Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump, in a Departure, Says Virus Will Get Worse

Trump says the virus will probably ‘get worse before it gets better.’

President Trump abruptly departed on Tuesday from his rosy projections about the coronavirus, warning Americans from the White House briefing lectern that the illness would get worse before widespread recovery.

“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Trump said. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”

In his first virus-focused televised news conference since late April, Mr. Trump appeared before reporters to defend his track record, which has been widely criticized for his tendency to downplay the severity of the pandemic. Appearing without Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx or Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, key members of his White House coronavirus task force, Mr. Trump also implored citizens — especially young people — to wear masks.

“Get a mask,” said Mr. Trump, who has been reluctant to wear them in public himself. “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They will have an effect and we need everything we can get.”

Mr. Trump’s comment urging Americans to wear masks was a stunning departure from his past comments on wearing them. In recent weeks, he has disparaged masks as unsanitary and suggested that people who wore them were making a political statement against him.

Mr. Trump’s less dismissive comments about the pandemic reflected a dawning realization within his team that the virus not only is not going away but has badly damaged his standing with the public heading into the election in November. Approval of his handling of the pandemic has fallen from 51 percent in late March to 38 percent last week in polling by The Washington Post and ABC News.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee who now leads Mr. Trump by double digits, has assailed him in recent days for ignoring a devastating threat to the United States.

In an interview shortly before Mr. Trump’s news conference, Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said that he had not been invited to attend and defended himself against comments Mr. Trump had made in a Fox News interview Sunday, when he called him “little bit of an alarmist.”

“People have their opinion about my reaction to things,” Dr. Fauci said in the interview on CNN on Tuesday afternoon. “I consider myself more of a realist than an alarmist.”

At the White House, Mr. Trump detailed what he said was data that put the United States in a better position to defeat the virus than other countries dealing with the pandemic. At one point, he repeated the false claim that the United States has a lower fatality rate than “almost everywhere else in the world.” The country, according to a New York Times database, has the world’s 10th highest rate of reported deaths per 100,000 people.

Mr. Trump also claimed “no governor needs anything right now,” contradicting the public accounts of a few governors. Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon told PBS last night that “we need help with testing supplies and equipment” while Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland warned of testing shortages earlier on Tuesday.

Asked about a tweet he sent a day earlier, in which he declared mask-wearing as “patriotic,” Mr. Trump did not explain why he often declined to wear one in public.

“If you’re close to each other, if you’re in a group, I would put it on when I’m in a group,” Mr. Trump said. But he did not directly answer when asked why he had not worn a mask during a small group gathering at the Trump International Hotel in Washington the evening before, and appeared to toggle back and forth between his own feelings about mask-wearing as he spoke.

“I’m getting used to the mask and the reason is, think about patriotism. Maybe it helps,” Mr. Trump said.

But even as he acknowledged that the outbreak would worsen, the president continued to maintain, without evidence, that “the virus will disappear.”

The U.S. reports more than 1,000 deaths in a day for the first time in July.

At least 1,120 coronavirus deaths were reported across the United States on Tuesday, the first time in July the single-day total had exceeded 1,000. With the exception of two days in late June when New Jersey and New York reported large numbers of deaths from unknown dates, Tuesday’s total was the highest since May 29, according to a New York Times database.

Officials in Nevada, Oregon and Tennessee reported their highest single-day death figures yet.

Public health experts have warned for weeks that deaths would trail new cases by about a month and case counts have risen substantially since mid-June, when states began lifting stay-at-home orders and reopening businesses.

Tuesday’s total was far below the single-day record of 2,752, reported on April 15 during the peak of the outbreak in New York and the Northeast.

The seven-day average of deaths in the United States reached 810 on Tuesday, up from an average of about 475 in early July, though still far below the country’s April peak.

The U.S. military’s infection rate has tripled over the past six weeks.

The United States military has emerged as a potential source of coronavirus transmissions both domestically and abroad, according to military and local public health officials. Over 20,000 members have contracted the virus, and the infection rate in the armed services has tripled over the past six weeks.

Cases are rising the most on military bases in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas, all states that have seen surges in infections, Jennifer Steinhauer and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of The New York Times reported. At a base in Okinawa, Japan, the U.S. Marine Corps has reported nearly 100 cases, enraging local officials. And in war zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, already awash with untracked cases, U.S. troops have contended with outbreaks of the virus within their ranks.

Domestically, local officials in Georgia’s Chattahoochee County, a sparsely populated area with high infection rates, traced the outbreaks to Fort Benning, the large training base there. And officials in California and North Carolina have also seen connections between military installations and communities.

The rise of cases among a largely young population that lives in dense quarters near cities where bars and other crowded places that have been opened is unsurprising. But the increase raises questions about the military’s safety precautions as the Pentagon wrestles with both containing the virus within the ranks while also addressing logistical problems it has created, like relieving units that had been stuck overseas for longer than expected.

There were 21,909 cases in the military as of Monday, compared with 7,408 on June 10, according to the Pentagon. Three service members have died since March, including a sailor on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. More than 440 service members have been hospitalized.

The C.D.C. says the number of people infected ‘far exceeds the number of reported cases’ in parts of the U.S.

The number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States has been anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings suggest that large numbers of people who did not have symptoms or did not seek medical care may have kept the virus circulating in their communities. The study is the largest of its kind to date, although some early data was released last month.

“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”

The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior virus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. They also released data from later times for eight sites to the C.D.C.’s website on Tuesday.

About 40 percent of infected people do not develop symptoms, but they may still pass the virus on to others. The United States now tests roughly 700,000 people a day. The new results highlight the need for much more testing to detect infection levels and contain the viral spread in parts of the country.

For example, in Missouri, the prevalence of infections as of May 30 was 2.8 percent or 171,000, 13 times the reported rate of 12,956 cases, suggesting that the state missed most people with the virus who might have contributed to its outsized outbreak.

In some regions, the gap between estimated infections and reported cases decreased as testing capacity and reporting improved. New York City, for example, showed a 12-fold difference between actual infections and reported cases in early April, but by early May the difference was down to tenfold.

The study indicates that even the hardest-hit area in the study — New York City, where nearly one in four people has been exposed to the virus — is nowhere near achieving herd immunity, the level of exposure at which the spread of the virus would start to dwindle on its own. To reach that level, experts believe at least 60 percent of people in a particular place would have had to be exposed to the virus.

U.S. ROUNDUP

As the deadline for renewing unemployment benefits looms, infighting hinders recovery-deal negotiations.

When millions of Americans began losing their jobs in March, the federal government stepped in with a life preserver: $ 600 a week in extra unemployment benefits. That life preserver will disappear within days if Congress does not act to extend it.

Republican leaders labored on Tuesday to avert a party revolt over the next round of coronavirus aid, announcing that they planned to provide $ 105 billion for schools, direct payments to American families and more aid for struggling small businesses.

Even as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, divulged details of his emerging plan, which is expected to be worth roughly $ 1 trillion, President Trump had yet to sign on and Republicans remained deeply divided over several key elements.

Ahead of what are expected to be difficult negotiations with Democrats, Senate Republicans and White House officials were fighting over how much money to devote to testing and to the federal health agencies on the front lines of the virus response; whether to include a payroll tax cut that Mr. Trump has demanded; and how to address the expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits at the end of the month.

Top Republican officials privately cautioned that the coming negotiation was likely to stretch into August, leaving tens of millions of unemployed Americans without extra help, potentially prompting a wave of evictions and further damaging the economy.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump offered a positive assessment of the economy. “We are in a pandemic, and yet we are producing tremendous numbers of jobs,” he said during his first virus-focused news conference in weeks. “That was something nobody thought possible,” he said, later adding that he expected the next few quarters to look even better, predicting a “record year.”

While it is true that nearly five million positions were brought back in June, over all the United States is still down around 14.7 million jobs since February.

• New York, grappling with how to prevent another large outbreak, will now require travelers from a total of 31 states to quarantine for 14 days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Tuesday. The weekly update saw Minnesota taken off the list and the addition of 10 states: Alaska, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Virginia and Washington.

• New Jersey and Connecticut are also requiring travelers from those 31 states to quarantine. Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut signed an executive order on Tuesday to mandate the self-isolation, with failure to comply punishable by a $ 1,000 fine.

• The top public official in hard-hit Hidalgo County, Texas, ordered residents on Monday to stay at home, imposed a curfew and implored all but essential businesses to shut down. But the order lacked any means of enforcement, a situation that has frustrated local officials across Texas. As Gov. Greg Abbott prepared to reopen the state in April, he blocked local officials from issuing enforceable stay-at-home orders.

• Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a sweeping new $ 775 billion investment in caregiving programs on Tuesday, with a series of proposals covering care for small children, older adults and family members with disabilities.

• Mississippi on Tuesday reported more than 1,630 cases, a single-day record for the state.

• Executives from four companies in the race to produce a coronavirus vaccine told lawmakers on Tuesday that they are optimistic their products could be ready by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. All four companies — AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Therapeutics and Pfizer — are testing proprietary vaccines in various phases of human clinical trials.

• Arizona is averaging more than 3,000 new cases a day this month, double what it was in mid-June. The state’s death toll is steadily climbing to nearly 3,000. But disease specialists are expressing cautious optimism that the crisis there may be leveling off or even starting to ebb.

• A study of patients in New York published in the journal JAMA reports that blood clotting problems may be significantly more common among Covid-19 patients than among those with other infectious diseases. And patients with blood-clotting problems were twice as likely to die, the study found.

U.S. officials accuse two hackers of trying to steal virus vaccine data for China.

The U.S. Justice Department accused a pair of Chinese hackers on Tuesday of targeting vaccine development on behalf of the country’s intelligence service.

Justice Department officials called the suspects a blended threat who sometimes worked on behalf of China’s spy services and sometimes worked to enrich themselves. The officials said that an indictment secured against them earlier this month and unsealed on Tuesday was the first to target such a threat.

The hacking was part of a broader, yearslong campaign of cybertheft by the pair aimed at an array of industries. American government officials said that at the behest of China’s spy service, the two hackers shifted their focus this year to trying to acquire vaccine research and other information about the pandemic.

The indictment came as the Trump administration has stepped up its criticism of Beijing, both for its theft of secrets and its failure to contain the spread of the virus, and is a significant escalation of that effort. The Justice Department said that China’s covert activity could potentially set back research efforts.

The accusations also came days after the United States and allied countries accused Russia of trying to steal information on vaccine development.

Global Roundup

Serious security flaws found in app mandated by South Korea, a leader in contact tracing.

South Korea has been praised for making effective use of digital tools to contain the virus, from emergency phone alerts to aggressive contact tracing based on a variety of data.

But one pillar of that strategy, a mobile app that helps enforce quarantines, had serious security flaws that made private information vulnerable to hackers, a software engineer has found.

The defects, which were confirmed by The New York Times and have been fixed, could have let attackers retrieve the names, real-time locations and other details of people in quarantine. The flaws could also have allowed hackers to tamper with data to make it look as if users of the app were either violating quarantine orders or still in quarantine despite being somewhere else.

In April, South Korea began requiring all visitors and residents arriving from abroad to isolate themselves for two weeks. To monitor compliance, they had to install an app with a name in Korean that means Self-Quarantine Safety Protection.

As of last month, more than 162,000 people had downloaded the app, which tracks users’ locations to ensure they remain in designated quarantine areas. Violators might be required to wear tracking wristbands or pay steep fines.

“We were really in a hurry to make and deploy this app as quickly as possible to help slow down the spread of the virus,” said Jung Chan-hyun, an official at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s disaster response division, which oversees the app. “We could not afford a time-consuming security check on the app that would delay its deployment.”

Here are other developments from around the world:

• As the dust settled on days of rancorous negotiations, the compromises that allowed Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose country holds the European Union’s rotating presidency, to guide 27 nations toward consensus on a landmark spending package were all the more apparent, and none too pretty, wrote Steven Erlanger and Matina Stevis-Gridneff in an analysis for The New York Times.

• Nearly 900,000 public workers in Britain, including teachers, doctors and security forces, will receive raises in recognition of the “vital contribution” they have made, Britain’s finance ministry announced Tuesday.

• Chinese officials are hailing a visit by a team of experts sent to Beijingby the World Health Organization to investigate the source of the coronavirus as evidence that the country is a responsible and transparent global power. But the investigation by the W.H.O. is likely to take many months and could face delays.

• Air passengers to China must provide a negative test result before boarding the flight, the aviation authority said. The test must be completed within five days of the trip.

Lamenting a ‘vacuum’ of national leadership, a health expert urges states to coordinate their virus reporting.

A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday called on state health officials to start reporting coronavirus data in a detailed and uniform fashion, rather than the hodgepodge most states now produce.

“We have a real vacuum of leadership at the national level,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit health advocacy initiative. “Absent a national strategy, our best hope is to get all 50 states on the same page, so we know where we are.”

Other public health experts said that such guidelines were long overdue and that the C.D.C.’s current director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, should have mandated them months ago.

Dr. Irwin E. Redlener, founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said it was “pathetic” that a private organization had to propose data standards and recruit states to voluntarily agree.

“The feds should have been demanding exactly this kind of standardized information from every state and territory since March,” he said. “This is another illustration of the failures of the federal government — Trump was explicit in telling governors that they were on their own.”

Dr. Frieden’s organization, concluding that states are reporting only 40 percent of the data needed to fight the pandemic, laid out 15 indicators that every state should report daily on a public “dashboard” that anyone can view.

They include not just basic elements like cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but sophisticated metrics. Among them: what percentage of infections came from clusters of people who knew one another; how many health care workers are infected on the job; how long it takes to get a diagnostic test result; and what percentage ofresidents are wearing masks.

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who helped design the data dashboard used by New York State and cited by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his news conferences, said Dr. Frieden’s proposal was “something we need in our tool kit that’s been absent.”

Here are some of the latest places where mask requirements are appearing.

As the virus surges around the world, government officials and business owners are increasingly turning to mask requirements to try to slow the spread of infection.

• Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami said Tuesday that the city would assign 39 police officers to a new unit that enforces mask violations. “All they will do for the whole week is mask enforcement,” he said.

• Austria announced on Tuesday a new mask mandate to go into effect on Friday for supermarkets and other stores that sell food, as well as post offices, banks and houses of worship. Cases in the alpine nation have begun rising again since restrictions were eased. On Tuesday, Austria recorded 1,386 active cases — roughly the same number as in mid-March, when the country was placed on lockdown.

• President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said the police would arrest people for not wearing masks in public. “We have to ask our police to be more strict,” he said. “Catch them. A little shame, or put them on notice forever.”

• Southeastern Grocers, the owner of the Winn-Dixie chain of supermarkets, joined the growing list of retailers that are requiring customers to wear masks. The announcement late Monday came a day after a company spokesman defended the company’s earlier policy of not requiring them. The new policy will go into effect on July 27. Another large grocery chain in the region, Publix, started to require masks on Tuesday.

Reporting was contributed by Sarah Almukhtar, Peter Baker, Pam Belluck, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Luke Broadwater, Julia Calderone, Ben Casselman, Christopher Clarey, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Julie Creswell, Melissa Eddy, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Christina Goldbaum, Shane Goldmacher, J. David Goodman, Javier C. Hernández, Tiffany Hsu, Juliana Kim, Aaron Krolik, Robin Lloyd, Patricia Mazzei, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Claire Cain Miller, Heather Murphy, Elian Peltier, Eduardo Porter, Amy Qin, Linda Qiu, Katie Rogers, Simon Romero, Brian M. Rosenthal, Choe Sang-Hun, Natasha Singer, Kaly Soto, Jennifer Steinhauer, Justin Swanson, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Eileen Sullivan, Noah Weiland, Katherine J. Wu and Raymond Zhong.