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July 10th: Coronavirus Updates from The Washington Post

The latest
Health experts are increasingly convinced that the only way to stop America's rapidly worsening coronavirus situation is to reimpose stay-at-home orders, effectively abandoning the country's two-month-long effort to resurrect public life. “Stay-at-home is a blunt instrument,” Farshad Fani Marvasti, director of public health at the University of Arizona College of Medicine at Phoenix, told The Post. “But when you’re leading the world in new cases and things don’t seem to be getting better, you may have to use that blunt instrument.”

Or as Harvard surgeon Thomas Tsai vividly put it: “We see the hurricane coming. In some places, it’s already here. The question is whether you’re going to evacuate your citizens from the path.”

The White House shows no sign of heeding this advice, and is instead pressuring federal health agencies to fall in line with President Trump's rosy outlook on the pandemic.

The Post obtained emails showing a senior Health and Human Services Department adviser accusing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of “undermining the President” by publishing a report on covid-19's potential risk to pregnant women — “as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”

The administration has also resumed pushing people to take hydroxychloroquine — the drug Trump has called a covid-19 “game changer” despite several major studies that found it doesn't work against the disease. The Food and Drug Administration pulled hydroxychloroquine from covid-19 wards several weeks ago, but White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is now pushing the agency to reauthorize the drug, citing a new study that many scientists says is flawed.

And school administrators are agonizing over the White House push to send 56.6 million K-12 students across the country back to class in several weeks. A lack of research on how the virus interacts with children isn't making the decision any easier. “Children are clearly at low risk of serious illness from covid-19,” our health desk wrote. “But it’s unclear to what extent they can still transmit it to each other and to vulnerable adults — such as their teachers or family members.”

The nation's running total of U.S. infections climbed past 3.1 million this week, and Arizona, California, Montana and South Dakota all reported record averages of new covid-19 deaths.

Despite the president's public assurances that the country is beating the pandemic, our political desk reports that Trump is privately sulking over bad news: “Callers on President Trump in recent weeks have come to expect what several allies and advisers describe as a ‘woe-is-me' preamble,” we wrote. “The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.”

Other important news
We've published a searchable database of businesses known to have received money from the federal government's economic rescue package. It includes elite private schools that got assistance, and more than $220 million that went to charter schools.

An estimated $50 billion shortfall in transportation funding has halted efforts to repave rutted and pockmarked roads, maintain bridges and otherwise prop up an already shaky U.S. infrastructure.

The college football season, a rite of autumn and revered American institution uninterrupted for 150 years, suddenly appears on the verge of vanishing. The financial consequences would be grave.

Disney World is set to reopen Saturday, despite Florida's escalating outbreak.

Amid new reports of protective equipment shortages, an Oregon company is trying to send a free mask to every American.

With many fitting rooms sealed off, shoppers are experimenting with apps that let them virtually try on clothing, cosmetics, jewelry and hairdos.