Live updates: Coronavirus cases in U.S. top 5 million

No one in the French city of Bayonne can recall a time in the past 500 years when the annual ham festival didn’t take place. But 2020 stands to be the first, thanks to a recent resurgence of coronavirus cases across the country.

Bayonne ham, or jambon de Bayonne, is renowned for the distinct flavor that comes from preserving meat in a specific kind of mineral-heavy salt found only in the base of the Pyrenees mountains. Since at least 1462, that tradition has been celebrated at the four-day-long Bayonne Ham Fair, where members of the Bayonne Ham Brotherhood in ceremonial capes and medals decide which farmers have produced the very best hams.

Jean-René Etchegaray, the mayor of Bayonne, told France Bleu on Saturday that he can’t remember a time that the Ham Fair “hasn’t always existed.” The event typically takes place on Easter weekend, but this year was postponed until October due to a nationwide ban on large gatherings. But when the mayor sat down to discuss the situation with ham industry professionals on Friday, everyone agreed that holding the 558th edition of the festival this fall wasn’t a good idea either.

Multiple European countries that reopened after getting their coronavirus outbreaks under control are now seeing an uptick in cases, and Etchegaray told France Bleu that it was “too risky” to hold a crowded event that drew 200,000 people last year, and takes place under tents where “everyone is on top of each other.” Even though the region’s infection rates remain low, “it wasn’t hard to imagine creating cluster situations,” he said.

“I didn’t want that kind of responsibility,” he said. “Neither did the ham professionals.”

I never would have chosen to move now, in the middle of a pandemic. But late this summer, as a result of events set in motion in January, I packed up the Northern California home I’d lived in for 16 years and moved about a half-hour’s drive away.

I can’t say how many times I washed my hands while five mostly masked men huffed and puffed past me carrying out my sofa, bed, table, chairs, nightstands, dressers, and boxes upon boxes of books, dishes, pots and pans.

Every time I touched a doorknob or a surface that one of the movers might have breathed or coughed on, I lathered up for two rounds of Happy Birthday. Three hours into the nine-hour move, the skin on my hands stung, and I felt newfound sympathy for germaphobe Howard Hughes, or at least Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of him in “The Aviator,” scrubbing his hands until they bled.

It’s going to be screen time all the time for kindergartners and graduate students alike. Teachers are threatening strikes. And students are already coming home with covid-19, the disease that has upended American education.

The 2020-2021 school year has dawned and it’s more chaotic than any before.

Plans are changing so fast that students and parents can hardly keep up. Districts that spent all summer planning hybrid systems, in which children would be in school part of the week, ditched them as coronavirus cases surged. Universities changed their teaching models, their start dates and their rules for housing, all with scant notice.

Thousands of bikers attending the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota this week will be barred from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, whose members have feuded with the state’s governor over their right to restrict access to tribal lands during the pandemic.

Roughly 250,000 people are expected to attend the annual event in Sturgis, S.D., which began this weekend over the objection of residents who fear it could lead to a massive outbreak. Remi Bald Eagle, a spokesman for the Cheyenne River Sioux, told the Rapid City Journal that the tribe plans to prevent tourists from exploring the reservation by setting up checkpoints and limiting access to emergency vehicles, commercial trucks and residents only. The Oglala Sioux Tribe have also put up checkpoints, but will allow bikers to pass through the reservation if they pass a coronavirus screening questionnaire, according to the paper.

Typically, the Cheyenne River Sioux restricts access for cars coming from out of state, but allows people from other parts of South Dakota to enter as long as they’re not coming from a hotspot. Those regulations have changed over time, but the checkpoints have been in place since April, when the Cheyenne River Sioux and Oglala Sioux Tribe warned that an unrestricted influx of visitors could be devastating to communities that already have a high rate of preexisting health conditions, and very little in the way of health care infrastructure.

Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) has repeatedly sought to have the roadblocks removed, and litigation over the issue is currently pending in federal court.

“We’d rather not have 250,000 outsiders, out-of-staters, coming in just for the purpose of engaging in, cutting loose with a little drunken debauchery, or whatever cultural aspect the motorcycle rally represents,” Chase Iron Eyes, a spokesman for Oglala Sioux President Julian Bear Runner, told KNBN.

When researcher Monica Gandhi began digging deeper into outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, she was struck by the extraordinarily high number of infected people who had no symptoms.

A Boston homeless shelter had 147 infected residents, but 88 percent had no symptoms even though they shared their living space. A Tyson Foods poultry plant in Springdale, Ark., had 481 infections, and 95 percent were asymptomatic. Prisons in Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia counted 3,277 infected people, but 96 percent were asymptomatic.

During its seven-month global rampage, the coronavirus has claimed more than 700,000 lives. But Gandhi began to think the bigger mystery might be why it has left so many more practically unscathed.

The number of reported coronavirus cases in the United States surpassed 5 million on Sunday, double the number since the end of June, as the Midwest grappled with new spikes and states across the South and the West fought to contain surges.

The 5 million mark comes just 17 days after the U.S. total exceeded 4 million, according to The Washington Post’s tracking. The previous million cases were also reported in about a two-week span.

Reported U.S. cases have doubled since late June, peaking on July 17 with a staggering 76,491 cases in a single day. The United States leads the world with a quarter of all global infections. Brazil and India follow, with 3 million and 2.1 million reported infections, respectively.

More than 97,000 U.S. children tested positive for the coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, more than a quarter of the total number of children diagnosed nationwide since March, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

The jump in pediatric cases comes as children are entering close quarters for the first time in months as some schools open their doors to students again. For months, teachers, parents and politicians have argued over whether the risks that the novel coronavirus pose to children outweigh the benefits of in-person learning.

President Trump’s new executive actions to disburse coronavirus relief without congressional approval sparked confusion and frustration on Sunday among businesses, Democrats and state officials, some of whom lamented the moves would not deliver the necessary relief to cash-strapped Americans.

Trump’s directives were aimed at offering new unemployment benefits, protecting renters from eviction and postponing the payment of a federal tax. But some economists and experts faulted these policies as incomplete or legally questionable — raising the prospect that the president’s attempt to boost the economy may have only a muted impact.

SAINT-TROPEZ, France — The party was on in this hedonistic playground this summer — until it wasn’t.

Last week, two of the French Riviera resort’s hot spots — Indie Beach House on Ramatuelle’s Pampelonne Beach, and Pablo, a trendy bistro on Saint-Tropez’s Place des Lices, both owned by the same company — where shut down when four staff members reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus. Since then, authorities have reported that 20 of Pablo’s 30 employees and one of Indie Beach’s have been infected with the virus that causes the disease covid-19.