Live updates: Trump cheers judge’s ruling overturning Pennsylvania coronavirus restrictions

As many college students returned to school during the past month, they were greeted by a new kind of campus police. Already equipped with military equipment and, in many cases, statewide jurisdiction, campus police have acquired new powers in the name of containing covid-19.

Departments are carrying out “policy enforcement for social distancing, face coverings” and “court-ordered or administratively ordered quarantine.” Many campus police are increasing their patrols both on and off-campus and partnering with municipal police to shut down student gatherings.

While it is critical to slow the spread of the virus, it is dangerous to attempt to do so by increasing police powers over campus life. In fact, the history of campus police surveillance shows once these departments receive new powers and equipment, they are loath to give them up. Communities of color on- and off-campus, and Black local residents and students especially, are most likely to experience the consequences.

Several large public universities in the Midwest have canceled spring break for 2021, citing fears that students who leave campus for a week or more to travel could spread the coronavirus.

At Ohio State University, students will get a brief respite from coursework in the form of two single-day “instructional breaks” that take place midweek, theoretically reducing the likelihood that students choose to leave campus. But at the University of Wisconsin, which will eliminate spring break but give students time off for Passover and Easter, some faculty members are skeptical.

One professor predicted that undergraduates will simply trade Madison’s frigid climate for Florida if classes move online, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, student groups have expressed concerns that the lack of a break will exacerbate the stress that many students are under.

The university’s provost, John Karl Scholz, acknowledged that a 15-week semester with no break would be a “slog” but said that the plan was necessary “given the vagaries of the pandemic,” according to the AP.

The Midwest has witnessed a surge of coronavirus cases in recent weeks as infections elsewhere have declined, with many outbreaks occurring in college towns. Over the past week, Wisconsin has seen a particularly troubling uptick, with more than 1,000 new cases reported for several days in a row and a 41 percent increase in the rolling average. Infections are also on the rise in Missouri, North Dakota and Nebraska.

Thousands of people in Mecklenburg County, N.C. received text messages on Friday telling them that they had tested positive for covid-19 — a false alarm that officials are now blaming on a “technical glitch.”

Roughly 6,700 people received the erroneous text messages, the Charlotte Observer reported, while more than 500 were sent a similar message by email. It’s unclear how many of them — if any — had actually tested positive for covid-19 in recent days. According to internal emails obtained by the paper, the notifications were sent out by HealthSpace Data System, the contact tracing software that the county uses to investigate outbreaks. Those receiving the alerts had profiles in the system, which could indicate that they previously tested positive, or had potentially been exposed to the virus.

Mecklenburg County, which includes the city of Charlotte, does not notify people about their test results by text message. Officials initially claimed that the notifications were a scam. Hours later, however, the county backtracked and said that the messages were erroneously sent out “due to a technical glitch in the software system that has been addressed by the software provider.”

“We apologize for any alarm this caused citizens who were not supposed to be sent an alert or survey,” HealthSpace CEO Silas Garrison told the Observer.

For some North Carolinians, the early-morning text messages led to a brief moment of panic. “When I saw it, my first thought was uh-oh,” Andrew Byrd, who was hospitalized for covid-19 for several weeks in April, told WBTV. Even after learning that it was an error, his confidence remained in the system remained shaken.

“I thought to myself if I’m getting this text, does that mean I’m now counted in the daily positive numbers of tests? Not just the test but the positive results? It gives me a lot of concern,” he said.

Apart from a requirement that spectators wear masks at games amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the NFL this season is leaving the question of fan attendance up to its teams, who in turn must coordinate with local officials. Most teams will open the season without fans present, though a few will open their stadiums to a limited number of spectators.

Here’s a rundown of where things stand for each NFL team.

The coronavirus caseload at two of the Washington region’s largest universities has jumped in recent days, while a small number of students at Maryland’s flagship university returned to the classroom Monday.

Georgetown University reported about a dozen cases last week, according to the school’s virus dashboard. Just outside Washington, at the University of Maryland in College Park, officials were forging ahead with some in-person instruction — one of the few universities in the region to offer teaching on campus.

In another sign of a slow return to normalcy, the Smithsonian Institution announced Monday that the American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Renwick Gallery will open Friday amid the gradual reopening of the world’s largest museum complex.

The unlikely portrait of Medicaid in the time of coronavirus looks like Jonathan Chapin, living with his wife and 11-year-old daughter in a gated community in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Chapin had a thriving Reno, Nev., production company, We Ain’t Saints, booking bands, managing weddings, hosting 600-strong karaoke nights at the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge & Casino. When the novel coronavirus came, forcing northern Nevada’s entertainment industry to go dark, he said, “everything I knew all disappeared.”

The family’s health insurance gone along with their income, Chapin applied online for Medicaid on April 1, the day after his wife’s job ended and three days before he needed a molar pulled. By the time his mouth was throbbing, Chapin and his family had become early additions to Nevada’s Medicaid rolls — rolls swollen now to record levels while pandemic-inflicted fiscal wounds have damaged the state’s ability to afford the safety-net health coverage.

President Trump’s first indoor rally in months was staged as a rebuke to Democrats he accuses of using coronavirus restrictions against him, but the campaign event in Nevada also prompted sharp denunciations from critics on Monday as a symbol of the president’s failure to effectively confront the deadly covid-19 crisis.

The Sunday night gathering came as the pandemic has caused at least 190,000 deaths in the United States, with the number expected to pass 200,000 sometime before Trump holds his next official campaign events on Friday. The Nov. 3 election had already become a referendum on the president’s often dismissive approach to the pandemic before revelations last week that he had told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward he knew the severity of the virus but preferred to play it down in public.

“We are already making the turn. We’re making that round, beautiful, last turn” to a post-pandemic economic recovery, Trump said during the rally in Henderson, Nev., although the nation has recovered only about half of the jobs lost since spring and 13.6 million workers remain unemployed.