Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/coronavirus-today-briefing.html

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This is the Coronavirus Briefing, an informed guide to the pandemic. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

In the U.S., the past week has been the worst seven-day stretch of the pandemic so far, with a daily average of 69,804 new cases reported.

Melbourne, Australia, will end one of the world’s longest lockdowns after the city recorded no new coronavirus cases for the first time since June.

El Paso ordered a two week curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. to stem a coronavirus surge as its hospitals overflow.

Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and trackers for U.S. metro areas and vaccines in development.

They’re restrictive, tedious and hotly contested, but since the early days of the pandemic we’ve known masks to be an efficient and cost-effective way to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

And they’re even better, it turns out, when you oblige people to wear them.

Take Kansas, where a real-world experiment in face coverings emerged this summer. In early July, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, issued a statewide mask order, but was forced to let counties opt out of it under a law limiting her emergency management powers.

Only 20 of the state’s 105 counties enforced the order, which required residents to wear masks in public. Those 20 counties saw half as many new coronavirus infections as the counties that did not have the mandate in place, according to a new study from the University of Kansas.

Cellphone-tracking data from the University of Maryland showed no differences in how often people left home in the counties with or without mask mandates, so it seemed likely that the masks made the difference.

Experts say it’s part of a countrywide trend: Localities that impose mask mandates often see fewer cases, fewer hospitalizations, fewer deaths and lower test-positivity rates than nearby localities that do not.

Other studies have turned up similar results in Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. A recently published report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a 75 percent drop in coronavirus cases in Arizona less than a month after mask-wearing became enforced and bars and gyms were shuttered.

A new coronavirus cluster has emerged in the White House, this time in Vice President Mike Pence’s office. Five of the vice president’s aides have tested positive, including his chief of staff. Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen, both tested negative over the weekend.

The new cluster emerged as Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, told CNN on Sunday: “We’re not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations, because it is a contagious virus — just like the flu.”

The second White House outbreak is a visceral reminder of the administration’s dismissive and erratic handling of the health crisis. Mr. Trump has downplayed the threat of the virus and made eschewing masks and social distancing into tests of political loyalty. As the leader of the White House virus task force, Mr. Pence has echoed the president’s rosy outlook, and in April he mirrored Mr. Trump’s aversion to masks by refusing to wear one during a visit to a hospital.

Inside the White House, the approach is the same. The president, the vice president and aides have declined to follow quarantine guidelines, ignored warnings from doctors and largely refused to wear masks. With just over a week before the election, Mr. Pence said he would continue to campaign and not quarantine despite having been exposed to the infected aides.

Alaska set a single-day record for new cases for the third day in a row. Overall, 19 states have announced more cases in the past seven days than any other seven-day stretch of the pandemic.

An outbreak in the Arkansas legislature continued to expand, as a sixth Republican lawmaker tested positive for the coronavirus over the weekend, The Associated Press reports.

Experts in Belgium warn that the country is entering a crucial week for its hospitals. More than 450 people are being admitted to the hospitals each day, a rise of 85 percent compared with a week ago.

France added nearly a quarter of a million cases — 241,473 — in the past seven days. The head of the scientific council that advises the government on the pandemic said that the actual number might be over 100,000 cases per day.

Here’s a roundup of restrictions in all 50 states.

Nine days before Election Day, in wide-ranging interviews on “60 Minutes,” President Trump and Joe Biden offered sharply divergent visions for the country, including how to address the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus is forcing universities to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close budget shortfalls.

The president of Fox News and several of the network’s top anchors have been advised to quarantine after they were exposed to a person on a private flight who later tested positive for the coronavirus.

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced that only about one-third of the city’s public school students had attended any in-person classes since the city’s school system reopened last month.

For months, journalists at The Times and 11 other news outlets cataloged how the dual blows of joblessness and the pandemic changed the lives of a dozen Americans.

Let us know how you’re dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter.

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