Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times

"The government of President Nicolás Maduro is detaining and intimidating doctors, marking the homes of people suspected of having the virus and detaining those who are returning to the country.

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Pope Francis said a coronavirus vaccine should be made universally available, especially to the poor.

In July, National Guard officers raided a house in Caracas where people had broken lockdown rules by having a gathering.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Venezuela is deploying security forces in its coronavirus crackdown.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has tackled the coronavirus much as he has any internal threat to his rule: by deploying his repressive security apparatus against it.

Officials in Venezuela’s government are denouncing people who may have come into contact with the coronavirus as “bioterrorists” and urging their neighbors to report them. The government is detaining and intimidating doctors and experts who question Mr. Maduro’s policies on the virus.

And it is corralling thousands of Venezuelans who are streaming home after losing jobs abroad, holding them in makeshift containment centers out of fear that they may be infected.

In commandeered hotels, disused schools and cordoned-off bus stations, the returning Venezuelans are forced into crowded rooms with limited food, water or masks and held under military guard for weeks or months for coronavirus tests or treatment with unproven medications, according to interviews with the detainees, videos they have taken on their cellphones and government documents.

“They told us we’re contaminated, that we’re guilty of infecting the country,” said Javier Aristizabal, a nurse from the capital, Caracas, who said he spent 70 days in centers after he returned from Colombia in March.

In one major city, San Cristóbal, governing party activists are marking the homes of families suspected of having the virus with plaques and threatening them with detention, residents said. In another city, Maracaibo, the police are patrolling the streets in search of Venezuelans who re-entered the country without official approval. Local opposition politicians whose constituencies register an outbreak say they are threatened with prosecution.

“This is the only country in the world where having Covid is a crime,” said Sergio Hidalgo, a Venezuelan opposition activist who said he had come down with symptoms of the virus, only to find police officers at his door and government officials accusing him of infecting the community.

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On the second night of the virtual convention, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. officially became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.CreditCredit...Democratic National Convention

Denied the chance to assemble in Milwaukee because of the pandemic, Democrats formally nominated Joseph R. Biden Jr. for the presidency on Tuesday from locations across all 50 states, the American territories and the District of Columbia.

While the bulk of the speeches addressed themes like national security, presidential accountability and continuity between past and future leaders of the party, the virus still made a few high-profile cameos:

• Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee invited Democrats to come to his city once the coronavirus crisis had passed. “Unlike the president, we never made fun of face masks,” he said. “We understand why we can’t be together this week, and we hope you do too.”
• Former President Bill Clinton accused President Trump of downplaying the virus crisis, and of collapsing under the pressure of a real management challenge. “At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center,” he said. “Instead, it’s a storm center. There’s only chaos. Just one thing never changes — his determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there.”
• Jill Biden, Mr. Biden’s wife and a former high school English teacher, expressed heartache over the losses from the coronavirus, as well as the frustration and fear it was inspiring among parents of schoolchildren. “Like so many of you, I’m left asking, ‘How do I keep my family safe?’” she said.

The convention’s central event — its roll call vote — was drastically revamped to accommodate the constraints imposed by the pandemic. This year, it consisted of a series of pretaped recordings of delegates listing their vote tallies, replacing the iconic and photogenic ritual of delegates shouting their state’s numbers into a hand-held microphone.

The Australian government has signed a deal with the drugmaker AstraZeneca to secure a potential coronavirus vaccine, and promised to offer it free to its 25 million citizens if clinical trials were successful.

The vaccine, a partnership between the British-Swedish drug maker and Oxford University, is in Phase III clinical trials. As of July, more than 10,000 participants in Britain, Brazil and South Africa had received doses.

“The Oxford vaccine is one of the most advanced and promising in the world, and under this deal we have secured early access for every Australian,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a statement on Wednesday.

He added that the vaccine doses would be manufactured domestically for its citizens, and that his office was working to secure early access for countries in Southeast Asia and those in Australia’s “Pacific family.”

Australia has also signed a $17.9 million deal with the U.S. medical technology company Becton Dickinson to supply needles and syringes.

Mr. Morrison said that Australia had so far invested $185 million in coronavirus vaccines, but did not specify the value of the AstraZeneca deal. Local news reports have estimated that the country’s overall plan to acquire vaccines would be worth billions of dollars.

The partnership between Oxford and AstraZeneca is among the most closely watched coronavirus vaccine efforts in the world. It was also the first to enter Phase III trials, and several countries — including Britain and the United States — have already agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a total of two billion doses even before the vaccine’s efficacy has been proven.

On Wednesday, Mr. Morrison cautioned that there was “no guarantee that this, or any other, vaccine will be successful,” and that his government was casting its net wide to find a vaccine.

Australia has reported 23,773 cases and 438 deaths. A recent outbreak in Melbourne, the country’s second-largest city, led to a lockdown with some of the toughest restrictions in the world.

Parents across the United States are facing the pandemic school year feeling overwhelmed, anxious and abandoned. With few good options for support, the vast majority have resigned themselves to going it alone, a new survey for The New York Times has found.

Just one in seven parents said their children would be returning to school full time this fall, and for most children, remote school requires hands-on help from an adult at home. Yet four in five parents said they would have no in-person help, whether from relatives, neighbors, nannies or tutors, according to the survey, administered by Morning Consult. And more than half of parents will be taking on this second, unpaid job at the same time they’re holding down paid work.

Raising children has always been a community endeavor, and suddenly the village that parents relied on is gone. It’s taking a toll on parents’ careers, families’ well-being and children’s education.

In families where both wage earners need to work outside the home, parents have obvious logistical challenges because they cannot be in two places at once. Three-fourths of these parents say they will be overseeing their children’s education, and nearly half will be handling primary child care, according to the survey, answered by a nationally representative group of 1,081 parents from Aug. 4 to 8.

Eighty percent of parents who are both working remotely during the pandemic will also be handling child care and education.

One-fifth of parents are considering hiring a private teacher or tutor to help with their children’s education while school is remote, according to the survey.

“All the choices stink,” said Kate Averett, a sociologist at the University at Albany in New York who has been interviewing parents nationwide since the spring. “There is a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. Parents tell me about not being able to sleep because they’re so anxious, or tell me they’ve been crying a lot. There’s been a lot of actual crying during interviews.”

education roundup

Military discipline gives the nation’s service academies one advantage over civilian colleges in dealing with the coronavirus threat: They can give students direct orders, and not just ask for compliance with safety precautions. But in many other ways, their traditions and long heritage creates complications, especially at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

When the midshipmen — the academy’s students — begin classes on Wednesday, not all of them will be seated in classrooms. And in what may be a first for the school, which was founded in 1845, not all will even be on campus — at least not right away.

Ordinarily, all midshipmen live in a single dormitory: Bancroft Hall, a sprawling building with eight wings. But this year, one wing has been set aside to quarantine students exposed to the virus and isolate those who contract it. (The nearest military hospital is 38 miles away.)

So the academy plans to house about 500 midshipmen off campus in the surrounding area — a major departure for a tightly guarded institution accustomed to curfews and strict discipline. The academy said it expected to bring the remainder of its midshipmen to Annapolis by mid-September.

The Naval Academy fills 338 acres, some of it reclaimed from the Severn River — a much tighter space than the U.S. Military Academy’s 16,000 acres at West Point, N.Y., and the Air Force Academy’s 18,000-plus acres in Colorado Springs, Colo.

With so much more space, the Army allowed all 4,400 cadets to be on campus when classes began Monday. Unlike Annapolis, West Point had several spare barracks available; two have been made ready to quarantine students if needed, and one has been converted to serve as an isolation ward. The Keller Army Community Hospital, with a 16-bed intensive care unit and a supply of ventilators, is on the post and can care for cadets who come down with Covid-19, according to Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, an Army spokesman.

Cmdr. Alana Garas, a Navy spokeswoman, said that, wherever they are, all 4,600 midshipmen will be taking classes offered in a “hybrid” fashion, combining in-person and online instruction.

The Air Force Academy, a much younger institution established in the 1950s, did not respond to queries about its pandemic precautions.

The Pentagon prohibits the academies from releasing the exact number of midshipmen and cadets who have contracted the coronavirus, but both Annapolis and West Point have reported an infection rate of less than two percent among students.

In other education news:

• A week into the fall semester, the University of Notre Dame announced on Tuesday that it would move to online instruction for at least the next two weeks in an attempt to control a growing coronavirus outbreak. Michigan State University also shifted its reopening plans, telling students not to return for the start of classes in two weeks.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

The Philippines largely reopened for business on Wednesday, against the advice of some health experts.

The Philippines has nearly 170,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, including nearly 30,000 that were reported in the past week, according to a New York Times database. Its total caseload is the highest in Southeast Asia.

Under the rules that took effect on Wednesday, more industries were allowed to open, limited church services were allowed to resume, and restaurants welcomed dine-in customers. The rules apply in and around Manila, the capital, and several outlying provinces, a region that has been under various stages of lockdown since March.

“Almost all industries will reopen, except for those that attract mass gatherings” like amusement parks, said Harry Roque, a spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte.

The easing of the lockdown was designed to revive a flagging economy that has taken a beating from the virus and that has officially slipped into recession in the second quarter. Mr. Duterte’s government has insisted that the majority of those infected in recent weeks have shown mild symptoms.

But health experts have warned that lifting lockdowns too quickly would lead to more cases and deaths. Nearly all of Manila’s hospitals are under severe strain.

“It’s really counterintuitive to reopen the economy amidst the steep rise of cases and the presence of fully loaded hospitals,” Dr. Anthony Leachon, a former adviser to Mr. Duterte’s government on the pandemic, said in an interview.

In other developments around the world:

• The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide has passed 22 million, according to a New York Times database. At least 780,000 people have died.

• South Korea reported 297 new infections on Wednesday, its highest daily rise since March. Kim Gang-lip, a senior health official, warned that new infections in and around Seoul, the capital, could lead to “massive nationwide transmission.” The country of about 51 million people has reported at least 16,000 confirmed infections during the pandemic, including at least 1,300 in the past week, according to a New York Times database.
• The head of the organization responsible for approving vaccines in Germany expects the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine to be available in the country by the beginning of next year. Klaus Cichutek, the president of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, said the timing was contingent on whether “the data in the Phase 3 trials prove the efficacy and safety of vaccine products.” Germany recorded 1,510 new infections on Tuesday, according to a New York Times database, the country’s highest daily total since the beginning of May.
• Pope Francis said on Wednesday that a coronavirus vaccine should be made universally available, especially to the poor. “How sad it would be if access to a Covid-19 vaccine were made available only to the rich,” the pope said during his weekly address, which since March has been broadcast from the apostolic library instead of being held in St. Peter’s Square. The pandemic, Francis said, was a crisis that could help improve the world by overcoming the “social injustice, lack of equal opportunity and marginalization of the poor.” He added, “We must come out better.”
• Aiming to provide a better picture of how the virus is spreading across Britain, the government announced a rapid expansion of one of its testing programs. The program selects a random sample of the population, regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms. The survey, which currently tests 28,000 people every two weeks in England, will be expanded to all parts of the United Kingdom, and a new target has been set of testing 150,000 people every two weeks by October. At least 41,000 people have died from the coronavirus in Britain, which has struggled in its efforts to track down those who have been exposed.
• Nepal plans to reimpose a strict lockdown and curfew in the Kathmandu Valley for a week, the country’s news media reported. All movement except essential services will be restricted. Nepal has reported at least 4,300 cases in the past week, for a total of at least 28,000.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Alexander Burns, Choe Sang-Hun, Nick Corasaniti, Katie Glueck, Jason Gutierrez, Isayen Herrera, John Ismay, Mike Ives, Jennifer Jett, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Jonathan Martin, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Nagourney, Elisabetta Povoledo, Frances Robles, Anna Schaverien, Christopher F. Schuetze, Sheyla Urdaneta and Elaine Yu."

Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times