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July 13th: Coronavirus Updates from The Washington Post

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In the wind

The latest
Coronavirus-related death rates climbed in most U.S. states over the weekend, undercutting the White House's insistence that the recent surge of infection reports was merely an artifact of increased testing. Many health experts expect the death toll to accelerate as the sickest patients deteriorate and hospitals struggle to cope. Arizona, California, Florida, Mississippi and Texas have already broken records for average daily fatalities in the past week. You can track the numbers in your area on our national infection map.

Florida is rapidly becoming the epicenter of the national outbreak, if not of the entire global pandemic. The state reported 15,300 new infections on Sunday, by far the highest daily count for any state since the crisis began. Florida's per-capita infection rate is now 20 percent higher than New York's was at the peak of its outbreak in the spring. One Florida infectious disease specialist on Monday compared Miami to “Wuhan six months ago.”

It is also the state where Disney World reopened this weekend, and where the NBA is trying to construct a virus-free “bubble” complex for its players to complete the basketball season.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) ordered California to largely shut back down, mandating the statewide closure of all bars and halting the indoor operations of restaurants and many other businesses. The new restrictions represent one of the most far-reaching rollbacks of any state’s reopening.

The White House has turned against Anthony S. Fauci, one of few federal government health officials willing to acknowledge the nation's coronavirus failures in public. “In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs,” our political desk wrote. Fauci no longer briefs President Trump on the pandemic, he has been forbidden from appearing on some news shows, and last week an unsigned White House statement attacked the country's top infectious disease expert as having been “wrong on things.”

The Post looked into the country's supposedly much-improved covid-19 testing system, which is in fact still hobbled by supply-chain failures. “It’s not shortages of any one thing. It’s now spot shortages of all of them,” said Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “Clinical labs need more swabs, chemical reagents, viral transport media, test kits, machines to process the tests, staffing to run the machines.” As a result, many of the millions of tests conducted in recent weeks took so long to complete that the results were basically useless for tracing and isolating outbreaks.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made the cable news rounds on Sunday to call for U.S. schools to fully reopen in the fall, one of the administration's top priorities. But when asked for her recommendations on how they could avoid spreading disease, DeVos repeatedly dodged the question. In a Monday roundtable, Trump said his response to worried parents was, “Schools should be opened. Kids want to go to school.” Despite White House pressure, California’s two largest school districts said they will open the year remotely, and Atlanta schools were preparing to announce the same.

Countries that have already sent children back to school may have lessons for this one. So far, experts have been encouraged by a lack of outbreaks in international classrooms. But there are some disturbing exceptions, and much left to learn.

Other important news
Some older people are playing bridge, running errands and getting haircuts. Their children are alarmed and disappointed.

The sudden recession, which economists once assumed would be brutal but brief, appears to be settling into a long, self-perpetuating slump.

Four months into that recession, tens of thousands of desperate Americans have yet to receive unemployment payments.

The pandemic drove the U.S. budget deficit to a record-high $864 billion last month.

Once the epicenter of the American outbreak, New York City celebrated its first day with no covid-19 deaths on Monday.