Trump defenders face pointed questioning on Sunday shows.
White House and Republican officials struggled to respond to sharp questioning by Sunday morning news show hosts about why President Trump knowingly played down the coronavirus in the crucial early months of the pandemic, as revealed by the journalist Bob Woodward in his new book, “Rage.”
The White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, claimed on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “nobody knew” how dangerous the virus was at the time the president spoke to the journalist Bob Woodward in February and March.
Jake Tapper, the show’s host, aggressively pushed back during the interview.
“He knew it was deadlier than the flu and he was lying to the American public two weeks later,” Mr. Tapper said, referring to remarks Mr. Trump gave on Feb. 26. “Why wasn’t the president straightforward with the American people?”
Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, provided a different defense of the president, saying that Mr. Trump had understood the serious threat the coronavirus posed by early February, but was “calm and steady and methodical” because he did not want to cause a panic.
“Think of what would have happened if he’d have gone out and said, ‘This is awful. We should all be afraid. We don’t have a plan,’” Ms. McDaniel said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It would have been a run on the banks. It would have been a run on the hospitals. It would have been a run on the grocery stores.”
The host, Chuck Todd, characterized the president’s defenders as saying, “You don’t yell fire if you’re in a crowded movie theater.”
“It’s true,” he said. “But you do if the theater is actually on fire.”
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Mr. Trump, suggested on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the president may have chosen to underplay the seriousness of the virus in part because he was getting bad information early on from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies. Dr. Gottlieb pointed out that the C.D.C. botched its initial diagnostic test for the virus, keeping state laboratories from being able to test for the virus for weeks in February.
The difficulties the C.D.C. had in monitoring for the virus’s spread early on have been well documented. The agency’s plan to conduct a national surveillance effort — by testing samples from people with flulike symptoms — to determine whether the virus was spreading undetected also failed to get off the ground that month.
“I think in this respect, the White House leadership was failed by health officials,” Dr. Gottlieb told the host, Margaret Brennan. “We did not have a diagnostic in the field, so we couldn’t screen for it.”
“I had a lot of conversations with the White House over this time period because I was concerned it was spreading,” Dr. Gottlieb added, “and they were telling me over and over they were hearing from top officials from the agencies that they were pretty confident it wasn’t spreading here.”
The first cases of Covid-19 in the United States that were not related to travel were confirmed on Feb. 26 and Feb. 28, suggesting that community transmission was occurring by late February. Dr. Robert Redfield, the C.D.C.’s director, has disputed that the agency failed to detect when the coronavirus started to spread in the United States.
Among outbreaks at campuses across the U.S., a college president in Georgia died of Covid-19.
The president of North Georgia Technical College, a public two-year college in Clarkesville, Ga., with about 2,700 students, has died “after losing his battle with Covid-19,” the school announced on Sunday.
Mark Ivester, who was 58 and had served as the college’s president since 2016, had been hospitalized since Aug. 16, according to The Northeast Georgian, a local newspaper. The paper also reported that Amy Hulsey, the college’s vice president of community relations, said last week during a prayer vigil for Dr. Ivester that he was on continuous dialysis at North Georgia Medical Center in Braselton.
“With incredibly heavy hearts, we are so sad to say that Dr. Mark Ivester passed away last night around midnight after losing his battle to Covid-19,” the college said in a statement posted on Facebook on Sunday. “Once again, please continue to pray for Eleanor” — his wife — “and his entire family. Thank you for all the love and support you have shown them and one another during this time. We are all devastated and will miss him terribly.”
A New York Times survey found that in just the past week, American colleges and universities have recorded more than 36,000 additional coronavirus cases, not all of them new, bringing the total of campus infections to 88,000 since the pandemic began. Only about 60 of the campus cases have resulted in death, mostly in the spring and among college employees, not students.
It was not immediately clear where or how Dr. Iverson contracted the virus. The website of North Georgia Technical College says is it “providing a safe, clean and protective environment for everyone on campus,” including plexiglass shields in areas where students and staff members frequently interact face to face and a requirement that students wear masks in classrooms and common areas.
As coronavirus cases fall in most parts of the country, they are on the rise in the Midwest, prompting alarm in places that had until now avoided the worst of the pandemic.
“Our community is experiencing its first sustained, significant surge of illness since this terrible pandemic began,” said Joe Parisi, the county executive in Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison. “We will have some incredibly difficult and sad weeks ahead if we don’t rally together now and stop this deeply disturbing trend.”
Through Friday, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri and Iowa had added more recent cases per capita than all other states.
Case numbers are not the only sign of trouble. Testing positivity rates, which measure the percent of positive findings among all people tested, are high across much of the Great Plains, a sign of uncontrolled spread and insufficient monitoring.
The rise of infection in the Midwest is different from what Brooklyn experienced in March or South Texas in July. So far, hospitalizations have not spiked. Morgues have not been overrun. Lockdowns have not been ordered.
Young adults, who often have milder cases of the virus, are helping to drive the current surge. Thousands of infections have been linked to Midwestern universities, some of which have struggled to enforce social distancing rules.
“We knew this was coming,” said Mayor Brandon Bochenski of Grand Forks, N.D., where more than 600 infections — or roughly one of every 24 cases in the state — have been linked to the University of North Dakota. “If we could control college students,” Mr. Bochenski added, “we would have figured that out about 200 years ago. We did the best we could.”
Many cases across several states have also been linked to a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., which attracted thousands of people from around the country. Hundreds of people were infected at a jail in Wichita, Kan. And in parts of rural Iowa and North Dakota, case numbers have risen with no obvious link to a college.
Inconsistencies and problems with data collection in Texas have clouded the picture of the pandemic’s trajectory in that state, the latest of many examples of how states’ reporting of data in real-time has complicated efforts to understand the virus.
Texas has overlooked thousands of coronavirus cases, only to report them weeks after infection. It has made major adjustments to its case and death counts, defining them one way and then another, sometimes suddenly reporting figures for some counties that were vastly different from those posted by the local health department.
Other states have also grappled with data challenges, including glitches and backlogs in California and a debate over transparency in Florida. But Texas has been troubled by multiple issues.
Public health officials and researchers place the blame for the state’s data problems on Texas’ antiquated data systems and a reliance on faxed test results, which limit the state’s ability to track every infection and death in many of its 254 counties. They also say that the vast state’s decentralized structure — with many local governments, some of them tiny, running their own public health operations — is ill-suited to coping with the crush of Covid-19.
“It’s a colossal undertaking, and because it’s happening in real time, there will inevitably be situations where we have to update or correct something,” said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
“Texas has these 57 strong, independent organizations that will do what they do,” he said, referring to the state’s local health departments. “That’s just the situation we’re in.”
As students return to colleges worldwide, eager to socialize after months under coronavirus restrictions, they are paying a price for a previously common aspect of student life: parties.
In Britain, the police in recent days issued a fine of 10,000 pounds (about $12,800) to a university student who had organized a party of more than 50 people at his off-campus housing. The fine — the maximum penalty possible for breaching the country’s 30-person limit on gatherings — came as England and Wales prepared to sharply reduce the size of permitted gatherings to just six people, starting Monday.
In the United States, six Miami University students in a house near the campus in Oxford, Ohio, received citations with fines of $500 each over Labor Day weekend when they were found hosting a party at which many students present had tested positive for the virus.
Penalties for attending unlawful gatherings have been frequent, with 11 Northeastern University students dismissed for violating public health rules and hundreds of students at Ohio State University suspended, in addition to suspensions at Purdue University, Syracuse University and New York University.
Some institutions acknowledged that there would be little point in trying to clamp down on parties altogether. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a comprehensive plan to keep the virus under control factored into its model that the school’s more than 7,000 students would attend parties three times a week. What it did not calculate was that some would attend gatherings after testing positive.
Yet many are taking the virus restrictions seriously. Oxford University and other colleges have experimented with asking students to sign “responsibility agreements,” and Yale University set up hotlines for reports of risky activity.
Though many students have said the idea of blowing the whistle on their classmates makes them uncomfortable, more than 4,000 people signed a petition started by students to revoke the admission of a first-year student at Cornell University after she posted a video from a party mocking safety precautions.
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
Israeli minister resigns over plans for nationwide lockdown during holidays.
An ultra-Orthodox member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet resigned from Israel’s government on Sunday over a nationwide lockdown to come into effect on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year holiday.
The lawmaker, Yaakov Litzman, was furious that the two-week lockdown would coincide with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the annual day of fasting and atonement, and that prayers would be allowed in synagogues only in limited numbers.
That would “significantly reduce the number of people coming to synagogues,” Mr. Litzman, who was minister of housing and construction, wrote in a letter to Mr. Netanyahu, adding that it would particularly affect “tens of thousands of Jews from a variety of different communities for some of whom this is the only time of year they attend prayers in synagogues.”
Israel moved to consider a second nationwide lockdown as its per capita coronavirus infection rate rose to among the highest in the world. More than 1,100 people in the country have died from the virus.
Prof. Ronni Gamzu, the country’s virus czar, has argued that a lockdown over the Jewish holidays would do less economic damage and would prevent large family gatherings where the virus could spread.
But Mr. Litzman said the government had delayed acting earlier for fear of spoiling Israelis’ summer vacation plans.
Mr. Netanyahu said Professor Gamzu and other health professionals had raised “a red flag regarding the ability of the health system to cope with the challenges we are facing, and the need to take the required steps are a result of that.”
Other developments around the world:
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Ireland is backing a proposal that all E.U. countries adopt shared rules on international travel restrictions. If the measures are approved, Ireland’s quarantine requirements will be replaced with a focus on testing and a system rating countries from low to high risk. The initiative would require some travelers to be tested for the virus before entering Ireland, Prime Minister Micheal Martin told the state broadcaster, RTE, on Sunday.
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India reported 94,372 new cases on Sunday, the fourth consecutive day that new cases exceeded 90,000 in the country, according to a Times database. India has the world’s second-highest number of cases after the United States.
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Officians in South Korea said on Sunday that social distancing measures would be eased in metropolitan Seoul for the next two weeks, even though daily new cases remain in the triple digits. The easing includes lifting a ban on on-site dining after 9 p.m. and reopening gyms and internet cafes. Stronger measures are to return on Sept. 28, ahead of the Chuseok fall harvest holiday, during which many people travel.
Politics stall U.S. efforts to provide international pandemic aid, adding to evidence of White House interference.
The coronavirus was spreading around the world, and officials at the United States Agency for International Development were anxious to rush humanitarian aid to nations in need. But first they had to settle a debate over branding on the packages.
Political appointees from the White House and the State Department wanted the aid agency’s logo affixed to all of the packages to show the world how much the United States was sending abroad, even as it grappled with its own outbreak.
Career employees at U.S.A.I.D. argued that the logo and other American symbols could endanger people who delivered or received the aid in countries that are hostile to the United States and where branding exceptions are usually granted.
At the end of the debate this spring, relief workers were allowed to distribute aid without the branding in a handful of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But the discussion delayed assistance for several weeks to some of the world’s most vulnerable communities and served as a cautionary example of political intervention roiling an agency that prides itself as leading the humanitarian response to global disasters, conflict and other emergencies.
“As far back as I go, working on these programs, U.S.A.I.D. has really been an extraordinary, respected leader in global health and humanitarian responses,” said Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. “To distort that mission is an insult, and it’s really outrageous to me.”
As President Trump campaigns for re-election and the virus has claimed more than 193,000 lives in the United States, evidence has been building of his administration’s interference across many agencies dealing with the pandemic.
For instance, political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to revise, delay and even scuttle reports on the coronavirus that they believed were unflattering to Mr. Trump.
And the president personally pressured the director of the National Institutes of Health to speed up the review of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19. And even though that agency’s vetting was not complete, Mr. Trump announced on the eve of the Republican National Convention that the F.D.A. had approved plasma therapy for wider use and vastly overstated what the data had shown about the benefits.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the practice of checking for fever in public spaces has become increasingly common, causing a surge in sales of infrared contact-free thermometers and body temperature scanners — even as scientific evidence indicating that they are of little value has solidified.
Gatekeepers with thermometer guns have appeared at the entrances of U.S. hospitals, office buildings and manufacturing plants to screen out people with fevers who may carry the virus. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last week called for checking patrons’ temperatures as one of several ground rules for resuming indoor dining in restaurants.
But while health officials have endorsed masks and social distancing as effective measures for curbing the spread of the virus, some experts scoff at fever checks. They say that taking temperatures at entry points is a gesture that is unlikely to screen out many infected people and offers little more than an illusion of safety.
The C.D.C. defines a fever as a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. But some reports have questioned the accuracy of thermometer guns, and while temperature checks may identify people who are seriously ill, those people are unlikely to be socializing much or going out for meals. A growing body of evidence also suggests that many of those who are driving transmission are silent carriers — people who have been infected but feel fine and don’t have a fever or other symptoms.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which in May told employers to consider checking workers daily for symptoms like fever, but appeared to reverse itself in July — said it would stop requiring airport health screenings beginning Sept. 14 for international passengers from countries like Brazil, China and Iran because the checks do not identify silent carriers.
Temperature checks are akin to “getting the oil checked before you go on a long car trip,” said Dr. David Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It makes you feel better, but it’s not going to keep you from wrecking the car or prevent the tires from falling off.”
“It’s something you can do, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something,” he said. “But it won’t catch most people who are spreading Covid.”
As the worst wildfire season in decades scorches the western United States, families and educators who were already starting the strangest and most challenging school year of their lifetimes have been traumatized all over again. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, with some mourning the loss of their entire communities.
Now, the remote learning preparations that schools made for the pandemic are providing a modicum of stability for teachers and students, letting many stay connected and take comfort in an unexpected form of virtual community.
“The pandemic has actually helped,” said Patsy Oxford, the principal of Berry Creek Elementary, the only school in Berry Creek, a Northern California town of about 1,200 people hit by what one official described as a “massive wall of fire.” It killed nine residents, including a 16-year-old boy, and destroyed the school and almost every home and business.
The fires prompted some West Coast schools to delay or cancel classes, and educators across parts of California, Washington and Oregon have spent recent days tracking down students to check on their safety.
Some schools have continued teaching remotely or are preparing to do so this week, even as families find themselves huddling in hotels, shelters and relatives’ homes.
The Times’s Sarah Kliff writes about how her latest article idea came from an unlikely source: her 2-year-old son.
A day care classmate of his had tested positive for the coronavirus, and a few days later, her son vomited. Between the known exposure to the virus and a possible symptom, she thought it made sense to find out whether he had been infected. The information, she notes, might help the family’s child-care provider and local health officials better understand how the disease spreads among young children, something that little is still known about:
It seemed like an easy task, given that I live in Washington, D.C., where health providers and the city have opened dozens of testing locations in recent months.
Except it wasn’t. I quickly stumbled upon another weakness in America’s testing infrastructure that I hadn’t seen news outlets reporting on: Most drive-through testing sites will not test young children.
My first thought was to go to the Walgreens drugstore near my house, until I learned it sees only adults. I began looking into the District of Columbia’s free testing sites. Again, no luck: The city’s walk-up sites are limited to adults, and its drive-through sites see only children 5 and older.
There was an urgent care center a half-hour drive from my house that would test my son, but I was hoping to go to a drive-through site so I could minimize our risk of becoming infected at a doctor’s office (and likewise reduce the chances of my son passing it to a health provider if he did have the virus). But everywhere I turned, I kept encountering age restrictions that excluded my child.
Finally, I had a stroke of luck. After I vented about the problem to a few other parents, one of them directed me to an urgent care center that offers drive-through testing for children of all ages. The hourslong search made me wonder: Were other parents going through the same thing? And why did these age limits exist in the first place?
My colleague Margot Sanger-Katz and I began researching testing sites in other cities, and found that D.C. was not unique: Dallas sets a cutoff at 5 years old. San Francisco won’t test children younger than 13. In Florida, where schools recently reopened, only a quarter of the 60 state-supported testing sites will see children of all ages.
Reporting was contributed by Christopher Cameron, Damien Cave, Tess Felder, Lazaro Gamio, Abby Goodnough, Lara Jakes, Lisa Waananen Jones, Isabel Kershner, Sarah Kliff, Dan Levin, Dan Powell, Roni Caryn Rabin, Anna Schaverien, Mitch Smith, Kate Taylor, Pranshu Verma, Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Will Wright.