Coronavirus Live Updates: Ohio Governor Urges Caution on Rapid Tests After False Positive

Use rapid tests, but use them carefully, Ohio’s governor says after a false-positive scare.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, who tested positive for the coronavirus, then negative and negative again last week, said his roller-coaster ride should not be reason for people to think “that testing is not reliable or doesn’t work.”

Governor DeWine got the positive result when he was screened before President Trump arrived in Ohio for campaign appearances.

That test was an antigen test manufactured by the diagnostic health care company Quidel, one of two such tests given emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. These tests, while fast and convenient, are known to be less accurate than PCR tests, which were used to retest Governor DeWine twice on Thursday and once more on Saturday. All three PCR tests came back negative, confirming that the governor is not infected.

His experience could raise concerns about how much states will rely on antigen tests to augment other forms of testing that are in short supply. Ohio is one of seven states that said this week that they were banding together to purchase a total of 3.5 million rapid coronavirus tests, including antigen tests, along with other vital supplies. Governor DeWine said on CNN Sunday that he had already been in touch with Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland to talk about the tests and the seven-state agreement.

“If anyone needed a wake-up call with antigens, how careful you have to be, we certainly saw that with my test,” Governor DeWine said. “And we’re going to be very careful in how we use it.”

He added that he would direct any funding from a new federal relief package to expanded testing and helping schools adapt.

“We have doubled our testing in the last four weeks,” he said. “We need to double it again and then double it again. And so that is not going to be cheap to do.”

PCR tests are in short supply nationwide, and turnaround times for results have stretched past two weeks in some parts of the country, rendering the information useless.

Compared with PCR tests, Quidel’s antigen test is more likely to return a false negative result, missing up to 20 percent of cases that PCR detects, though the figure may drop below 5 percent for patients with high virus levels. But Governor DeWine’s antigen test produced the opposite error: a false positive.

He noted on Sunday that antigen tests function especially well as screening tests, delivering a quick preliminary indication that can be confirmed by the more accurate but slower PCR tests.

Virus cases have surged in the United States in recent weeks, particularly in the Sun Belt states and in communities where officials moved quickly to reopen. According to a New York Times database, the United States leads the world in confirmed cases with more than five million — a milestone reached on Saturday — followed by Brazil and India. Experts have warned that the actual number of people infected is far greater than the confirmed case count. Brazil also reached a milestone of 100,000 deaths on Saturday.

Trump’s moves on economic aid draw fire on the Sunday news shows.

Administration officials struggled in television appearances on Sunday to explain President Trump’s attempts to circumvent Congress in the absence of an agreement on a coronavirus aid package, sowing further confusion over whether tens of millions of Americans will receive the promised relief.

The president announced executive steps on Saturday that he said were intended to address lapsed unemployment benefits, reinstate an eviction ban, provide relief for student borrowers and suspend collection of payroll taxes. They came after crucial benefits provided under earlier aid bills had lapsed, and after two weeks of talks between congressional Democrats and administration officials failed to yield an agreement on a broader relief package.

But Mr. Trump’s steps appeared unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the sputtering economy, raising questions about whether Mr. Trump had taken them mainly to gain more leverage in his face-off with Congress.

Democrats criticized the actions on Sunday as executive overreach, and warned that the nation’s social safety net could be jeopardized.

“The president’s meager, weak and unconstitutional actions further demand that we have an agreement,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on “Fox News Sunday.”

She, along with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, urged administration officials to resume talks and seek a compromise on a broad relief package.

“The president’s executive orders, described in one word, could be paltry; in three words, unworkable, weak and far too narrow,” Mr. Schumer said on the ABC program “This Week.”

Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers were on the defensive Sunday about whether the president had the authority to bypass Congress, which retains the constitutional power of the purse, and redirect billions of dollars in spending. But there was some acknowledgment that the measures were not as potent as congressional action would be.

“The downside of executive orders is, you can’t address some of the small business incidents that are there,” said Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in a prerecorded interview that was broadcast Sunday on Gray Television. “You can’t necessarily get direct payments, because it has to do with appropriations. That’s something that the president doesn’t have the ability to do. So, you miss on those two key areas. You miss on money for schools. You miss on any funding for state and local revenue needs that may be out there.”

Kansas City, a potential hot spot, needs federal aid to cope, the mayor says.

Like many communities, Kansas City, Mo., has been having a tough time lately, and it will get tougher if Congress and the White House can’t reach a deal on more aid, the city’s mayor, Quinton Lucas, said on Sunday.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, recently named Kansas City as one of 10 potential coronavirus hot spots around the country because of troubling signs in its testing data. Daily case counts have been declining, but the city is experiencing huge backlogs in testing that are delaying results by as much as two weeks, making them nearly useless in heading off the spread of the disease.

What will it take to address the problem? “Money,” Mr. Lucas said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “We need more resources to get more testing, to get faster testing through.”

Kansas City’s Covid-19 response has already cost the city millions, and without federal aid, a growing budget deficit may soon force officials to start furloughing workers and eliminating jobs.

“This isn’t just theoretical for us,” he said. “These are issues that are significant and in the now, and so we are looking for a deal.”

Kansas City has delayed the start of its school year until after Labor Day to buy more time to make its schools safe to reopen. But the schools need more money to buy protective equipment and implement social distancing measures, Mr. Lucas said.

He said it was difficult to make the right decisions locally without clear guidance from the federal government: “I’m a lawyer by training. I talk to doctors and health care professionals here, but these are calls necessarily that sometimes mayors may not be equipped to make, or some governors.”

New Zealand goes 100 days with no new reported local cases.

New Zealand on Sunday marked 100 days without any new reported cases of local transmission of the coronavirus, a milestone as the pandemic continues to devastate countries across the world — including neighboring Australia, where recent outbreaks have led to new lockdown measures in Melbourne and broader Victoria State.

New Zealand, a nation of five million people, reported in March that it had stamped out the virus after strict lockdown measures were implemented, and there has been no community transmission since, according to the country’s Health Ministry.

“It has been 100 days since the last case of Covid-19 was acquired locally from an unknown source,” the ministry said in a statement on Sunday. “No additional cases are reported as having recovered, so there are still 23 active cases of Covid-19 in managed isolation facilities.”

Public life has resumed for many people in the country, as they eat out at restaurants, socialize at bars and attend sports and cultural events. However, some experts warn that letting down their guard now could lead to outbreaks.

“Achieving 100 days without community transmission is a significant milestone,” said Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, the country’s top health official, in a statement on Sunday. “However, as we all know, we can’t afford to be complacent.”

“We have seen overseas how quickly the virus can re-emerge and spread in places where it was previously under control,” he said, “and we need to be prepared to quickly stamp out any future cases in New Zealand.”

Pfizer strikes a deal with Gilead, the maker of remdesivir, to manufacture the urgently needed drug.

With the number of severely ill patients rising and with remdesivir, the only drug shown to speed recovery, in short supply, an urgent need to quickly increase remdesivir production has arisen. Some U.S. hospitals have been forced to ration the drug, using various systems to decide who should get it.

Now, in a rare agreement between drug companies, Pfizer has entered into an agreement with Gilead Sciences, the maker of remdesivir, to manufacture the drug at a facility in Kansas. It is meant to be part of an effort to quickly increase the drug’s supply.

Pfizer will be one of 40 companies in North America, Europe and Asia that will be making the drug. Gilead says it plans to produce more than two million courses of treatment by the end of 2020. It says it also will produce another several million doses of remdesivir in 2021 if they are needed.

Remdesivir is an anti-viral drug that failed as a treatment for hepatitis C but was tested in Covid-19 patients because it seemed effective against the virus in laboratory studies and because its safety had already been determined. It is supplied intravenously.

The evidence of its effectiveness against the new coronavirus comes from a federal study of 1,000 hospitalized patients who received remdesivir or a placebo. Preliminary results were announced on April 27, and on May 1, the Food and Drug Administration gave the drug emergency use authorization, allowing Gilead to sell remdesivir even though it has not yet been approved. The price for a five-day course is $ 3,120.

Gilead explains the supply problems by saying it is difficult and time consuming to make remdesivir. The company says manufacturing is “a long, linear chemical synthesis process that must be completed sequentially and includes several specialized chemistry steps and novel substances with limited global availability.”

Your immune system may already recognize the coronavirus.

Eight months ago, the new coronavirus was unknown. But to some human immune cells, it was already something of a familiar foe.

A flurry of recent studies has revealed that a large proportion of the population — in some places, 20 to 50 percent of people — may harbor immunity assassins called T cells that recognize the new coronavirus despite having never encountered it before.

These T cells, which lurked in the bloodstreams of people long before the pandemic began, are most likely stragglers from past scuffles with other related coronaviruses, including four that frequently cause common colds. It’s a case of family resemblance: In the eyes of the immune system, germs with common roots can look alike, such that when a cousin comes to call, the body may already have an inkling of its intentions.

The presence of these T cells has intrigued experts, who say it is too soon to tell whether the cells will play a helpful, harmful or entirely negligible role against the current coronavirus.

But should these cross-reactive T cells exert even a modest influence on the body’s immune response, they might make the disease milder — and perhaps partly explain why some people who catch the germ become very sick while others are dealt only a glancing blow.

This contact tracer is fighting two contagions: the virus and fear.

Radhika Kumar goes to work every morning hoping to save lives. As a contact tracer for Los Angeles County, her job, at least on paper, entails phoning people who have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with others they may have exposed, and providing them with guidance on how to isolate so as not to infect others.

If that sounds easy, it is not.

To persuade people to cooperate, she has to get them to trust her. She has to convince them that they might be infected, even if they have no symptoms. She has to let people curse at her and hang up, then she has to call them back the next day.

And if she wants them to heed her advice, she has to listen, really listen, to how scared they are that if they stay home from their jobs, they might not be able to feed their families.

“Sometimes it can really get to you,” she said. “The other day I had one young lady, and she was screaming on the phone, ‘You don’t understand — I have three kids. I have to go to work.’”

“I kept calling back and calling back,” Ms. Kumar said. “I’m very relentless like that. I thought about it all night — what am I going to do? I called her again first thing in the morning, and I was so relieved when she picked up.”

Even as officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to tout the effectiveness of contact tracing, and state and local health agencies across the United States deploy new armies of tracers, tracking down everyone with the coronavirus is proving to be a Sisyphean task.

France will require masks in crowded outdoor areas starting on Monday.

France is imposing a new requirement that people wear face masks outdoors in crowded areas of Paris and other major cities beginning on Monday as the number of coronavirus infections rises at the fastest rate since a national quarantine ended in mid-May.

The country had gotten the number of infections under control, but the pandemic is creeping back, with 2,288 new Covid-19 cases reported on Friday — the third consecutive day of sharp increase. In the Paris Ile-de-France region, the rate of infections reached 2.4 percent on Friday, compared with a 1.6 percent national average.

The rise of new clusters has led the government to warn of the possibility of a second wave of infections in the autumn. In an effort to stem the spread of the virus, masks will now be mandatory for people age 11 and above in high-traffic areas, from the tourist havens of Saint Tropez and Biarritz to the Seine river in Paris, Montmartre and other popular sites, as well as at outdoor food markets and in Paris’s crowded suburbs.

The police will be enforcing the measures — which will be in place for at least a month in Paris and are subject to review in other areas — with a fine of 135 euros ($ 159).

The authorities are especially concerned about the popularity of “free parties,” in which hundreds of young people gather in the Parisien woods and other areas, often without wearing masks.

Wearing a mask in crowded enclosed spaces, including museums, shopping malls and on public transportation, has been compulsory in France since mid-July.

A 10-day motorcycle rally is underway and expected to attract 250,000 people to a South Dakota city.

Tens of thousands of motorcyclists swarmed the streets of Sturgis, S.D., in the past few days for an annual rally, despite objections from residents — and with little regard for the coronavirus.

The herds of people driving recreational vehicles, bikes and classic cars overran every street in town, making little or no effort to keep six feet apart. Few masks could be seen, and free bandannas being passed out were mostly folded, or wrapped around people’s heads.

With temperatures in the low 80s and not much cloud cover, many people sought shade under shopping tents where “Screw Covid” shirts were sold.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a 10-day affair that began Friday, is expected to attract roughly 250,000 enthusiasts this year — about half the number who attended last year, but a figure that puts it on track to be among the country’s largest public gatherings since the first coronavirus cases emerged.

South Dakota is one of several states that did not impose a lockdown, and state officials have not required residents to wear masks.

Health experts say the coronavirus is less likely to spread outdoors, especially when people wear masks and socially distance. But large gatherings also increase the number of visitors inside restaurants and stores.

A few businesses in Sturgis put up signs limiting the number of customers who could enter, but most did not.

Over the past week, South Dakota has reported an average of 87 new coronavirus cases per day. At least two new virus deaths and 106 new cases were reported on Saturday.

BUSINESS ROUNDUP

A biotech company says it’s making inroads with a vaccine. Experts are skeptical.

In 2009, when H1N1, better known as swine flu, was stoking fears of a devastating pandemic, a small biotech company named Inovio Pharmaceuticals rushed to create a vaccine. After announcing promising early results, the company’s stock soared more than 1,000 percent.

In the years since, Inovio has announced encouraging news about its work on vaccines for malaria, the Zika virus and even a “cancer vaccine.” The declarations have caused the company’s stock price to leap, enriching investors and senior executives.

There is a catch, though: Inovio has never brought a vaccine to market.

Now, Inovio is working on a vaccine for the coronavirus, and a flurry of positive news releases about its funding and preliminary results have helped the company attract money from the U.S. government and investors.

But some scientists and financial analysts question the viability of Inovio’s technology. While there are some early signs of promise with its vaccine, Inovio has released only bare-bones data from the first phase of clinical trials. It is locked in a legal battle with a key manufacturing partner that claims Inovio stole its technology.

And while the company has said that it is part of Operation Warp Speed — the flagship federal effort to quickly produce treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus — Inovio is not on the list of companies selected to receive financial support to mass-produce vaccines.

“The absence of that funding, coupled with their ongoing litigation, coupled with the need to scale a device, coupled with the absence of complete Phase 1 data, makes people skeptical,” said Stephen Willey, an analyst at Stifel, an investment firm.

Inovio could provide an update on its progress with the vaccine when it releases its second-quarter financial results on Monday.

In other business news:

• Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said on Sunday that its quarterly earnings had plunged more than 73 percent compared with a year ago, as lockdowns imposed to curb the pandemic drastically cut the demand for oil. Despite the steep fall in earnings, to $ 6.6 billion from $ 24.7 billion, the company said it would continue paying a quarterly dividend of $ 18.75 billion — nearly all of which will go to the Saudi government.

At least nine are killed in a fire at a makeshift virus clinic in India.

At least nine people were killed after a fire broke out on Sunday at a hotel in southern India that was being used as a makeshift facility for Covid-19 patients, officials said.

The fire, in the city of Vijayawada, occurred at the Swarna Palace hotel, which was being used to shelter and treat people who had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The police attributed the accident to a short circuit in an air-conditioner on the ground floor. After the blaze broke out early Sunday, panicked patients jumped from balconies on the upper floors and several were injured, according to local news media outlets.

After most of India’s coronavirus restrictions were lifted in recent weeks, infections have surged, leading some states to move patients into hotels and other makeshift health facilities. As of Sunday, India’s health ministry had reported more than two million total infections and nearly 45,000 deaths.

Dozens of N.F.L. players are choosing their families’ safety over the game.

Despite surging coronavirus transmission rates around the United States, the N.F.L. contends that its season will begin, as scheduled, on Sept. 10. But 68 players have opted out of playing, according to the league.

They represent a microcosm of N.F.L. rosters: rookies and veterans, practice-squadders and starters, all of whom decided to lessen one risk while absorbing another. To keep themselves and their families safer, they will sacrifice the chance to compete for a Super Bowl, forgo showcasing themselves for more lucrative contracts and, in some cases, cede starting jobs and roster spots that may not be there next season.

Half of the players who opted out are offensive and defensive linemen, who are in closest contact with other players during practices and games. Leo Koloamatangi, an offensive lineman on the Jets who opted out, said he was resigned to contracting the virus had he chosen to play.

“Where I play, I’m literally bear-hugging another creature on the other side of the ball every single play,” Mr. Koloamatangi, 26, said in an interview. “If that guy has any symptoms, I’m going to get them.” He added, “For myself, I couldn’t take those chances.”

Mr. Koloamatangi said he believed it was unfeasible for the N.F.L. to enter a “bubble,” as the N.B.A. and N.H.L. have, because of the size of the league and length of the season. But he wondered why the N.F.L. had not delayed camp and the season, or introduced additional safety measures — like gloves, or helmets with masks — that would further mitigate his risk of infection.

As it stands, the N.F.L.’s testing protocol calls for players to be tested every day for the first two weeks of training camp, and then every other day after that.

A New Hampshire poet laureate brightens up her city’s Covid-19 advisories.

On Sundays, thousands of residents of Portsmouth, N.H., find a poem nestled inside the city’s Covid-19 newsletter.

The poems, written by Tammi J. Truax, the city’s poet laureate, help offset the gloom of the pandemic while giving residents a chance to pause briefly and reflect on something other than the coronavirus.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been more than 6,800 cases and at least 419 deaths in New Hampshire, according to a New York Times database, with a recent average of 28 cases per day.

The idea for featuring the poems came from Stephanie Seacord, the public information officer in Portsmouth, a city of about 21,000 residents about 60 miles north of Boston. Ms. Seacord was compiling information about the virus and health updates in a weekly city newsletter sent to about 5,000 email subscribers and circulated on social media.

“When the pandemic hit, it became quickly clear that people needed information more than once a week,” Ms. Seacord recalled in an interview last week, adding that “things were changing almost on a daily basis.”

In mid-March, the newsletter turned into a daily advisory of coronavirus cases and tips, like where to find personal protective equipment. Around that time, Ms. Seacord had the idea that including a poem in the Sunday newsletter would be “a good calm moment in the middle of the intensity,” she said.

Wondering about mass transit?

If you are feeling ready to go somewhere slightly out of the way, you may be worried about the buses, trains or planes you need to get there. Here’s some information to help ease your anxiety and remain safe on mass transit.

Reporting was contributed by Liz Alderman, Emily Cochrane, Johnny Diaz, David Gelles, Rebecca Halleck, Gina Kolata, Heather Murphy, Alan Rappeport, Stanley Reed, Ben Shpigel, Derrick Taylor, Lucy Tompkins, Mark Walker, Katherine J. Wu and Ceylan Yeginsu.