Friday WashingtonPost Coronavirus Update

"A record number of infections were reported for the second consecutive day Thursday — more than 39,000 new covid-19 cases across the United States — and several states are abruptly reimposing quarantine orders amid signs that the country's push to restart economic activity has badly backfired.

On Friday, Texas and Florida ordered bars to close, weeks after celebrating their reopening, and the latter state recorded nearly 9,000 new cases. New Mexico has halted the next phase of its reopening plan. “I’m terrified we will overwhelm the health-care system, the hospitals, the ICUs,” Mississippi's state health officer told the Clarion-Ledger. “Not in the fall, I’m talking about this week.”

And in Arizona, whose reopening mantra was “Return Stronger,” hundreds of Phoenix residents sat in line for hours Saturday at an overwhelmed drive-through testing site. The Washington Post's health desk took a hard look at the state to understand how it rapidly transformed into an epicenter of the crisis. “At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data,” according to the report. “And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.” Read the story.

The virus's asymmetrical assault on black communities may help explain why so much of the public underestimated the crisis. A new Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that nearly 1 in 3 black Americans knows someone who has died of covid-19, compared with just 9 percent of white Americans.

“Something’s not working,” the country's top infectious-diseases expert, Anthony S. Fauci, told The Post in an interview about the country's testing strategy. He told our Health 202 newsletter that the government is considering a dramatically different method known as “pool testing,” in which samples from many different people would be tested together to save time and resources.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said that if he wins in November, he “would do everything possible to make it required that people had to wear masks in public.” Conversely, our national desk reports that dozens of sheriffs across the South and the West are rebelling against state-imposed mask requirements. “Don’t be a sheep,” one sheriff said. And Vice President Pence, in the first White House coronavirus task force briefing in nearly two months, minimized the record daily case counts in some states as “outbreaks in specific counties.” He asserted: “We did slow the spread. We did flatten the curve. We’re in a much better place.”