Live updates: Daily number of new coronavirus cases in U.S. tops 50,000 for first time

When pathologist Amy Rapkiewicz began the grim process of opening up the coronavirus dead to learn how their bodies went awry, she found damage to the lungs, kidneys and liver consistent with what doctors had reported for months.

But something was off.

Rapkiewicz, who directs autopsies at NYU Langone Health, noticed that some organs had far too many of a special cell rarely found in those places. She had never seen that before, yet it seemed vaguely familiar. She raced to her history books and — in a eureka moment — found a reference to 1960s report on a patient with dengue fever.

Autopsies have long been a source of breakthroughs in understanding new diseases, from HIV/AIDS and Ebola to Lassa fever — and the medical community is counting on them to do the same for covid-19.

Aseel Bader set off for Prato, Italy, in January, traveling under a passport bearing the eagle emblem of the Palestinian Authority to pursue a master’s degree. Then the novel coronavirus hit — and rendered the document nearly useless.

Bader, 27, reached out to Palestinian envoys in Italy. “They kept telling me they have no solution for me,” she said.

The semiautonomous Palestinian government in the Israeli-occupied West Bank does not control any airport or border. It must coordinate travel with Israel, usually via neighboring Egypt or Jordan, which closed crossings and restricted borders in March and prioritized seats on flights for their own citizens.

Coronavirus-related travel restrictions have stranded people around the world. Many residents of African countries have struggled to get home, with flights to their countries still cut off. But as a Palestinian traveling on documents issued by an entity that’s not officially a state, Bader’s predicament, and that of others in similar situations, sits at a particular nexus of international politics and the pandemic.

Authorities in Rockland County, N.Y. are issuing subpoenas in a desperate attempt to find people who may have been exposed to covid-19 at a large house party linked to a cluster of infections.

The party’s host was already experiencing coronavirus symptoms when the event took place in mid-June, officials said at a Wednesday news conference. Since then, eight other attendees, most of them in their early 20s, have tested positive.

But those partygoers — some of whom went on to attend other parties in Rockland County, officials believe — have reportedly refused to tell contact tracers who else was at the gathering.

“My staff has been told that a person does not wish to — or have to — speak to my disease investigators,” said Rockland County health commissioner Patricia Schnabel Ruppert. “They hang up. They deny being at the party, even though we have found their names from another party attending or a parent provides us with the information. They do not answer their cellphones and do not call back.”

Officials believe that as many as 100 people may have attended the first party, and are threatening to hand out $2,000 fines to anyone who doesn’t help the health department identify them.

“I don’t care who you are, who you know, how much money you make, where you live,” Rockland County Executive Ed Day said Wednesday. “I will not allow the health of our county to be compromised because of ignorance, stupidity or obstinance, or anything else.”

It’s not the first time that Rockland County has issued subpoenas to help trace a viral outbreak. Authorities turned to similar tactics last year when a measles epidemic spread through the Upstate New York community and some residents refused to comply with the health department’s investigation.

Federal Reserve officials raised concerns about additional waves of coronavirus infections disrupting an economic recovery and triggering a new spike in unemployment and a worse economic downturn, according to minutes released Wednesday by the central bank about its June 9-10 meeting.

Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell has repeatedly said that the path out of this recession, which began in February, will depend on containing the virus and giving Americans the confidence to resume normal working and spending habits. But the notes from the two-day meeting reveal how interconnected Fed officials view a prolonged economic recession and the pandemic’s continued spread — and why Powell often asserts that lawmakers will need to do more to carry millions of Americans out of this crisis.

McDonald’s is putting plans to reopen its dining rooms on pause as coronavirus cases surge across the country.

In a Wednesday memo first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the company said that it would wait three weeks before bringing back dine-in service at any more of the chain’s 40,000 U.S. restaurants. The roughly 2,200 locations that have already reopened their dining rooms won’t have to close down again unless local regulations compel them to do so.

The move comes as states including California are reimposing coronavirus-related restrictions and banning indoor dining for the second time this year in some areas. In some parts of the country, such as New York City and New Jersey, dining rooms were supposed to reopen with limited seating at the start of July, but those plans have now been shelved.

Other corporate giants are beginning to roll back their reopening plans, too. On Wednesday, Apple announced plans to close down 30 more of its stores, bringing the total number that have reopened and shut down for then a second time to 77.

With coronavirus infections surging in the South and West of the United States, American travelers are likely to remain a rare sight around the world for months to come, at minimum, even as European flights and cross-border tourism resume quicker than anticipated.

While the European Union has seen a major decline in novel coronavirus infections and reopened many of its internal and some external borders, U.S. travelers remain banned in many places, or face quarantine on arrival.

The E.U. on Tuesday recommended that its member states resume admittance for people traveling from at least 14 countries outside the bloc. Canada and Thailand were among the nations included, but not the United States, Russia and Brazil, where infection levels are spiking or remain high.

Bradley Beal has not yet made a decision about joining the Washington Wizards when the NBA season resumes near Orlando at the end of the month.

Washington’s all-star guard cited concerns over potential injuries as the primary reason for his hesitation.

“I’m still working my tail off every single day as if I am playing. Definitely, it’s more or less going to be a decision that comes down to the medical staff and I, just because of our precautions and coming back from being 0 to 100, then I have some nagging stuff at the end of the year we’re trying to clean up,” Beal said in a virtual news conference Wednesday. “We’re looking at it from all angles, but I’m definitely working out every single day here, and it’s good to be back in our facility. But I’m not swayed one way or another.”

New Zealand’s health minister resigned Thursday, saying that his gaffes had become a distraction from the country’s successful coronavirus response.

David Clark, who was demoted in April after breaching quarantine to take a family beach trip, also faced criticism for going on a mountain biking excursion during New Zealand’s strict lockdown. Last week, calls for his resignation intensified after a news conference during which he appeared to blame recent blunders on the widely beloved director-general for health, Ashley Bloomfield.

Although New Zealand has been more successful in stamping out the coronavirus than any other nation, officials revealed last month that two women who were allowed to leave isolation early had potentially exposed hundreds of people to the coronavirus. In a video that went viral last week, Clark said that Bloomfield had “accepted responsibility” for lapses in border security protocols, giving many New Zealanders the impression that he had thrown the popular health official under the bus.

Clark previously offered to resign in April, when word got out about his unauthorized trip to the beach, the New Zealand Herald reported. At the time, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that she would not accept his resignation because the shake-up in leadership would cause too much disruption while the government tried to cope with the ongoing crisis.

On Thursday, with the outbreak under control, Ardern said that Clark felt his presence had become an “unhelpful distraction” and she agreed.

“It’s essential our health leadership has the confidence of the New Zealand public,” she said.

Oklahomans voted Tuesday to alter their state constitution to expand Medicaid over nearly a decade of opposition by Republican governors, making their state the first to widen the safety-net insurance program as the coronavirus pandemic steals jobs and health benefits.

The expansion’s approval, by a slender margin, means that an estimated 250,000 additional Oklahoma residents will be eligible for the public insurance, including nearly 50,000 who have lost coverage as unemployment has soared this year.

The decision in a Republican-leaning state is rich in political significance. Oklahoma becomes the fifth state in which voters have passed ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid by employing a tool to circumvent the will of GOP governors and legislatures. Another Medicaid-expansion vote is pending in Missouri early next month.

It was just hours before President Trump was set to take the stage for his rally in Tulsa last month when the news broke: Six staff at the site had just tested positive for the coronavirus.

The president, who was en route from Washington, was livid that the news was public, according to people familiar with his reaction. In the tent outside the BOK Center, where campaign staff were being tested before the event, the release of the information caused a scramble.

Health-care workers were quizzed about whether they had leaked the information about the positive cases to the news media — and then were given a different list of people to test, according to two people with direct knowledge of the events who, like others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

The flurry inside the tent was part of a cascade of events triggered by Trump’s insistence on holding the June 20 rally inside the Tulsa arena, despite the adamant warnings of health officials about the rising risks of the novel coronavirus in Oklahoma.

Coronavirus infections in the United States surged nearly 50 percent in June as states relaxed quarantine rules and tried to reopen their economies, data compiled Wednesday showed, and several states moved to reimpose restrictions on bars and recreation.

More than 800,000 new cases were reported across the country last month, led by Florida, Arizona, Texas and California — bringing the nation’s officially reported total to just over 2.6 million, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

More than 52,000 new cases were reported in the United States on Wednesday, the highest total since the start of the pandemic, according to data collected by The Post. Record-shattering numbers of new cases were reported Wednesday in six states — California, Georgia, Texas, Alaska, North Carolina and Arizona.