Reuters News Now

What you need to know about the coronavirus today

One-day record
More than 60,500 new COVID-19 infections were reported across the United States, according to a Reuters tally, setting a one-day record as Americans were told to take new precautions and the pandemic becomes increasingly politicized. The total represents a slight rise from Wednesday, when there were 60,000 new cases, and marks the largest one-day increase by any country since the pandemic emerged in China last year. As infections rose in 41 of the 50 states over the last two weeks, Americans have become increasingly divided on issues such as the reopening of schools and businesses. Orders by governors and local leaders mandating face masks have become particularly divisive.

Track the spread of the virus with this state-by-state and county map.

Don’t come home
Australia will halve the number of citizens allowed to return home from overseas each week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday, as authorities struggle to contain a COVID-19 outbreak in the country’s second most populous city. The state of Victoria reported 288 new cases on Friday, a record daily increase for any part of the country and sparking fears of a wave of community transmission in a country where most cases have involved returned travelers. “The news from Victoria remains very concerning,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.

Talk softly and follow the rules
Hosts and hostesses in Japanese nightclubs need to abide by rules and follow advice on how to interact with customers to stop the coronavirus spreading in nightlife districts, where infections have surged again, Japanese officials said. Infections in the capital have been creeping up since the government lifted a state of emergency about a month ago, with the Kabukicho red-light district becoming a major source of cases.

Kazakhstan hits out at ‘fake news’
Kazakhstan dismissed as incorrect a warning by China’s embassy for its citizens to guard against an outbreak of pneumonia in the central Asian nation that it described as being more lethal than the coronavirus. In a statement late on Thursday on its official WeChat account, the Chinese embassy flagged a “significant increase” in cases in the Kazakh cities of Atyrau, Aktobe and Shymkent since mid-June. On Friday, however, Kazakhstan’s healthcare ministry branded Chinese media reports based on the embassy statement as “fake news”.

China finds virus in shrimp shipment
China’s customs authority said it was suspending imports from three shrimp producers in Ecuador after detecting the presence of the coronavirus in recent shipments. “After nucleic acid sequence analysis and expert judgement, the test results suggested that the container environment and the outer packaging of the goods of the three companies were at risk of contamination by the new coronavirus, and the companies’ food safety management system was not in order,” the General Administration of Customs said. The findings are the first positive results announced by Beijing since it began testing imported frozen foods for presence of the virus.

From Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Eurogroup, South Korea, Debt. Ireland bags another top EU job, South Korea’s house prices and pandemic’s debt problems. Read today’s Corona Capital.

Reuters reporters and editors around the world are investigating the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

We need your help to tell these stories. Our news organization wants to capture the full scope of what’s happening and how we got here by drawing on a wide variety of sources. Here’s a look at our coverage.

Are you a government employee or contractor involved in coronavirus testing or the wider public health response? Are you a doctor, nurse or health worker caring for patients? Have you worked on similar outbreaks in the past? Has the disease known as COVID-19 personally affected you or your family? Are you aware of new problems that are about to emerge, such as critical supply shortages?

We need your tips, firsthand accounts, relevant documents or expert knowledge. Please contact us at coronavirus@reuters.com.

We prefer tips from named sources, but if you’d rather remain anonymous, you can submit a confidential news tip. Here’s how.

Politics

'Epic failure': U.S. election officials warn of November chaos due to budget crunch. More voting machines. More COVID-19 protection equipment. More mail-in ballots. These are the things states are demanding ahead of the November election. Here's the problem: There's no money for it.

If the Trump administration carries out the first federal execution since 2003 on Monday, as scheduled, it will mark the culmination of a three-year campaign to line up a secret supply chain to make and test lethal-injection drugs, a Reuters investigation has found.

Faced with sliding poll numbers and multiple national crises, President Donald Trump is set to hold his latest rally on Saturday in New Hampshire, a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hopes to flip this year. The rally will take place at an airport hangar in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as coronavirus cases surge across the country and public health and state officials advise against large gatherings.

The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts leading the way, has distinctly staked out its independence from President Donald Trump by delivering a series of setbacks to him and his administration in pivotal cases.

COVID Science

As scientists question whether the presence, or absence, of antibodies to the coronavirus can reliably determine immunity, some are looking to a different component of the immune system, known as T cells, for their role in protecting people in the pandemic. Recent studies show that some recovered patients who tested negative for coronavirus antibodies did develop T cells in response to their COVID-19 infection.