Covid deaths surge across a weary U.S.
A summer that began with plunging caseloads and real hope that the worst of Covid-19 had passed is ending with soaring death counts, full hospitals and a bitter realization that the pandemic is far from over in the U.S.
The country is now reporting more than 160,000 new cases a day and about 100,000 Covid patients hospitalized nationwide, even as vaccination rates tick upward and caseloads start to fall in some hard-hit Southern states. The resurgence has left the country exhausted and less certain than ever about when normalcy might return.
More than 1,500 Americans are dying most days, fewer than during the winter peak but worse than last summer. With millions of schoolchildren returning to classrooms — some for the first time since March 2020 — public health experts say that more coronavirus clusters in schools are inevitable.
Highs and lows: “Things got so good in May and most of June that all of us, including me, were talking about the end game,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We started to enjoy life again. Within a very few weeks, it all came crashing down.”
Vaccine update: Health officials say that most of the patients who are being hospitalized and are dying are not vaccinated, placing stress on the health care system. Some 47 percent of Americans are not fully vaccinated.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:
A failed plan to reconcile France and Russia
The repatriation of the skeleton of Gen. Charles Étienne Gudin, a Napoleonic general who died in Russia in 1812, was supposed to bring together the leaders of two nations long at odds. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, would host his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for a funeral that would serve as a symbolic burying of the hatchet.
What happened instead was a small ceremony in a grim hangar at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, next to a decommissioned Concorde jet. The presidents were nowhere in sight.
Once seen as an opportunity to leverage history for diplomatic purposes, the plan was sunk by France’s discomfort with Russia’s increasingly tough domestic and foreign policies — as well as the particularities of their complicated relationship, shaped by a history filled with shadowy intermediaries and backdoor diplomacy.
Quotable: Albéric d’Orléans, a descendant of the general, said the return of his remains had been overly politicized. “My feeling is that we missed a unique opportunity to improve relations between France and Russia,” he said.
‘Everyone is on the list’
A quest by Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, to secure a fourth term has plunged the Central American nation into a state of pervasive fear. Ortega is now running on a ballot devoid of any credible challenger, and is turning Nicaragua into a police state.
Since June, the police have jailed or put under house arrest seven candidates for November’s presidential election and dozens of political activists and civil society leaders.
Government critics say the arrests have turned Nicaragua into a more repressive state than it was during the early years of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, who was overthrown in 1979 by the Sandinista Revolutionary Movement led by Ortega.
Details: Targets of the crackdown have included a millionaire banker and a Marxist guerrilla, a decorated general and a little-known provincial activist, student leaders and septuagenarian intellectuals.
First person: “Everyone is on the list,” said one Nicaraguan businessman, whose family home was raided by the police and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “You’re just trying to figure out how high or low your name is on it, based on the latest arrest.”
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ARTS AND IDEAS
Where pandemics are remembered
The German Hygiene Museum in Dresden promotes itself as “the museum of the human being and of the human body,” said Klaus Vogel, its director. But as the coronavirus has given disease prevention a new and lethal urgency, the museum is grappling with how to address the very thing it’s named after, reports Annalisa Quinn.
In times of health crisis, similar debates have recurred throughout the history of medicine, often turning on questions of privacy, individual freedom and the best way to communicate health information to a skeptical public.
The museum has more than 10,000 posters relating to the prevention of H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as others encouraging people to get inoculated against smallpox, the first disease for which there was an effective vaccine. “Right from the beginning, we had a problem persuading people to be vaccinated,” said Carola Rupprecht, the head of the museum’s education department.
Smallpox vaccination was eventually made mandatory in many places, including in parts of the U.S. and what is now Germany — which was controversial at the time, much as proposed vaccine mandates are today.
The arguments are still the same, Rupprecht said. “The main question is: What is to be regarded as more important? The assumed protection of the whole society by vaccination, or the freedom of each individual to decide for himself?”
Read more about the museum here.
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