Covid Live Updates: With U.S. Cases Stable, Americans Return to July 4 Rituals

LONDON — A week from now, more than 60,000 soccer fans will pack Wembley Stadium in London for the European Championship final. British travelers with two vaccine shots will soon be welcomed back to Germany, which had banned them. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was on track to lift most remaining coronavirus restrictions on July 19 — or, as the British press has dubbed it, “Freedom Day.”

All this in a country that, despite having a population that is almost 50 percent fully vaccinated, reported 27,125 new cases of the virus on Friday, a 52 percent jump from just a week earlier.

Britain’s determination to reopen amid that steep rise in cases amounts to a bold experiment, one that will be closely watched in the United States and across Europe: Can a country with a largely vaccinated adult population learn to live with the coronavirus?

“The world is watching the U.K. to see what living with Covid and high vaccine uptake looks like,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh. “The next few weeks will reveal if they’ve gambled correctly, or we end up having another wave of high hospitalizations.”

Britain has gone from one of the longest stretches under lockdown of any advanced economy to one of the swiftest vaccine rollouts and now, to a reopening. Scientists say it is time to test whether the nation can reach a coveted goal: population immunity through inoculation rather than infection.

There are some promising early signs. Britain’s recent rise in cases, most of which are also attributed to the highly transmissible Delta variant, has yet to be followed by a commensurate rise in hospital admissions or deaths.

That could be because of more testing or a greater number of cases among younger, unvaccinated people. But some scientists say it also suggests that the widespread deployment of vaccines — particularly among the most vulnerable populations — has weakened the link between infection and serious illness.

RIO DE JANEIRO — The plot twists of a coronavirus vaccine kickback scandal that has rattled Brazil’s capital have been worthy of a reality TV show.

The main stage has been a congressional hearing room, where scores of witnesses have been shedding light on the government’s chaotic response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 520,000 in the country.

There has been plenty of yelling, a bit of crying and a fair amount of pearl clutching as the audacity and scope of a scheme by health ministry officials to solicit bribes from vaccine dealers have come into focus.

And public rage is growing. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in a third round of demonstrations in recent weeks against the government of President Jair Bolsonaro. In downtown Rio de Janeiro, thousands marched to the beat of drums and chanted “Out with Bolsonaro!” as activists delivered fiery speeches from sound trucks. A man held a large cardboard sign that said: “The people only take to the streets in the middle of a pandemic when the government is more dangerous than the virus.”

At the urging of a Supreme Court justice, the attorney general’s office on Friday opened an investigation into Mr. Bolsonaro’s role in the vaccine corruption scheme. He is under scrutiny in a deal to secure 20 million doses of a vaccine that had not yet completed clinical trials or been approved by regulators. He is accused of overlooking a warning that there were some irregularities in the deal.

Mr. Bolsonaro has not disputed that senior officials in his government may have acted unlawfully in vaccine negotiations. But he called efforts to pin the wrongdoing on him unfair.

“I have no way of knowing what’s happening in the ministries,” he told supporters on Monday. “We did nothing wrong.”

Adding to Mr. Bolsonaro’s troubles, a group of 100 legislators from a broad range of parties presented draft impeachment articles earlier in the week outlining scores of alleged crimes, ranging from the president’s actions to weaken democratic institutions to accounts of negligence and malfeasance that have stymied Brazil’s Covid vaccine campaign.

The widening inquiry is likely to pose a major threat to Mr. Bolsonaro’s re-election bid next year — and perhaps even to his ability to serve out the remainder of his term.

“Every crime committed by the president is serious, but this one is even more serious because it involves lives,” said Joice Hasselmann, a member of Congress from São Paulo who was among Mr. Bolsonaro’s fiercest defenders until a falling out in 2019. “Brazil can’t stand another year with Bolsonaro.”

Six emergency medical workers helping with rescue efforts at the site of a collapsed condo in Surfside, Fla., have tested positive for the coronavirus, Alan R. Cominsky, the chief of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, said at a news conference on Saturday.

The workers, who were all part of the same task force, were no longer at the site, Chief Cominsky said, adding that contact tracing had been performed and that 424 members of other Florida task force teams responding to the site had been tested.

Chief Cominsky did not address the conditions of the six workers in his comments. It was unclear whether they had been vaccinated.

The chief told The Miami Herald on Friday that the six emergency medical workers were firefighters from Florida, but that they were not from Miami-Dade.

“We do have our medical procedures in place,” he told the newspaper. “Unfortunately, this is another challenge, but something we’ve been dealing with for over the past year.”

Average daily reports of new cases in Florida have risen by 55 percent in the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Across the state, 65 percent of residents 18 and older have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 56 percent are fully vaccinated.

At the news conference on Saturday, Chief Cominsky said the rescue effort would continue with teams from Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey and Indiana in addition to those from Florida.

A year ago, the United States celebrated Independence Day largely by staying home. The country staggered into that Fourth of July holiday weekend, having set records for new coronavirus cases in six out of the nine previous days.

About 600 people were dying with the virus each day. On July 2, the country set what was then a record: 53,000 new reported cases. Governors were forced to slow their reopening plans — and in the months that followed, the pandemic grew much, much worse.

This year, reports of new cases are holding steady at 12,000 a day, the lowest since testing became widely available. The U.S. average of fewer than 300 daily deaths from Covid-19 is a decline of 23 percent over the past two weeks. Hospitalizations are also dropping.

Riding a wave of optimism, Americans are eagerly returning to their Fourth of July rituals, flocking to the roads and to the skies in the stiffest test yet for the nation’s travel infrastructure since the pandemic shut the nation down in March 2020.

About 48 million Americans are expected to travel over July 1 to 5, a 40 percent jump over last year, according to AAA, the automobile owners group. Of those, a record 43.6 million are predicted to travel by car, an 8 percent increase compared with 2019.

Another 3.5 million people are expected to fly, representing a 164 percent increase from 2020. United Airlines says that more than two million passengers have booked flights between July 1 and 6, five times the number that flew during the same weekend last year. (The airline announced this week that it would place the largest order for airplanes in its history, underscoring the bullish outlook for domestic travel.)

Ridership on Amtrak is at about 55 percent of prepandemic levels, the highest level so far this year. For the Fourth of July weekend, it’s at 80 percent of what it was over the 2019 holiday, Jason Abrams, a spokesman, said.

“Travel is in full swing this summer, as Americans eagerly pursue travel opportunities they’ve deferred for the last year-and-a-half,” said Paula Twidale, senior vice president at AAA Travel. “We saw strong demand for travel around Memorial Day and the kickoff of summer, and all indications now point to a busy Independence Day.”

Still, a precipitous drop in U.S. coronavirus cases through the spring has leveled off. About 100 million people in the country have yet to receive a single vaccine shot, and the supply of vaccines far outstrips the demand.

The spread of the Delta variant remains worrisome for the unvaccinated, and there are 1,000 counties in the country where fewer than 30 percent of residents are inoculated, said Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The White House plans to host 1,000 essential workers and military families on the South Lawn on Sunday, the largest gathering of President Biden’s tenure. The celebratory display is meant to signal that the president has delivered on his promise that Americans would return to some semblance of normal life by the holiday.

“This weekend, millions of Americans will be able to get together — back together, not just with their families and close friends for small backyard cookouts, but with their community for larger festivals, parades and fireworks, celebrating our country’s July 4th Independence Day and the progress we have made against the virus together,” the White House coronavirus coordinator, Jeff Zients, said on Thursday.

While the country has fallen short of Mr. Biden’s goal of getting shots to at least 70 percent of adults by July 4, the White House has put a positive spin on the numbers. Mr. Zients noted last week that 70 percent of Americans age 30 and up have received at least one shot.

Public health officials have been struggling to motivate the vaccine holdouts. A few airlines and airports are taking up the charge, trying to entice people to get the shots with sweepstakes. (The Transportation Safety Administration still requires masks in airports, on airplanes and on trains.)

While Americans are traveling again, many local officials are taking a cautious approach. Though New York City plans to revive its huge Macy’s fireworks show, some large celebrations, parades and fireworks extravaganzas have been pared back or canceled.

A few places, like Glencoe, Ill., have postponed their fireworks shows until Labor Day, though neighbors and community groups will be allowed to parade through the village’s downtown once again.

In the United States, a weekend of barbecues and Independence Day parades means that there will be many children under 12, who are sill not eligible to be vaccinated, mixing with people of all ages who may or may not be fully vaccinated.

Since the highly transmissible Delta variant is spreading, and only full vaccination offers significant protection from it, here is some basic advice for parents on how to navigate public areas with unvaccinated children, from The Morning Newsletter.

But first, some perspective. In England, where Delta is already widespread, Covid-related hospitalizations of children have risen from their lows of a few weeks ago, but the increases are not large. So the best assumption seems to be that Delta will be modestly worse for children than earlier versions of the virus. “I haven’t seen data to make me particularly worried about Delta in kids,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said.

And Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, said this of the coronavirus and children: “The actual overall threat of death is minuscule, and the threat to health is quite low, but if I had young kids, I’d still really prefer they not get Covid.”

• Unvaccinated children, like adults who are not fully vaccinated, should wear masks indoors and avoiding crowded places.

• Take special care in areas are those with the lowest vaccination rates, which tend to be in the Southeast and the Mountain West. “If I were living in a place where cases were rising, I’d be more worried that my children could contract Covid,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist.

• The biggest risk to your child’s health today almost certainly is not Covid. It’s more likely to be an activity that you have long decided is acceptable — like swimming, riding a bicycle or traveling in a car. So exercise caution.

Last week, New York City tourism officials announced a $30 million ad campaign to lure tourists back. After a record of over 66 million visitors in 2019, the city envisions 36 million visitors this year and a return to prepandemic numbers by 2024, if not sooner.

That means an end to the all-too-brief window when, because of pandemic closures and travel restrictions, New York belonged to New Yorkers. Writer Adam Sternbergh reflects on the past year, during which New York City residents “got a chance to rediscover the city we long ago fell in love with but that many of us may have feared we’d lost to the unceasing waves of interlopers”:

First came a return to the outdoor attractions: a cautious trip to Coney Island in early summer, say, with only a few dozen stray people wandering the boardwalk’s vast expanse. The Bronx Zoo reopened last July, with timed tickets and reduced capacity, so, for a time, you could commune in relative privacy with rhinos and silverback gorillas, as though perambulating your own private nature preserve.

As fall approached, many of the city’s crown-jewel cultural attractions unshackled their massive doors. MoMA reopened on Aug. 27; the Met reopened two days later; and the American Museum of Natural History reopened two weeks after that.

Crowds were small and unintimidating. Traffic was often nonexistent. Tourists — the vast throng that typically jams these places by the tens of thousands — were nowhere to be seen.

And it was glorious.

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Anxiety over the highly contagious Delta variant, which has been rapidly outpacing other versions of the coronavirus as it spreads around the world, has led several countries to return to a defensive stance on the pandemic.

Portugal reimposed a nighttime curfew. Indonesia announced new restrictions ordering places of worship closed and nonessential workers to stay home in parts of Java and Bali islands. And Australia, which had come close to an ambitious “Covid zero” target in recent months, has ordered lockdowns in several cities after outbreaks.

Even Israel, where the vaccination rate is among the highest in the world, is seeing new pockets of infections linked to the Delta variant, which scientists believe may be twice as transmissible as the original version of the coronavirus. Genome sequencing in the United States and elsewhere strongly suggests that Delta — which now accounts for one-quarter of U.S. cases — is poised to become the dominant version in many parts of the world over the coming months.

As concern about the variant grows, the World Health Organization split with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday in urging even vaccinated people to continue wearing masks to help stem the virus’s spread.

A recent analysis by New York City’s Health Department found that the variant has gained ground in the past few weeks, but overall case counts are low.

The state reached out to the Biden Administration only hours after the White House announced that it was creating “surge response teams” to help states contain outbreaks fueled by the new variant and low inoculation rates.

A number of vaccines seem to hold up against the Delta variant, including those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Johnson & Johnson shared research this week indicating that its one-shot vaccine was also effective against the variant, a boost for health officials trying to contain its spread in communities with lower vaccine access.

But headed into the July 4 weekend, the pace of vaccination in the United States has slowed significantly from its April peak, and the White House has acknowledged that the country will not meet President Biden’s goal of having 70 percent of adults at least partly vaccinated by the holiday.

Here’s what else happened this week:

• In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court refused to lift a moratorium on evictions that the C.D.C. had kept in place since last year. The moratorium had been scheduled to expire at the end of July, and the court’s decision could cost the nation’s landlords up to $200 billion in unpaid rent, according to an emergency application filed with the court by landlords, real estate companies and trade associations.

• A report published in the journal Nature Medicine found that the pandemic has reversed a steady rise in life expectancy in Brazil, which has seen an estimated decline of 1.3 years in 2020 and an even steeper drop so far this year. As of Friday, the country had reported more than 520,000 deaths from the virus.

• North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said that missteps in the country’s public health efforts had caused a “great crisis,” with significant national security implications. It was unclear whether the statement amounted to an admission of a serious outbreak, as the country officially maintains that it has no active cases. But experts said that the acknowledgment could pave the way for North Korea to accept international assistance to fight the virus crisis, including vaccines.

• U.S. regulators on Friday cleared a batch of Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine that could furnish up to 15 million doses. The doses were made at a troubled factory in Baltimore, Md., that ruined 75 million other doses.

• A June jobs report released by the U.S. Labor Department showed that employers added 850,000 workers in June, the largest monthly gain since August, and a signal that Wages increase for the third consecutive month, a sign that employers are trying to attract applicants with higher pay and that workers are gaining bargaining power.