U.S. Sets Record for Daily New Cases as Virus Surges in South and West

Some states, including New York, which at one point had the most daily virus cases, have brought their numbers under control. Hoping to keep it that way, New York — along with New Jersey and Connecticut — said it would institute a quarantine for some out-of-state travelers.

The stock market slid 2.6 percent as investors fretted about what the latest troubling news meant for the economic recovery. That could lead some states to slow the reopening of businesses, further hobbling the economy and delaying its recovery.

As of Wednesday, 2.3 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and 121,925 have died.

On Wednesday it was as if the country had found itself back in March — at the start of the pandemic, in the early days of the lockdown, when masks were in short supply and when the death toll was skyrocketing.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that the state had recorded more than 7,000 new cases over the previous day.

“This is about saving lives,” said the state’s governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat. “It’s about reopening our businesses. And it’s about showing respect and care for one another.”

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, continued to attribute the rising infections, especially in cities, to younger people who have started to socialize in bars and homes, in spite of rules in many municipalities prohibiting group gatherings. He pressed older people to keep staying home as much as possible, and pleaded with young people to be responsible.

“You need to do your part and make sure that you’re not spreading it to people who are going to be more at risk for this,” he said.

Arizona on Tuesday reported its highest number of virus hospitalizations, as did North Carolina, prompting its governor, Roy Cooper, to announce on Wednesday that the state would pause reopening for three weeks and require face masks. In Texas, more than 4,300 people with the virus are hospitalized, more than double the number at the beginning of June.

But in Missouri, where new case reports have reached their highest levels in recent days, coronavirus hospitalizations have declined slightly over the last month.

The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that if governments and communities in the Americas are not able to stop the spread of the virus through surveillance, isolation of cases and quarantine of contacts, there may be a need to impose — or reimpose — general lockdowns.

“It is very difficult to take the sting out of this pandemic unless we are able to successfully isolate cases and quarantine contacts,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the W.H.O. health emergencies program. “In the absence of a capacity to do that, then the specter of further lockdowns cannot be excluded.”

Apple said it closed seven of its stores in the Houston area because of rising coronavirus cases in the region. The move on Wednesday followed its closing of 11 stores in Arizona, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina because of the virus. Apple had closed nearly all of its roughly 500 stores worldwide months ago, but had opened most in the United States in recent weeks after cases declined. Just over 200 of Apple’s 271 American stores are now open, with some still closed because of damage from protests, an Apple spokesman said.

In other news around the United States:

N.Y. ROUNDUP

New York will require out-of-state travelers coming from hard-hit states to quarantine upon arrival.

The restrictions will be based on specific health metrics related to the virus, he said at a news conference. The quarantine would apply to travelers arriving from a state, as well as New Yorkers returning from a state, where there was either a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents, or a state with a 10 percent or higher rate over a seven-day rolling average.

“A lot of people come into this region and they could literally bring the infection with them,” he said. “It wouldn’t be malicious or malevolent, but it would still be real.”

Eight states would be included, Mr. Cuomo said, when the restrictions took effect at midnight: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah. Washington State had originally been included, but was dropped from the list after a further review of the data.

Travelers returning to New Jersey and Connecticut from those states would also be told to quarantine; their governors appeared with Mr. Cuomo to announce a tristate “joint travel advisory.” Mr. Cuomo said that enforcement would be up to each of the three states. Officials from New Jersey and Connecticut said there was no enforcement mechanism at the moment in their states.

In New York, those violating the quarantine order could be “subject to a judicial order and mandatory quarantine,” he said, and fines of up to $10,000. Mr. Cuomo also said that officials would not be stopping people at state borders to forbid them to enter, but that travelers were being asked to comply once they arrived.

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said that if a New Yorker believes that a recent arrival — or a returning neighbor — has not been abiding by the quarantine, then that person should start by reporting the possible violation to the local health department. Elsewhere in the U.S. where there are similar quarantines for travelers, there has not been widespread enforcement.

The goal, the governor said, was to maintain the hard-fought gains made in the region at great economic and human cost. For months, the state — New York City particularly — had been a global center of the pandemic. Hospitals filled to near capacity. Hundreds died each day, reaching a peak in mid-April. But on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo said there were only an additional 17 deaths statewide.

New York’s quarantine will not apply to Yankees and Mets players returning to the area to complete spring training, which can begin on July 1, Mr. Cuomo said, adding that the state had been working on separate “health protocols” with them since last week.

Elsewhere in New York:

The I.M.F. now projects that the U.S. economy will shrink 8 percent this year before expanding 4.5 percent next year. Economies in the eurozone are projected to shrink 10.2 percent this year and expand 6 percent next year. The economy of China, where the virus originated and which imposed draconian containment measures, is expected to expand 1 percent this year and 8.2 percent in 2021.

In the markets on Wednesday, the S&P 500 fell more than 2 percent by midafternoon, erasing gains from earlier in the week, as investors confronted new signs of the pandemic’s persistence. Shares of retailers, airlines and cruise companies — which are proxies for sentiment about the prospects of a recovery — are faring poorly. Nervousness about the economic outlook was evident in oil prices, and shares of energy companies also declined.

The top U.N. relief official warned Wednesday of a drastic worsening in the outbreak in war-ravaged Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where he said 25 percent of those infected die — about five times the global average.

As Covid-19 sweeps the country, many deaths are most likely going unreported, said Mark Lowcock, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. But there is one unmistakable measure of the virus’s toll: “Burial prices in some areas have increased by seven times compared to a few months ago,” he said.

The United Nations has been chronically hampered in providing aid to Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has been waging war on the rebel Houthi group for more than five years.

Mr. Lowcock spoke Wednesday at a United Nations Security Council briefing on the conflict, held three weeks after a major donor conference to raise money for the humanitarian emergency in Yemen secured $1.35 billion in pledges.

That was about half what was pledged a year earlier — and many of the pledges, Mr. Lowcock said, have not yet been paid.

If donors fail to make good on their pledges, he said, “at a minimum, we can expect many more people to starve to death and to succumb to Covid-19, and to die of cholera, and to watch their children die because they are not immunized for killer diseases.”

In low-income nations, the pandemic may erase 20 years of hard-fought progress against tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria, diseases that together claim more than 2.4 million lives each year.

The toll is most severe in nations already strapped for resources. The pandemic has overwhelmed fragile health care systems in those countries, disrupting programs for preventing and treating tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria. Restricted air and sea transport also threatens the availability of crucial medicines.

Several models produced by the World Health Organization and others project that deaths from these diseases could double as a result. Treatment interruptions also raise the threat of drug resistance, already a formidable problem in many countries.

“The stakes are extraordinarily high,” Peter Sands, who heads The Global Fund, a public-private partnership that published the estimates, said in a statement. “The knock-on effects of Covid-19 on the fight against H.I.V., T.B. and malaria and other infectious diseases could be catastrophic.”

Since March, The Global Fund, which works mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, has provided $1 billion to help countries maintain their campaigns against these diseases. In the new report, the organization said that amount served only as a stopgap measure.

A blistering 174-page independent report on the outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, released on Wednesday, paints a picture of a facility in chaos, as traumatized nurses carried out orders to combine wards of infected and uninfected men, knowing that the move would prove deadly to many of their patients.

One social worker told investigators that she “felt it was like moving the concentration camp — we [were] moving these unknowing veterans off to die,” the report said.

More than 60 percent of fatalities from the coronavirus in Massachusetts have been at nursing homes.

In addition to combining crowded wards, the report said, the home rotated staff members between the wards; discouraged them from using protective gear in an effort to conserve limited supplies; and often failed to isolate infected veterans or to test those who had symptoms.

“In short, this was the opposite of infection control,” the report said.

The parade, the largest of several celebrations taking place nationwide, was originally scheduled for May 9, an annual holiday known as Victory Day, but was delayed for six weeks by the pandemic. The outbreak continues to grow in Russia — the world’s third-worst-affected country, with more than 600,000 cases — but at a slightly slower pace than before.

Aging veterans in their 80s and 90s joined Mr. Putin on the reviewing stand, nearly all of them without masks, to watch 14,000 troops march by.

Kremlin critics have accused Mr. Putin of gambling with public health to put himself at the center of a gigantic display of Russia’s military might and to rally support ahead of a nationwide vote on his future. Voting on constitutional amendments that would allow Mr. Putin to stay in power until 2036 starts on Thursday.

In other news from around the world:

• Saudi Arabia effectively canceled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, for what some scholars say may be the first time in history. The decision sent shock waves of sadness and disappointment across the Muslim world.

• The virus is gaining steam in Latin America, where the number of deaths have more than doubled in a month, according to the Pan American Health Organization. The region now accounts for several of the world’s worst outbreaks.

• Taiwan said on Wednesday that it would relax its entry rules for travelers from Hong Kong and Macau. Arrivals from the Chinese-controlled territories must prove that they have tested negative for the virus and enter home quarantine for 14 days after entry.

• India is under pressure to open its airspace to international airlines after the United States and some European nations accused it of discriminatory practices under the guise of repatriations. The U.S. Department of Transportation accused Air India of selling tickets in the open market, even while New Delhi officials keep American carriers from flying to India.

France’s new contact-tracing app has alerted only 14 people that they were exposed to the virus.

Three weeks after it was introduced, a French contact-tracing app has fallen short of its potential to be a game changer: Only 14 users have been alerted that they were exposed to the virus.

The app, called “StopCovid,” uses Bluetooth technology to trace a person’s interactions. If users test positive and indicate their status on the app, their recent contacts — the ones who are also using the app — get an alert. But so far, only 68 people have informed the app that they were infected, and just a handful of their contacts received alerts.

“These figures correspond to a double reality,” Cédric O, the French digital affairs minister, said during a news conference this week. “A decrease in the spread of the epidemic in France — about 30 people a day are tested positive in Paris — but also a limited use of StopCovid.”

Mr. O said that 1.9 million people had downloaded the app in France, or about 3 percent of the total population. About 460,000 people then uninstalled it.

Mr. O acknowledged in April that one of his main worries about the technology was whether enough people would install it. In Germany, some 10 million people, or about 12 percent of the population, downloaded a similar app. Britain was set to unroll its own app in June, but those plans were shelved after an initial testing phase revealed major problems.

Unlike most European countries, France opted to develop its own technology to underpin its app, rather than using the standard version backed by Apple and Google, and that decision partly delayed the introduction of StopCovid.

Answering your questions about the virus.

With cases on the rise in the United States and around the world, here’s what to do if you feel sick and are worried it may be the coronavirus.