The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began, bursting past a grim threshold even as the wave of infections engulfing the country shows no sign of receding.
The total count of new infections was at least 107,000, according to a New York Times database. Twenty-three states have recorded more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch.
Five states — Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota and Nebraska — set single-day case records on Wednesday. Cases were also mounting in the Mountain West and even in the Northeast, which over the summer seemed to be getting the virus under control.
North and South Dakota and Wisconsin have led the country for weeks in the number of new cases relative to their population. But other states have seen steep recent increases in the last 14 days.
Daily case reports in Minnesota, on average, have increased 102 percent over that time, while those in Indiana have risen 73 percent. For months, Maine had among the lowest levels of transmission anywhere in the country, but new cases there have more than tripled. In Wyoming, new cases are up 73 percent, while in Iowa they have more than doubled.
Deaths related to the coronavirus, which lag behind case reports, have increased 21 percent across the country in the last two weeks.
Hospitals in some areas are feeling the strain of surging caseloads. More than 50,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project, an increase of roughly 64 percent since the beginning of October.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, predicted in June, when new cases were averaging roughly 42,000 a day, that the rate would eventually reach 100,000 a day if the pandemic were not brought under control. His blunt assessments of the country’s failure to control the virus drew attacks from Trump administration officials, including the president, who called him alarmist.
In an interview on Friday, Dr. Fauci told The Washington Post that the country would most likely hit the 100,000 mark soon.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” he said.
Dr. Fauci said that the country “could not possibly be positioned more poorly” as winter approaches and colder temperatures lead people to gather indoors.
And with the holiday season just weeks away, people will need to make tough decisions about how they will celebrate this year. As the virus spreads, holiday gatherings — traditionally indoors and drawing people who have traveled from other places — have the potential to become superspreader events.
When making holiday plans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends considering the state of the virus in a particular area, including the areas where guests may be traveling from and the length of the event.
As states report new cases unevenly from day to day, seven-day averages are a more reliable gauge of trends than an individual day’s figures are. Wednesday was bad by that measure as well, with the seven-day average nearing 92,000, the highest since the pandemic began.
During the early days of the pandemic in March and April, testing in the United States was very limited, so it is not possible to say with certainty that the virus is spreading faster now than it did then.
But the pattern of infection has clearly changed.
Dr. Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said this week that while the surges in the spring and summer were concentrated in specific regions — the Northeast in the spring and the Sun Belt in the summer — the current one reflects transmission increases in nearly all parts of the country.
Dr. Hanage called Wednesday’s milestone “the completely foreseeable consequence of not taking pandemic management seriously.” And he said the country would see “hospitalizations and deaths increase in due course.”
“This is desperately concerning,” Dr. Hanage said, “because uncontrolled transmission will end up compromising health care, and in order to preserve it, we will almost certainly end up needing to take stronger action to prevent the worst outcomes.”
“Look to Europe to see the consequences of leaving it too late,” he said. “The longer you leave it, the harder it will be to control.”
Global Roundup
England began a four-week national lockdown on Thursday, and Greece announced new restrictions nationwide starting this weekend, as Europe confronts a growing wave of coronavirus infections.
Under the new measures in England, which replace more localized restrictions, people may leave home only for essential reasons, including exercise and seeking medical care, and retail stores and other nonessential businesses have been ordered to close. Pubs and restaurants can remain open only for food takeout and delivery, but schools and universities will remain open.
“It’s an unusual feeling to dread something while also knowing it’s the right thing to do,” London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, wrote on Twitter. “London, we will get through this together.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday that the restrictions would expire on Dec. 2 and that the government would use the month to begin a program of mass-testing across parts of the country. Earlier this week a mass-testing plan was announced for the northern city of Liverpool.
The new measures in England come as piecemeal restrictions across Europe are being replaced by far stricter rules — and hurried efforts to bolster health systems that could quickly reach capacity in the coming weeks.
In Greece, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday announced a three-week nationwide lockdown starting Saturday, after a sharp spike in infections and amid fears about increasing pressure on Greek hospitals.
“I chose to take drastic measures sooner rather than later,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in a televised address, noting that other European nations had resorted to similar measures. “I am certain that if the measures are observed we will be able to quash the current wave,” he said.
The Italian government announced Wednesday that it would lock down a significant portion of the country, including the northern regions that are its economic engine, in an effort to stop a resurgent wave of infections.
Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said the measures, the most drastic since the nationwide lockdown in March, would take effect on Friday and would seal off six regions in the country’s deeply infected north and highly vulnerable, and poorer, south.
“The situation is particularly critical,” Mr. Conte said at an evening news conference. He said the virus was moving at a “strong and even violent” pace.
Norway also urged its citizens to stay home as much as possible in the coming weeks, according to Reuters. The country tightened restrictions last week on gatherings and foreign workers entering the country after a rise in coronavirus infections.
“We now see a sharp increase in the number of people testing positive. The situation is very serious,” Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Parliament on Thursday. She added, “We don’t have time to wait and see if the measures we introduced last week are enough.”
And in France, which is under a national lockdown, convenience stores, bars and restaurants in Paris have been ordered to close at 10 p.m. after residents persisted in gathering around them. France’s health minister, Olivier Véran, is expected to speak on Thursday night and may announce even tighter measures in the country.
In Europe generally, a feeble recovery staged over the summer months when the pandemic was in a brief lull has been disrupted by the second onslaught gripping the region, European Commission forecasts said Thursday, adding that the bloc will not return to pre-pandemic economic output before 2022 at the earliest.
In England, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, said on Thursday that the government’s furlough program, which pays 80 percent of wages for the hours that employees cannot work, would be extended through the end of March. It was supposed to end in October and be replaced by a less generous plan.
In other developments around the world:
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Moscow on Thursday ordered schools to remain closed for grades six and up until at least Nov. 22, as the Russian capital recorded at least 5,000 new coronavirus cases for the third straight day. “The situation has been worsening again since the beginning of this week,” Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow wrote in a blog post. “In this situation and given what is happening around us and in other countries, it is clear that it is too soon to relax,” he said. Schools have been closed for grades six through 11 — the last year of high school in Russia — since Oct. 5 amid an intense second wave of the virus in Moscow and across Russia.
When Americans voted in this presidential election, they made it clear that of all the crucial issues facing the country, the coronavirus pandemic towered over the rest.
They remained diametrically opposed, however, on how the pandemic reflected on President Trump.
In the Midwest — states that were battlegrounds in the presidential race and where the virus has soared — supporters of Mr. Trump defended his handling of the crisis, praised his efforts to revive the economy and echoed his claims that the dangers of the virus’ have been overblown.
Those who voted for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. often said that Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic had given them one more urgent reason to vote him out.
“We need somebody in office who has a game plan,” said Gabrielle Young, a 30-year-old health care worker in Kenosha, Wis.
Ms. Young said she had never cared about politics in the past. But that changed this year.
She said she was disgusted by Mr. Trump’s dismissal of masks and his shoulder-to-shoulder rallies, including one he hosted on the eve of the election in Wisconsin, which Mr. Biden went on to narrowly win.
In Ohio, where coronavirus hospitalizations are at a peak, Mr. Trump triumphed on Tuesday just as he did in 2016, sweeping northeastern counties that were once Democratic strongholds.
Mr. Trump’s supporters said they saw little reason to punish him for the pandemic.
“I’m not as afraid of Covid as I am as a bad economy,” said Ish Soltay, 51, of Avon Lake, a suburb west of Cleveland.
Mr. Soltay’s county, Lorain, which was once reliably Democratic, went for Hillary Clinton by just 131 votes in 2016. On Tuesday, it appeared to move farther right, flipping to Mr. Trump, according to preliminary vote totals.
Twelve states around the Midwest added more cases in the seven-day period ending Tuesday than in any other week of the pandemic, a sign of the rapidly worsening situation in the center of the country.
Outside Northern State Prison in Newark, a line of cars stretched along the road early Wednesday. Their occupants were waiting for some of the 2,258 inmates who would be released early from prisons and halfway houses across New Jersey to reduce the risk of the coronavirus in crowded lockups, where social distancing is next to impossible.
It was one of the largest single-day reductions of any state’s prison population.
Only prisoners within a year of completing sentences for crimes other than murder and sexual assault are eligible to be released up to eight months early.
The freed prisoners were easy to spot: Each carried a white mesh laundry bag filled with manila envelopes that held their prison health records, state ID cards and leaflets about addiction treatment programs and re-entry services.
Over the coming months, 1,167 more prisoners will be freed. In all, the releases will result in a roughly 35 percent reduction in New Jersey’s prison population since the start of the pandemic.
The initiative grew out of legislation signed into law last month and comes at a moment of intense national debate over transforming a criminal justice system that imprisons people of color in disproportionate numbers.
But politics and criminal justice policy were far from the minds of most people waiting to spot their loved ones walking out of prison gates, or off buses and trains, and into their arms.
The men leaving Northern State Prison spoke of people they knew who had contracted the virus, and about the lockdown measures in place since March that kept them inside small rooms with a bunkmate for as many as 23 hours a day.
Allan Campbell, a 41-year-old Passaic County man who was imprisoned for a parole violation, said a man in his unit died of Covid-19, one of at least 52 virus-related inmate fatalities in New Jersey prisons. He said he had worried about getting the virus, and in June he was quarantined for seven days with a fever of 100.7.
“I’m so glad to get out — I just thank God,” said Mr. Campbell, dressed in a newly issued pair of jeans and a white shirt.
The New York Times is investigating the costs associated with testing and treatment for the coronavirus and how the pandemic is changing health care in America. You can read more about the project and submit your medical bills here.
A $900 nursing home bill. A $60 ambulance surcharge. A $45 dental tab.
They are often called Covid fees, and they are popping up more often on medical bills.
The coronavirus pandemic has made the practice of health care more costly as providers must wear protective gear and sanitize equipment more often, even as they face declining revenue. To address this financial shortfall, some health providers are turning directly to patients. Surprise “Covid” and “P.P.E.” fees have turned up across the country, in bills examined by The New York Times.
“It’s a complicated answer, who pays for this,” says Scott Manaker, a physician who is in charge of the American Medical Association’s practice expense committee. “You look around the community and see additional costs being imposed right and left because of Covid-19. Barber shops, pedicures and restaurants all have additional charges. It would be an undue burden to ask the medical community to bear this alone.”
But some of these fees — when millions of Americans are reeling after losing jobs and the health insurance that came with it — have drawn the attention of state attorneys general who say that charging patients directly can take advantage of vulnerable consumers or violate health insurance contracts and consumer protection laws. The new charges range from a couple of dollars to nearly $1,000.
Two groups of providers have been particularly hard hit. Dentists have lost billions since patients began postponing nonurgent dental care this spring. And assisted living facilities, grappling with lower overall demand, have also been forced to admit fewer residents to help stop the spread of infection.
“The cynical view is that some see this as an opportunity,” said Darrin Fowler, an assistant attorney general in Michigan who has been investigating coronavirus fees in assisted living facilities. “Everyone understands something unusual is going on, and most customers are ready to embrace the idea they will need to bear some expense. Unfortunately, in every setting there are a percentage of folks who will take advantage of that situation.”
China on Thursday halted the entry of almost anyone traveling from Bangladesh, Belgium, Britain, India or the Philippines except for Chinese citizens, in the latest move by Beijing to keep out anyone with even a slight chance of being infected with the coronavirus.
Even people with valid residency visas in China and recent tests showing that they do not have the virus will not be allowed to enter from these countries, all of which are struggling to control the virus, according to new rules posted on the websites of the Chinese embassies in Dhaka, Brussels, London, New Delhi and Manila. The rules did not specify whether citizens of the affected countries would continue to be allowed entry if they tried to travel to China from other countries.
“The suspension is a temporary response necessitated by the current situation of Covid-19,” said the statement by the Chinese Embassy in Britain. Wang Wenbin, the Chinese foreign ministry’s chief spokesman, also emphasized at a news briefing in Beijing on Thursday that the measure was temporary, but offered no prediction of when it might be lifted.
The only non-Chinese travelers who will still be allowed in from Bangladesh, Belgium, Britain, India or the Philippines will be diplomats, flight crews and people traveling on rarely issued courtesy visas, or people who might be issued new visas in the future.
The main effect of the new rules is to prevent the return to China of businesspeople and teachers who were foreign residents of China before the pandemic. China had previously halted tourism and short-term business travel to the country.
Many businesspeople and teachers left China during the early days of the pandemic. They have been unable to return so far because China halted 98 percent of international flights at the end of March and began requiring special humanitarian passes for entry in addition to residency visas. Seats have been very scarce on the few flights still operating.
The new travel bans, which took effect immediately, triggered a wave of cancellations of charter flights that various countries had arranged to return to China their citizens who had residency there since before the pandemic. Four flights from India that were supposed to carry 1,500 Indians back to their homes in China in the coming days were canceled on Thursday.
The restrictions on non-Chinese travelers are in addition to new Chinese health rules that were also rushed into place on Thursday. Those rules require anyone trying to fly to China, including Chinese nationals, to obtain two tests less than 48 hours before flying. One of the tests is a nucleic acid test for the virus and the other is a blood test for antibodies to the virus.
The requirement for an antibody test is new, and appeared to reflect a worry that patients who recover might be susceptible to relapses. The Beijing Municipal Health Commission separately announced on Thursday that a Chinese woman who was infected with the coronavirus in Sweden, recovered and then flew back to Beijing had tested positive once again for the disease.
The Labor Department reported on Thursday that 738,000 workers filed new claims for state unemployment benefits last week, virtually unchanged from the previous week as the U.S. economic recovery struggles to keep its footing.
Another 363,000 new claims were filed under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits to part-time workers, freelancers and others ordinarily ineligible for jobless aid.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 751,000, significantly lower than after the coronavirus pandemic first struck but still extraordinarily high by historical standards.
“More than a half year after the pandemic-caused downturn began, we remain in a very stressful time for the U.S. economy,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate.com.
That economic stress is compounded by the political impasse over a new federal aid package, which the election this week did little to resolve.
“The prospects of a fiscal stimulus over the next few weeks are still quite uncertain, and the possibility of even a stronger economy under a Democratic sweep is now highly unlikely,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics. “As a result, we are that much more concerned about the pace of growth heading into 2021 and the effect on the labor market.”
The reading on initial claims comes a day before the Labor Department releases a comprehensive report on the nation’s employment situation in October. Most forecasts point to a continued slowing in job creation.
More Americans are joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed, defined as those out of work for 27 weeks or more. The number receiving assistance from the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which provides 13 weeks of benefits after state unemployment insurance runs out, is on the rise.
At the same time, a surge in coronavirus cases in the Midwest has prompted a fresh round of lockdowns, which could lead to more layoffs as businesses close and people feel less comfortable dining in restaurants and shopping in stores.
“Whoever becomes the president faces a very formidable challenge in the coming months, as winter weighs down on certain industries that were able to get by with outdoor service, as extended unemployment benefits expire at the end of the year, and as assistance for student-loan borrowers and renters expires,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the career site ZipRecruiter. “A wave of challenges is coming in the direction of workers who have lost their jobs in the pandemic.”
The Danish government will slaughter millions of mink at more than 1,000 farms, citing concerns that a mutation in the novel coronavirus that has infected them could possibly interfere with the effectiveness of a vaccine.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made the announcement at a news conference on Wednesday. There are 15 million or more mink in Denmark, which is one of the world’s major exporters of mink furs. She said the armed forces would be involved in the culling of the animals.
At the news conference, according to Danish news reports, Kare Molbak, the head of the Danish Serum Institute, warned that some coronavirus mutations could impede the efficacy of future vaccines for humans.
The government has notified the World Health Organization about the mutation, which shows a weak reaction to antibodies. Twelve people in Jutland are known to have virus with the mutation too, the W.H.O. said.
Without published reports on the nature of the mutation or how the virus variant was tested, research scientists outside Denmark who study the virus were left somewhat in the dark. Stanley Perlman, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa and a specialist on the novel coronavirus, said he could not evaluate the Danish statements without more information.
In September, Dutch scientists reported in a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed that the virus was jumping between mink and humans. In Denmark, the government described a version of the virus that migrated from mink to humans.
The coronavirus mutates slowly but regularly, and a different variant of the virus would not, in itself, be cause for concern, experts have said.
Researchers have previously studied one mutation labeled D614G in the spike protein of the virus that may increase transmission. They concluded that there is no evidence so far that this particular mutation increases virulence or would affect the workings of a vaccine.
Denmark has already begun killing all mink at 400 farms that were either infected, or close enough to infected farms, to cause concern. The killing of all mink will wipe out the industry, perhaps for years.
Mink are in the weasel family, along with ferrets, which are easily infected with the coronavirus. But while ferrets appear to suffer mild symptoms, mink react more like humans.
Many conservation scientists have become concerned about the spread of the virus to animal populations, like chimpanzees, which are believed to be susceptible, although cases have not been identified yet.
Andrea Luttrell writes about the ways the pandemic has exacerbated her worries as a single mother, which came into sharper focus recently as she tried to juggle helping her 9-year-old son connect virtually to school and coping with the demands of her bosses and colleagues.
She acknowledges that she had the privilege of working from home — at least while her son’s school remained online — as she desperately attempted to navigate their two schedules. But the experience, as she writes, summoned haunting thoughts about the direction of her life:
Lying in bed that night, I thought of my divorce, of my meager savings and wondered how long it would carry us if I got laid off. Even before the pandemic, I had been clinging to the middle class by my fingernails. I also worried that my son’s current unhappiness wasn’t solely attributable to the pandemic. Was it, really, my own damn fault?
I counted my regrets. I should have gone to law school or pursued hedge-fund management rather than get an MFA in fiction. Surely if I had more money, I could insulate my child from the pandemic. If I were still married, we could tag in and out, managing our own work and remote learning. Maybe if I were prettier or skinnier or smarter or braver or less outspoken, I might have remarried by now and had help. In short, if I had made better choices, I could keep us both safe and happy.
These what-ifs had haunted me for years. Before the pandemic, they were easier to ignore. Covid-19 had made all my fears and resentments into a topographical chart of regret. I could suddenly touch and see every mistake I’d ever made in vivid relief. Each night, staring at the ancient water stain on the ceiling, I tried not to fall into self-loathing and self-pity. “You’re being selfish,” I would think, disgusted, knowing that at least we were healthy and unharmed. But I couldn’t help it — the pandemic, the impossibility of balancing everything, of attending to everything, had exhausted me.
With American tourists banned from Europe, online posts from expatriates are as close to a vacation abroad as many got this year.
Jamie Beck, 37, a photographer who was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, moved to Provence about four years ago, and now she documents the sunflowers and vineyards and castles and croissants that she encounters, all the while clad in a seemingly endless series of flouncy white dresses. Her apartment in the town of Apt has previously been rented for honeymoons. It’s all very idyllic, and her 317,000 Instagram followers seem to agree. She is known, for want of a better term, as a “Frenchfluencer.”
During “le confinement” — what the French call their coronavirus lockdown — Ms. Beck lost all her commercial work.
“The only thing I could control was what I did with my time, so I decided to make a piece of art every single day,” she said. She tagged her posts #isolationcreation and soon realized she was gaining about 1,000 new followers per day.
Ms. Beck is not the only American in France with an online following who has noticed a big increase in engagement during the pandemic.
“I definitely saw a spike in June and July for Instagram and YouTube,” said Tiffanie Davis, 30, who moved to Paris in 2017 to get her master’s degree in business administration. In 2019 Ms. Davis started to post videos about expat life on YouTube around topics like the cost of living (189,000 views), dating in France (which was explored in a two-part series), and Black hair salons.
“I have been getting a ton of DMs from people interested in my story and saying, ‘I’m living through your experiences and want to make the move abroad.’” Ms. Davis has made a worksheet on moving abroad downloadable from her personal website.
Paris and the rest of France are struggling with the pandemic, violence and protests, but so much of what outsiders see is still the beautiful parts.
Molly Wilkinson, 33, moved to France in 2013 to study pastry at the Cordon Bleu; before the pandemic, she taught cooking classes in person. She now leads online workshops about how to make macarons (her most popular class) and tarte Tatin. They were all selling out, she said, so she has increased them to 50 students from 30, for 25 euros each.
She posted many photos to Instagram from a trip to the Loire Valley in September. “It was incredible, the engagement,” she said. “They wanted to experience everything and daydream where they could go. Whenever something is banned, you want it more.”
Reporting was contributed by Mitch Smith.
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