The United States and much of Europe barreled into the new week scrambling to confront surges in new cases that threaten to overwhelm hospitals, with just eight days until the American presidential election.
Stock and oil prices dropped Monday in response to a continued stalemate in the United States over additional virus aid and new restrictions to halt a third surge in cases.
The United States hit a record number of daily new cases on Friday, while the death toll surpassed 225,000. More than 41,000 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus in the United States, a 40 percent rise in the past month. And though daily death tolls have not risen so sharply, they are inching upward.
At least five members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff have tested positive for the coronavirus, but that’s not keeping him from the campaign trail: Mr. Pence was scheduled to travel to Minnesota for a rally on Monday afternoon.
Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen, tested negative for the virus on Monday morning, his office said. His chief of staff, Marc Short, was among the aides who have tested positive for the virus in recent days.
It was unclear whether Mr. Pence would also attend the Senate vote to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court later in the evening. If she is confirmed, Mr. Trump, who was campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday, is likely to hold a swearing-in ceremony at the White House on Monday night, several officials said. The prospect of a crowded event may serve as a reminder of Judge Barrett’s nomination ceremony, which may have seeded the first White House virus outbreak.
A spokesman would not say whether the vice president was receiving some of the drugs Mr. Trump was given, including an experimental cocktail of antibodies by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, as a preventive measure.
Stocks on Wall Street extended last week’s decline on Monday, following European shares lower as more restrictions, including curfews and business closures in Spain and Italy, were introduced to try to combat a second wave of the pandemic. The S&P 500 fell about 2 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 600 index was down by more than 1.5 percent.
Oil prices also fell, with rising cases expected to reduce demand. Futures for West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, fell 2.6 percent to below $39 a barrel.
The news from Europe continued to be grim: Britain, which had the greatest surge of excess deaths during the pandemic’s first peak in Europe and still holds the most reported deaths in the region, has recorded 151,391 new cases in the past seven days, according to a Times database.
France has added nearly a quarter of a million cases — 241,473 — in the past seven days. On Sunday alone, the country reported 52,010 new cases, and the head of the scientific council that advises the government on the pandemic said that the real number could be over 100,000 cases per day. Officials have warned repeatedly that intensive care beds were quickly filling with Covid-19 patients.
With the coronavirus spreading out of control in many parts of the United States and daily case counts setting records, health experts say it is only a matter of time before hospitals start to reach the breaking point.
In some places, it is already happening.
There are more than 41,000 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in the United States, a 40 percent rise in the past month. And unlike during the earlier months of the pandemic, more of those patients are being cared for not in metropolitan regions but in more sparsely populated parts of the country, where the medical infrastructure is less robust.
In Utah last week, hospital administrators sent a grim warning to Gov. Gary Herbert that they would soon be forced to ration access to their rapidly filling intensive-care units, and requested approval for criteria to decide which patients should get priority, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
“We told him, ‘It looks like we’re going to have to request those be activated if this trend continues,’ and we see no reason why it won’t,” the paper quoted Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, as saying.
Skeptics need only look at places like Kansas City, Mo., where this month medical centers turned away ambulances because they had no room for more patients. And in Idaho, a hospital that was 99 percent full warned last week that it may have to transfer coronavirus patients to hospitals as far away as Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Hospitals in hard-hit parts of the country are resorting to a tactic commonly used during the pandemic as it eats away at medical resources: limiting their services.
In Tennessee on Saturday, the Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia suspended all elective procedures requiring an overnight stay to make room for Covid-19 patients. Most of the facility’s 26 I.C.U. beds are already filled.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said an emergency care site would be set up this week in El Paso, where public health officials on Sunday again issued a plea for residents to stay home for two weeks to help curb the rapidly rising number of virus infections.
In places like Milwaukee and Salt Lake City, field hospitals are being opened.
As it resurges across the United States, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls.
Though many colleges imposed stopgap measures such as hiring freezes and early retirements to save money in the spring, the persistence of the economic downturn is taking a devastating financial toll, pushing many to lay off or furlough employees, delay graduate admissions and even cut or consolidate core programs like liberal arts departments.
Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its Ph.D. programs in anthropology, sociology and art history.
“We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”
State governments from Washington to Connecticut, tightening their own belts, have told public universities to expect steep cuts in appropriations. Students and families, facing skyrocketing unemployment, have balked at the prospect of paying full fare for largely online instruction, opting instead for gap years or less expensive schools closer to home.
Costs have also soared as colleges have spent millions on testing, tracing and quarantining students, only to grapple with outbreaks. A New York Times database has confirmed more than 214,000 cases this year at college campuses, with at least 75 deaths, mostly among adults last spring, but also including some students more recently.
In a letter to Congress this week, the American Council on Education and other higher education organizations estimated that the virus would cost institutions more than $120 billion in increased student aid, lost housing fees, forgone sports revenue, public health measures, learning technology and other adjustments.
Only about a third of New York City’s public school students have attended any in-person classes since the city’s school system reopened last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday.
The low figure undermines the mayor’s justification for reopening schools here. Mr. de Blasio has said he pushed for in-person classes because a vast majority of city parents wanted him to do so.
Yet despite that campaign, about 500,000 students — representing roughly half of the nation’s largest school system — elected to start the year with online classes only last month.
And now it is clear that many more families than expected have opted out of in-person instruction, with the new data showing that only about 283,000 children have shown up.
“This is a number that needs to be understood as a work in progress,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference. “A lot more kids could be attending in person,” he added, “and we want to make sure that their families know and they know that school is safe.”
The city now faces a major test: convincing families that sending their children to in-person classes is safe. Families who decided to start the year remote-only have until Nov. 15 to opt back in to classroom learning, with those children resuming in-person classes on Nov. 30.
If children do not return in significant numbers later this fall, it would severely undercut the mayor’s push to reopening, an ambitious yet fraught effort that faced strong political headwinds from union leaders, rank-and-file educators, and some parents.
The city had initially said that parents could opt back in once a quarter, but the schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, said Monday that is no longer an option.
New York City is one of only a few large districts nationally that have welcomed children back into classrooms this fall, and there are still more students attending classes in-person than in nearly any other city in the country. The city has over 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools, making the herculean task of reopening the most closely-watched in America. Cities in particular have struggled with the question, with some tentatively reopening for younger students and others opting to remain all-remote.
Mr. de Blasio also said Monday that the seven-day average rate of positive test results citywide was 1.73 percent.
Nine days before Election Day, President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered sharply divergent visions for the country, including the coronavirus pandemic, in wide-ranging interviews on “60 Minutes.”
In both substance and demeanor, the two presidential candidates cut strikingly different figures on Sunday during one of their last big opportunities to reach a national television audience during the campaign.
Mr. Trump was combative and testy during his prerecorded interview with the “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, insisting, as he has done repeatedly in recent days despite surging coronavirus cases, that the country was “rounding the corner” on the pandemic.
“We’ve done a very, very good job,” he said at one point, falsely arguing that the increase in cases was because “we’re doing so much testing.”
Speaking at a time when family, business and government finances have been battered by the pandemic, the president also painted a rosy picture of the nation’s economy, which he said was “already roaring back.” Pressed to specify his biggest domestic priority, Mr. Trump responded that it was to “get back to normal” and “have the economy rage and be great with jobs and everybody be happy.”
But perhaps the biggest headline to emerge from his interview was his behavior. As he became increasingly irritated with the questioning, he cut off his interview with Ms. Stahl, which was taped at the White House on Tuesday, then taunted her on Twitter and posted a 38-minute clip of the interview on Facebook.
Mr. Biden, for his part, was more measured in his interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, but he was direct in his criticism of Mr. Trump. Asked what the biggest domestic issue facing the country was, he responded “Covid.”
“The way he’s handling Covid is just absolutely, totally irresponsible,” he said about Mr. Trump.
Global Roundup
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to declare victory in the next two months in a campaign to eliminate extreme poverty in the country. The Chinese economy is once again gaining strength, and the Communist Party’s achievements in reducing poverty are expected to feature prominently this week at a conclave of party leaders in Beijing.
Four decades of fast economic growth lifted most people in China out of poverty. Mr. Xi’s antipoverty drive is focused on about five million people who earn less than 92 cents a day, down from nearly 56 million five years ago.
Vowing to “leave no one behind,” Mr. Xi has traveled to hard-hit areas like Wangjiaba to reiterate his commitment.
But the pandemic has exposed the party’s shortcomings in providing its most vulnerable citizens with more than the barest of social safeguards, especially in rural areas. And some experts warn that the government’s response to the crisis — favoring infrastructure spending and tax breaks for companies instead of direct aid for families — may widen China’s gap between rich and poor.
China has for decades treated rural people as second-class citizens, limiting their access to high-quality health care, education and other benefits under the strict Mao-era household registration system by keeping them from moving to the cities.
China’s early efforts to fight the spread of the virus, including lengthy lockdowns, left rural residents stranded hundreds of miles from the factories where they work. Many were unemployed for months. Their children also fell behind, lacking the internet connections or hardware to take part in online classes.
A recent study by Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program found that incomes fell severely among rural workers during the peak of China’s outbreak in February and March.
The central government has done little to address the pressures facing rural workers during the pandemic, the Stanford study found. The government has directed much of its aid to businesses in urban areas.
In other developments around the world:
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Melbourne, Australia, will end a strict lockdown of more than three months, officials announced on Monday, after the city recorded no new coronavirus cases for the first time since June. Starting Wednesday, restaurants, cafes and bars will be able to reopen, with some social-distancing restrictions, for the first time since July 9, and all retail will be able to reopen for the first time since August. Asked whether the easing of restrictions meant residents “can finally get back on the beers,” the premier of Victoria State, Daniel Andrews, said: “I might go a little higher up the shelf.”
After officials acknowledged over the weekend that another coronavirus outbreak had struck the White House, infecting Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and four other top aides, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, essentially offering a verbal shrug on 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,” Mr. Meadows said.
President Trump made no reference to the new cases during campaign rallies in New Hampshire and Maine on Sunday. But for voters, the new wave of infections at the White House just over a week before Election Day was a visceral reminder of the president’s dismissive and erratic handling of the virus, even in one of the most secure spaces in the country. And it comes just as the United States suffers its third surge in infections, with a record number of daily new cases on Friday and a death toll that has passed 225,000.
The past week has been the worst seven-day stretch of the pandemic so far in the United States, with a daily average of 69,804 new cases reported. Alaska set a single-day record for new cases for the third day in a row, and 19 states announced more cases in the past seven days than any other seven-day stretch of the pandemic.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday that the statement by Mr. Meadows was “an acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.”
Mr. Pence tested negative for the virus on Sunday, and said he would not quarantine after his exposure to infected aides, who include Marc Short, his chief of staff, and Marty Obst, a senior adviser. His spokesman would not say whether Mr. Pence was receiving some of the drugs Mr. Trump was given, including an experimental cocktail of antibodies by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, as a preventive measure.
In a statement, the White House deemed the vice president “essential” and said he would stick to his campaign schedule. That included an address on Sunday evening to supporters in Kinston, N.C., where Mr. Pence made no reference to the cases that had infiltrated his staff and instead defended the administration’s coronavirus response as the “greatest national mobilization since World War II.”
The weather has turned distinctly autumnal in Europe, but the pandemic looks much like it did in the spring, with cases climbing at alarming rates in nearly every country.
Britain, which had the greatest surge of excess deaths during the pandemic’s first peak in Europe and still holds the most reported deaths in the region, has recorded 151,391 new cases in the past seven days, according to a New York Times database.
In Germany, where 71,567 new cases have been documented in the past week, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she foresees a bleak winter ahead, and in neighboring Austria, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz evoked the possibility of a second lockdown as cases continued to spike.
Experts in Belgium, which has recorded 83,156 cases in the past seven days, warned that the country is entering a crucial week for its hospitals.
France has added nearly a quarter of a million cases — 241,473 — in the past seven days. On Sunday alone, the country reported 52,010 new cases, and the head of the scientific council that advises the government on the pandemic said that the real number could be over 100,000 cases per day.
Jean François Delfraissy, an immunologist and expert in emerging diseases who heads the panel, said in a radio interview on Monday that the situation was “difficult, not to say critical.” France has now surpassed one million total cases. Mr. Delfraissy urged a stricter curfew that could eventually be tightened into a lockdown, or an immediate lockdown “lighter than the one in the month of March” that would allow schools and some economic activity to operate.
In Belgium, 467 people are being admitted to the hospitals each day, a rise of 85 percent compared to a week ago, with 5,000 people in the hospitals and 750 of them in intensive care units.
“Without changing the infection curve, we should have 2,000 patients in intensive care in two weeks, which is our maximum capacity,” Yves Van Laethem, the spokesperson for Belgium’s crisis center, said on Monday at a news conference.
Rules differ among the country’s three regions. Starting on Wednesday, high school students in two regions, Wallonia and Brussels, will no longer be allowed to attend in person.
As infection rates in Brussels, Belgium’s capital, which hosts the headquarters of the European Union, climb to among the highest in Europe, physical meetings will be reduced to the absolute minimum, according to a spokesperson for the German delegation, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the bloc.
Spain and Italy both extended restrictions this weekend to avoid second lockdowns, with Spain entering a new state of emergency and Italy again tightening limits on bars, restaurants and gyms.
Spain’s new declaration set few nationwide rules, and instead granted regions far greater leeway to take their own measures. In the region of Catalonia, Meritxell Budó, a member of the regional government, said on Monday that Catalans could soon be forced to stay indoors over the weekends, which would amount to a significant extension of the nighttime curfew announced on Sunday by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
In Britain, the number of virus hospitalizations has doubled in the last two weeks, though it is only about 33 percent of its spring peak, according to data released by the European Center for Disease and Control last week.
Ms. Merkel will meet with her governors at the end of the week to assess whether Germany will impose new rules. “We are facing very, very difficult months,” she said in a telephone call with party colleagues on Sunday night, according to the daily Bild. On Monday, Ms. Merkel’s party canceled a leadership conference scheduled for December. Also, the Bavarian district of Rottal-Inn is going into lockdown after registering 260 cases for 100,000 people in a week. Not only will schools, day cares, restaurants and museums close, people will not be allowed to leave their houses without a good reason. The lockdown, which follows another one in a Bavarian district last week, will initially last 10 days.
On Sunday, about 2,000 protesters gathered in Berlin to demonstrate against rules imposed by the government to keep infections at bay. Early Sunday morning, security personnel stopped vandals who were throwing Molotov cocktails at the Robert Koch Institute, the German federal authority that keeps track of infections.
The president of Fox News and several of the network’s top anchors have been advised to quarantine after being exposed to someone on a private flight who later tested positive for the coronavirus, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said on Sunday.
The infected person was on a charter flight to New York from Nashville with a group of network executives, personalities and other staff members who attended the presidential debate on Thursday, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal network matters.
Everyone on board the plane has been told to get tested and quarantine. It was unclear whether more than one person had tested positive.
Those who were exposed include Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News Media; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor; Martha MacCallum, the anchor of Fox’s 7 p.m. show, “The Story”; and Dana Perino and Juan Williams, two hosts of “The Five.”
A network representative would not confirm any details of the exposure, citing the need to keep private health information confidential.
Fox has been faster than other cable news and broadcast networks to resume in-studio programming. And it has had one of the largest in-person footprints of the news organizations that covered the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Several Fox shows are now regularly broadcast from its Midtown Manhattan headquarters, while others are done remotely, as is more common among competitors like CNN and MSNBC.
The anchors who were affected are expected to host their shows from home for the time being.
Network personnel have been serious about taking precautionary measures like wearing masks and avoiding proximity to one another, both in the studios and on the road for major events like the debates, network employees said. And Fox staff members on the ground in Nashville were regularly tested by the network and the Commission on Presidential Debates.
But on the air, Fox has not always treated the coronavirus like the serious and potentially fatal illness that it is.
In February and March, as the virus took hold in the United States, anchors and commentators like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham repeatedly echoed Mr. Trump’s claims that the mainstream news media and Democrats were exaggerating the issue to harm him politically.
On Sunday, an N.F.L. game day when the Green Bay Packers were taking it to the Texans in Houston, the scene in the Packers’ Wisconsin hometown was noticeably subdued, as the coronavirus surged in the state and people mostly avoided the bars that are usually jammed when the Packers are playing.
“You can’t even really tell that there’s a game,” lamented Jon Cooper, a 31-year-old machinist who was having a beer with friends at Cropsey’s on State, an indoor bar about a mile and a half from Lambeau Field, where the Packers play home games. No one wore masks except the bartenders, and about 30 people crowded together around the bar, leaving most of the room empty.
Still, that was busier than most other places in town, many of which had a straggler or two watching the game on big-screen televisions in otherwise empty rooms.
The Great Lakes states are in the grip of a synchronized spiraling of the pandemic. Seven states that border the lakes, including Wisconsin, are at or near their all-time-worst daily case totals. And along with 16 other states, Wisconsin has added more cases over the last seven days than in any other weeklong stretch.
More than 41,000 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus in the United States, a 40 percent rise in the past month. Daily death tolls have not risen so sharply, but they are inching upward: The country is now averaging more than 800 deaths a day for the first time since mid-September.
Wisconsin, and the Green Bay area in particular, has reported some of the country’s most alarming data in recent weeks. Brown County, which includes Green Bay, has averaged more than 230 cases a day over the last week, up from about 50 a day at the start of September and around 10 in early June.
As of Sunday morning, the Green Bay metropolitan area ranked 15th nationally in recent cases per capita; seven other Wisconsin metro areas ranked even higher.
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