Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Shatters Single-Day Caseload

But there remains firm resistance in many circles, including from some Republican leaders who view mask requirements as a threat to personal liberty.

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who announced this week that he was suspending all local mask mandates, filed a lawsuit on Thursday challenging the authority of leaders in Atlanta to require masks inside their city’s limits.

Also on Thursday, health officials in Dallas announced that the city’s public and private schools would conduct classes virtually for the first three weeks of the school year, which begins there on Aug. 17. Several other large school districts have announced plans to rely on distance learning when they reopen for the upcoming school year, bucking pressure from the Trump administration.

“What I think we need to do, and my colleagues agree, is we really almost need to regroup, call a timeout — not necessarily lock down again, but say that we’ve got to do this in a more measured way,” Dr. Fauci said. “We’ve got to get our arms around this and we’ve got to get this controlled.”

The number of cases in late June surged higher than during the outbreak’s first peak. At this same time, daily Covid-19 fatalities decreased slightly, leading President Trump to proclaim that deaths were “way down.” But that divergence may have come to an end last week, when the average number of new deaths per day began steadily rising again.

Additionally, more widespread testing means cases are caught sooner, on average. That means that the lag between diagnosis and death would be longer than in March, when tests were in critically short supply.

Many of the states that reopened early are the ones seeing the biggest increases, while New York, the country’s hardest-hit city, has seen a 64 percent drop since June 1.

The lockdown came at a steep economic cost, and Mr. Modi lifted it last month. Now India is recording about 30,000 new cases a day, almost three times as many as a month ago, and with testing still sparse, the true figure is likely to be much higher.

Critics say that Mr. Modi imposed the lockdown before it was needed, then lifted it too soon. In his defense, he has pointed to wealthier countries where the official death toll has been 20 to 50 times as high, relative to the size of their populations, as in India.

Regardless, India now ranks third in the world — behind only the United States and Brazil — in both total infections and the number of new ones recorded each day.

The rate of new cases in India is on track to soon overtake Brazil, which surpassed two million cases on Thursday but where the spread of the virus has leveled off. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate that by the end of next year, India will have the worst outbreak in the world.

“We have paid a price for laxity,” said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, a nonprofit organization of public health experts and academics.

The offer to employees at the state-owned oil giant was compelling: Be among the first in China to receive a coronavirus vaccine.

The offer was backed by the government. It stressed that data from clinical trials showed that the products, both made by Sinopharm, were safe. It did not mention the possible side effects or warn against the false sense of security from taking a vaccine that had not been approved by regulators.

“I don’t think this is right ethically,” said Joan Shen, the Shanghai-based chief executive of the pharmaceutical firm I-Mab Biopharma.

The unorthodox move, to test people separately from the normal regulatory approval process, reflects the formidable challenge facing China as it races to develop the world’s first coronavirus vaccine.

Eager to find a long-term solution to the outbreak and burnish their scientific credentials, Chinese companies are rushing to get as much data as possible on their vaccines to prove they are safe and effective. In China, they are selectively testing their vaccines on small pools of people like the PetroChina employees — an approach that does not count toward the regulatory process but that could bolster their own confidence in the vaccines.

Learn about 20 of the most talked-about possible coronavirus treatments with this new tracking tool.

Companies and researchers worldwide are rushing to test hundreds of possible treatments meant to prevent or quell coronavirus infections. Some they hope will block the virus itself, nipping a burgeoning infection in the bud, while others are aimed at mimicking the immune system or quieting an overactive immune response.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and the Health Ministry said in a statement that gyms would be closed and almost all restaurants would be limited to takeout and delivery services, starting at 5 p.m. on Friday.

Beaches, they said, would be inaccessible during most of the weekends, starting July 24.

The new restrictions come after Israel reimposed other measures to stem the spread of the virus last week.

In the past several weeks, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has come under sharp criticism for its management of the virus crisis, especially its economic fallout. Last Saturday, thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv to protest the government’s handling of the pandemic’s economic fallout.

In other news around the world:

• Japan has asked the U.S. military to quarantine all of its personnel arriving at American bases in Japan for two weeks and then test them for the coronavirus, the country’s defense minister, Taro Kono, said on Friday. There has been an outbreak of cases on U.S. military bases on the island of Okinawa.

• In Australia, the state of Victoria reported 428 new cases on Friday, another single-day record. “We are in the fight of our lives,” Victoria’s health minister, Jenny Mikakos, told reporters in Melbourne, the locked-down state capital.

• The authorities in the Philippines said that foreigners with long-term visas could begin entering the country in August, for the first time since March. They will be quarantined, monitored and tested.

• Queen Elizabeth II will confer a knighthood on Tom Moore, the 100-year-old British Army veteran who raised $40 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking 100 laps of his garden in the spring. Friday’s ceremony, to be held outside Windsor Castle, will be only the second time the queen has emerged from seclusion since March 19, when she left Buckingham Palace as the coronavirus bore down on London.

• A 27-year-old woman in Tunisia was found guilty of “inciting hatred between religions” and sentenced to six months in jail and a $700 fine after she shared another Facebook user’s post about the coronavirus that mimicked Quranic iconography.

Deluged by mail-in ballots because of the pandemic, New York State is swimming in uncounted votes.

The absentee ballot count — greatly inflated this year because the state expanded the vote-by-mail option because of the pandemic — has been painstakingly slow, and hard to track, with no running account of the vote totals available.