test whether mouthwash affects how viruses spread from person to person.
“I don’t have a problem with using Listerine,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “But it’s not an antiviral.”
The study, which was published last month in the Journal of Medical Virology, looked only at a coronavirus called 229E that causes common colds — not the new coronavirus.
The researchers flooded 229E coronaviruses grown in human liver cells in the lab with several types of mouthwash and nasal rinses for 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes — longer than the typical swig or spritz into a nose or mouth. Around 90 to 99 percent of the viruses could no longer infect cells after this exposure, the study found.
But because the study didn’t recruit any human volunteers to gargle the products in question, the findings have limited value for the real world, other experts said. The human mouth, full of nooks and crannies and a slurry of chemicals secreted by a diverse cadre of cells, is far more complicated than the inside of a laboratory dish.
Researchers warn people not to misuse mouthwash or nasal rinses or ingest large quantities of the liquids as they can be dangerous.
Global roundup
A far-right party in Spain led a no-confidence motion against the government over its management of the coronavirus on Wednesday. While the effort is almost certain to fail in Parliament, the vote underlined the deep political tensions exacerbated by the pandemic.
The party, Vox, is the country’s third-largest and has long opposed the left-wing coalition government. The main opposition organ, the Popular Party, said on Wednesday that it would not support the motion, which is expected to be voted on Thursday.
Spain exceeded one million reported virus cases on Wednesday amid a second wave that has surged despite lockdown orders around Madrid, the center of the outbreak. The orders have generated backlash from business owners and residents.
In other developments around the world:
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Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, tested positive for coronavirus on Wednesday, hours after he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel and other ministers in her cabinet, his ministry said. He is the first member of the German government to be infected with the virus since the start of the pandemic. Mr. Spahn was in isolation with cold-like symptoms, the ministry said. The chancellor’s office said that Ms. Merkel and the rest of her ministers will not have to quarantine, as they were all masked and sitting at a safe distance from one another. Germany has been experiencing a spike in the spread of the virus since the start of October. On Wednesday, the public health authority reported 7,595 new cases of infection.
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Thailand welcomed its first group of foreign tourists in more than six months. The group of 39 arrived from Shanghai on Tuesday and went directly into quarantine, at their own expense, in a Bangkok hotel. The governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Yuthasak Supasorn, said in an interview on Wednesday that he hopes the group’s arrival will open the door to travelers from other low-risk countries, such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.
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The European Union has reached a deal with Johnson & Johnson that will allow the bloc to buy up to 400 million doses of the pharmaceutical company’s coronavirus vaccine. “As coronavirus spreads rapidly across Europe, we are securing doses of future vaccine to protect citizens,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s administrative branch, announced on Wednesday. The European Union has also signed contracts with Sanofi and AstraZeneca for up to 300 million doses of each company’s vaccine.
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About seven million people in the north of England will soon be living under the country’s toughest virus restrictions as large parts of the region are moved to the highest alert level in Britain’s new tiered response system. South Yorkshire will rise to the “very high” alert starting this weekend, a local official announced on Wednesday. Greater Manchester, Britain’s second-largest urban area, will also move to the highest alert level starting Friday.
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said on Wednesday that a call by Democrats for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid for states and cities and their resistance to a liability shield for businesses remained the toughest obstacles to a stimulus deal.
“The biggest issue remains state and local assistance,” Mr. Meadows said on the Fox Business Network. “That remains a stumbling block.”
His remarks came hours before Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were scheduled to continue talks on a broad pandemic relief package in hopes of reaching a deal this week, even as congressional Republicans fought to prevent such a compromise from materializing before Election Day.
Mr. Mnuchin, who is returning from a trip to the Middle East, and Ms. Pelosi planned to speak later on Wednesday. The two sides have been trying to reach an agreement on another round of economic aid that could be enacted before Nov. 3. But Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has told the White House to abandon its efforts, concerned about the political fallout for Republicans.
Mr. Meadows suggested that progress was being made, but said he feared that politics could get in the way. Ms. Pelosi on Tuesday signaled that Democrats were preparing counteroffers on both liability protections for businesses that are seeking to reopen and state and local funding.
The White House has proposed providing $250 billion to states and municipalities, Mr. Meadows said, while House Democrats have called for double that. He also said that the liability protections were a crucial priority for Republicans, and he chided Ms. Pelosi for resisting them, saying she was being “disingenuous” if she believed that his party would agree to any deal without them.
Even as Republicans resisted a compromise, pressure was mounting from rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties to reach one. A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Wednesday wrote to congressional leaders and Mr. Trump urging a resolution before the November elections.
“We know there may be remaining issues to be resolved between the negotiators, but it appears those issues are certainly solvable,” the group, known as the Problem Solvers Caucus, wrote. “Our families, businesses, and local communities don’t have the luxury of time so Washington can continue its partisan games. We must do our job and do it now.”
Across the Capitol, Senate Democrats blocked a move by Republicans to advance a $500 billion plan that would revive lapsed federal unemployment benefits and a popular federal loan program for small businesses, as well as provide additional money for testing. Democrats, who have argued the package falls far short of the level of aid needed, unanimously opposed it, and it fell short on a party-line vote of 51-44, failing to clear the 60-vote threshold required to move forward.
Mayors from the surrounding areas of nine Big Ten schools raised concerns about potential coronavirus outbreaks linked to the league’s debut this weekend as cases rise in parts of the country.
In a letter to the conference on Monday, which encompasses football powerhouses like Ohio State and Michigan State, 12 mayors noted that watch parties and gatherings of fans could increase the spread of the virus. Those types of unofficial gatherings cannot be stopped by preventing fans from entering the stadium, which the Big Ten has already committed to do.
“We know the history of football games within our cities,” the mayors wrote in the letter. “They generate a lot of activity, social gatherings and consumption of alcohol.”
The Big Ten promised football’s return in October so long as the schools’ football programs keep positive coronavirus tests low throughout the season. Mayors requested the conference also factor in case counts of surrounding communities when deciding whether or not to stall games.
Schools in the Big Ten, which is actually made up of 14 universities, are spread across the Midwest, and reach New Jersey and Maryland. Mayors from many of the areas around the schools’ campuses — except for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Nebraska and Rutgers University — signed on.
Many schools responding to the pandemic have asked students to stay inside or have shifted back to remote classes after reports of outbreaks, and some schools or local agencies have issued punishments to students caught gathering at parties or violating restrictions. Ann Arbor, Mich., home to the University of Michigan, issued an emergency stay-at-home order Tuesday for the college, effective until Nov. 3. The university allowed students to return to campus this fall with bans on large gatherings and mandatory mask wearing. Athletics were exempt from Tuesday’s stay-at-home order.
The Big Ten was the first conference to postpone football this summer, only to reverse its decision in September. The conference’s season kicks off Friday with the University of Illinois against the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the past seven days, seven countries — Argentina, Brazil, Britain, France, India, Russia and the United States — have reported at least 100,000 new cases of the coronavirus, helping to push total cases worldwide to more than 40.7 million, according to a New York Times database.
In many cases, these countries are seeing numbers that are much higher than they were during the height of the pandemic in the spring. At that point most countries locked down, stopping movement and much interpersonal contact. Strategies have changed, and today local lockdowns are the way forward for most. There is more testing, giving a clearer picture of the pandemic. But the numbers continue to grow.
Over the past week in the United States, there have been 421,114 new cases, illustrating that the long-predicted fall wave of the virus is well underway. Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states are struggling to control major outbreaks. And the national trajectory is worsening by the day, as the cooler weather drives more people to stay indoors where the virus spreads easily. In some states, hospitals are almost full.
India reported 411,718 over the past seven days, but numbers have been falling since mid-September. On Monday, the country recorded fewer than 50,000 cases, the lowest number since July, the government said. But the lower numbers, which would seem at first glance to be good news, have raised questions. The government recently approved the use of rapid coronavirus testing based on gene-editing technology, hoping to increase its testing capabilities. But experts question the reliability of rapid tests.
In France, which has added 174,273 cases in the past seven days, a curfew has been implemented in Paris and eight other regions. Still, more than 11,000 virus patients are hospitalized, and 2,000 are in intensive care, a threshold that had not been reached since May. (The country currently has 5,800 intensive care beds.)
Brazil, which has reported 160,326 cases in the past seven days, is among the countries with the lowest testing rates and still lacks a clear contact tracing policy. Despite being the country with the second-highest death toll, about eight million Brazilians had received laboratory tests by mid-October, according to the Ministry of Health, less than a tenth of the number of people tested in the United States.
But, as in India, the disease has been trending downward in Brazil since early August. The country is now reporting an average of 500 deaths a day, half of the daily toll it reported two months ago. Most big cities have eased social-distancing measures and opened some schools, restaurants, and beaches.
The number of daily recorded infections in Britain, which includes England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, has nearly tripled since the beginning of October. In the past seven days, Britain has reported 127,622 new cases. Hospitalizations and deaths are also rising, and in some parts of the country, intensive care units are being stretched to their limits. The countries that make up Britain are each forging their own paths: England has implemented a tiered alert system; Northern Ireland is ramping up restrictions for pubs and restaurants, and closing schools; Scotland implemented a two-week tightening of restrictions; and Wales was preparing to enter a two-week national lockdown.
Russia has added 103,992 new cases in the past seven days.. The government, however, has resisted imposing even local lockdowns, although it has started to enforce mask-wearing requirements The capital, Moscow, is recording about one-third of the country’s daily new cases. Health authorities there have opened temporary hospitals in a city park and in a large car-dealership center. But Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said curfews and business closings are “absolutely unacceptable and impossible for us.”
Argentina has reported 101,964 cases in the past seven days. It is the fifth country to surpass one million total cases. The country received praise early in the pandemic for imposing a strict quarantine in mid-March, and although certain restrictions have been relaxed, much of the country is still under some type of lockdown order. Still, the virus, which was once concentrated in the Buenos Aires area, has since expanded to much of the country, including remote areas with scarce medical resources.
Reporting was contributed by Monika Pronczuk, Anna Schaverien and Eileen Sullivan.
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