European Leaders Weigh New Lockdowns as Instances Rise

On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a new plan for reopening, which would allow some counties, including San Diego and San Francisco, to reopen many businesses indoors as early as Monday under limited circumstances, such as gyms and houses of worship, as well as permit indoor dining. Bars will remain closed in most of the state.

The new plan was based on new daily case numbers per 100,000 residents, as well as positivity rates.

California has seesawed through the pandemic. It was the first state to issue a comprehensive stay-at-home order, on March 19, when it was reporting about 116 new cases a day.

But after the state started to reopen two months later, its caseload surged, as severe outbreaks of the coronavirus shifted from the Northeast to the South and the West.

As the new school year has started across the state, most districts have stuck to online instruction.

Louisiana currently has the highest number of cases per 100,000 people in the United States, with over 3,100, while California has about 1,770. New Jersey, where the virus peaked months ago, has the highest death rate: 179 per 100,000 residents. California has 33 deaths per capita.

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European leaders weigh new lockdowns as alarming caseloads return.

As Germany faces its own more modest resurgence — its seven-day average for new cases has now risen to over 1,300, the database shows — Chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that managing the pandemic would become more challenging in the fall and winter, as the colder weather drives people back indoors. “We will have to live with this virus for a long time to come,” she said.

The sobering comments from Ms. Merkel and Mr. Macron come as European countries brace for — or even appear to be entering — a second wave of infections.

Nowhere on the continent is the threat more alarming than in Spain, where the Times database shows that the seven-day average has passed 7,600. The country reported nearly 9,800 new cases on Saturday, its highest number for a single day to date.

The mayor of Madrid has asked residents of the city’s southern neighborhoods to stay at home, and more than 2,000 members of its armed forces may soon be deployed to track local outbreaks, the authorities announced this week.

Although Germany has been lauded for mostly minimizing the pandemic’s toll healthwise, many who have found themselves out of work are angry and afraid that they would not survive a second lockdown.

About 1,000 anti-mask protesters also gathered in the Swiss city of Zurich, and a similar number demonstrated in London at Trafalgar Square, according to The Associated Press.

While Mr. Macron has not ruled out another nationwide lockdown, the Tour de France, the prestigious cycling race, nonetheless departed from the southern city of Nice on Saturday, amid concerns that the peloton could carry infections as it rides across the country until Sept. 20. Teams will face possible exclusion if two of their riders test positive for the virus within a seven-day period during the race.

• India reported 78,761 new coronavirus infections on Sunday, setting a global record for the third time in recent days. Until this past week, the U.S. had held the record for a single-day increase in cases, 75,682 on July 16, according to a Times database. India’s steep rise in infections — which officials say is partly explained by an increase in testing — comes as more state governments, desperate to stimulate an ailing economy, are loosening lockdown restrictions.

• Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand thanked residents of Auckland, the country’s largest city, as they prepared to come out of lockdown at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday. But she encouraged residents to wear masks in public and remain vigilant. “Our system is only as good as our people, and our people are amazing,” she said. The city has been on lockdown since Aug. 12 as it tries to contain a cluster that has grown to 135 cases, including two reported on Sunday.

Outside Chicago, Northwestern University announced on Friday that its sorority and fraternity housing would be closed for the fall term. Also, first- and second-year students will, for the most part, be limited to remote learning, while undergraduate tuition will be reduced by 10 percent.

And Indiana University said on Thursday that it was requiring all Greek houses at its Bloomington campus to suspend “in-person organizational activities” after an alarming rise in new cases. The university also directed members of eight Greek organizations to quarantine.

The New York Times has tracked more than 26,000 cases of the virus linked to students returning to colleges, and the latest outbreaks underscore the challenges universities face in trying to regulate student behavior.

“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.”

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles. Large viral loads take fewer cycles to register, while even small amounts of virus — or inactive virus fragments — will register if enough cycles are run. (Dr. Mina thinks the cutoff in cycles should be no more than 30, to limit positives for samples with very little virus.)

The number of cycles at which the virus registers is called the cycle threshold, or C.T. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it was examining the use of C.T. measures “for policy decisions,” and that it would need to collaborate with the Food and Drug Administration and device manufacturers to ensure the measures “can be used properly and with assurance that we know what they mean.”

In three sets of testing data that did include C.T. values, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of positive samples barely carried any virus, a review by The Times found. If that rate applied nationwide, then only about 4,500 of the 45,604 new U.S. cases reported on Thursday would actually require isolation and contact tracing.

“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they’re just returning a positive or a negative,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

“This is how we begin the healing process,” Mayor Duggan said.

Bells will ring across the city as the families of those who died drive around Belle Isle, a park in the Detroit River, in 15 processions led by hearses. A local radio station, WRCJ-FM (90.9), will play gospel, classical and jazz music as the vehicles pass 900 photographs, each 4 by 4 feet, of the deceased that will be scattered around the park, according to the news release.

“These are the funeral processions that many of these folks didn’t get to have,” said Rochelle Riley, the director of arts and culture for Detroit and the coordinator of the memorial. “We need to see hearses. We need to see the mourning, so that everyone will understand that this is a pandemic that is stealing people away from us.”

Mourners will remain in their cars to ensure the event abides by guidelines against large gatherings and the park will be closed to other traffic for the day. The photos will stay in the park until Wednesday.

In addition to helping the families through their losses, Ms. Riley said she hoped the memorial would emphasize the threat of the virus to those who haven’t taken it seriously. The memorial can be viewed on the city’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, she said.

The number of new coronavirus cases in most of the United States is declining, but some states, including North and South Dakota, are announcing high numbers of new infections. Both states announced single-day records on Saturday: more than 370 in North Dakota and more than 420 in South Dakota.

Cases in Grand Forks County, N.D., spiked in the last week, a surge that health experts believe could be linked to college students returning to class at the University of North Dakota, the state’s largest university, with an enrollment of more than 13,000 students.

The university currently has more than 300 positive cases among students, and almost 700 students and staff members quarantined, according to its online dashboard.

Molly Howell, the deputy state epidemiologist in North Dakota, said in an interview that the bulk of the new cases had appeared in people between the ages of 20 and 29. She noted that the health department had seen a rise in the number of residents defying quarantine rules.

“We’re finding some contacts aren’t necessarily staying home or even answering their phone or calling us back,” Ms. Howell said.

She said that as of Saturday, 28 coronavirus cases in North Dakota had been linked to the two-week motorcycle rally in the city of Sturgis that ended on Aug. 16.

In South Dakota, 88 cases have been associated with the rally, health department officials said at a briefing. Meade County, where Sturgis is located, reported 68 new cases on Thursday for a single-day record, and added a record 127 over the past week.

Private bus companies normally carry 10 million students to U.S. schools. Many are on the brink of failure.

Sicily’s president, Nello Musumeci, ordered all migrant centers on the island closed last weekend, saying it was impossible to prevent the spread of the illness in them. A court blocked the order, but his effort underlined the challenges Italy faces as right-wing politicians seek to rekindle a polarizing debate about immigration in a country hit hard by the pandemic, and now seeing its cases surge.

In the last two weeks, Italy’s seven-day average of new cases has more than doubled, from 476 on Aug. 15 to 1,192 on Friday, according to a New York Times database.

Franco Locatelli, the president of Italy’s Superior Health Council, a government advisory body, said migrants’ role in bringing the virus to Italy was “minimal.”

In the first half of August, around 25 percent of the country’s new infections arrived from abroad, according to Italy’s National Health Institute. Italians who had traveled accounted for more than half, and many other cases were among foreign residents returning to the country. Less than 5 percent were among new immigrants, the Health Ministry said.

About 11,700 migrants have reached Sicily since June, and 3 percent either tested positive upon arrival or during a quarantine period imposed at shelters.

Last weekend, a ship carrying hundreds of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, about 20 of whom had tested positive, was turned away by mayor after mayor in Sicily, before eventually docking in Augusta, in the southeast.

The program has drawn little attention since, but a review by The New York Times of payments made through it, as well as interviews with hospital executives, patients and health policy researchers who have examined the payments, suggests that the quickly concocted plan has not lived up to its promise.

It has caused confusion at participating hospitals, which in some cases have mistakenly billed patients who should be covered by it. Few patients seem to know the program exists, so they don’t question the charges. And some hospitals and other medical providers have chosen not to participate.

Large numbers of patients have also been disqualified because Covid-19 has to be the primary diagnosis for a case to be covered (unless the patient is pregnant).

“They” were the stomping, clapping, screaming, delirious fans whose rabid enthusiasm helped give Connors the energy and psychological edge to topple his younger opponent.

The U.S. Open is known for its passionate and raucous fans, so their absence this year will definitively change the tenor of the tournament, which begins Monday in New York.

“Playing in an empty stadium will be quite a change from what we’re used to, especially in New York,” said the 14th-ranked Petra Martic.

A recent $84 million budget cut to New York City’s sprawling parks system, forced by the dire economic challenges the city faces because of the pandemic, comes as the city’s green spaces are hosting gatherings that once took place in bars, reception halls and living rooms.

Some New Yorkers fear that the disheveled parks are a portent of something far worse than litter: a city spiraling toward decline.

“It’s kind of depressing,” said 19-year-old Elizabeth Soto, as a squirrel licked a fruit snack wrapper nearby. “We’re stuck in the house, and then we come out of the house and we have to do extra cleaning.”

Seven months into the pandemic, more than 30 vaccines are rapidly advancing through clinical trials. At least 88 vaccine candidates are under active preclinical investigation in laboratories across the world, with 67 of them due to begin clinical trials before the end of next year.

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Reporting was contributed by Ed Augustin, Melissa Eddy, Marie Fazio, Tess Felder, Abby Goodnough, Taylor Lorenz, Zach Montague, Sarah Maslin Nir, Apoorva Mandavilli, Stuart Miller, Elian Peltier, Christopher F. Schuetze, Pranshu Verma and Lauren Wolfe.