The Associated Press: Surging US Virus Cases Raise Fear That Progress Is Slipping
Alarming surges in coronavirus cases across the U.S. South and West raised fears Monday that the outbreak is spiraling out of control and that hard-won progress against the scourge is slipping away because of resistance among many Americans to wearing masks and keeping their distance from others. Confirming predictions that the easing of state lockdowns over the past month and a half would lead to a comeback by the virus, cases surpassed 100,000 in Florida, hospitalizations are rising dramatically in Houston and Georgia, and a startling 1 in 5 of those tested in Arizona are proving to be infected. (Lush, Ellgren and Webber, 6/22)

CNN: US Is Still In The First Wave Of The Coronavirus Pandemic And Experts Raise Concern For Several States 
With half of US states reporting a rise in new cases, one expert warns of 'danger signs' in some parts of the US. After weeks of many Americans failing to heed face mask and social distancing guidelines, health officials in some states are reporting an increase in younger populations testing positive -- saying those individuals are often asymptomatic but could be infecting others. And public health measures meant to control infection aren't quite up to speed -- a problem the country has consistently faced in past months. (Maxouris, 6/23)

CNN: Study Suggests Most Covid-19 Cases Went Undetected 
A new study suggests that as many as 8.7 million Americans came down with coronavirus in March, but more than 80% of them were never diagnosed. A team of researchers looked at the number of people who went to doctors or clinics with influenza-like illnesses that were never diagnosed as coronavirus, influenza or any of the other viruses that usually circulate in winter. There was a giant spike in these cases in March, the researchers reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. (Fox, 6/23)

Houston Chronicle: With Shutdown Success Evaporated, Model Suggests Mid-July Peak For COVID-19 In Houston
A surge in COVID-19 cases since Memorial Day could set the Houston area on track for a peak of 2,000 daily hospitalizations by mid-July, according to a model from a Baylor College of Medicine epidemiologist. The region’s intensive care units would be overwhelmed by that number of patients, a nearly 50 percent increase from current levels, though thousands of general hospital beds remain available, said Dr. Chris Amos. (Despart and Ketterer, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Cases Top 9.1 Million Globally; Second Wave Hits Seoul
Reopening plans have slowed in Louisiana, where Gov. John Bel Edwards said the state wouldn’t move into its third phase of reopening by the end of the week as planned due to increased infections and hospitalizations. Mr. Edwards said 630 people were in hospitals for the coronavirus, an increase of almost 90 over the past 10 days. The state passed two milestones Monday, with more than 50,000 total cases and 3,000 total deaths. (6/23)

Reuters: White House: Trump Did Not Direct Virus Testing Slowdown, Does Not Regret 'Kung Flu' Remark
President Donald Trump has not directed any slowdown in coronavirus testing and does not regret using the term “kung flu,” which many consider to be offensive, to describe the virus, the White House said on Monday. The Republican president said at a political rally in Oklahoma on Saturday that he had directed his people to slow down testing for the virus because the process had led to an increased number of known COVID-19 cases.The White House said at the time that he was kidding and made clear on Monday that no such request was made. (Mason and Holland, 6/22)

ABC News: White House Claims Trump Just Joking When He Said He Ordered COVID Testing Slowdown 
"No, he has not directed that," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in an exchange with ABC News’ Ben Gittleson in Monday’s press briefing and added that "any suggestion that testing has been curtailed is not rooted in fact." "It was a comment that he made in jest," she also said. (Phelps and Gittleson, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Trump: US Doing 'Too Good A Job' On Testing
President Donald Trump said Monday the United States has done “too good a job” on testing for cases of COVID-19, even as his staff insisted the president was only joking when he said over the weekend that he had instructed aides to “slow the testing down, please.” The president’s comments at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday brought quick rebukes from the campaign of likely Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as well as scores of Democratic lawmakers. (Freking, 6/22)

Politico: White House Delivers Mixed Explanations On Trump's Vow To Slow Down Testing
Scientists and even politicians in states like Florida, where the uptick in cases has been especially severe, have said the recent spike in coronavirus cases cannot solely be explained by an increase in testing. But Trump did not deny asking his staff to slow down testing when questioned during a Monday interview with Scripps’ Joe St. George. “If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves, if you want to know the truth.” Trump said. “We’ve done too good a job.” (Cohen, 6/22)

CBS News: Trump Draws Criticism For Suggesting A Slowdown In Coronavirus Testing
Kate Bedingfield, deputy campaign manager for Biden's campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Trump's comment was "outrageous" and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic "catastrophic mismanagement." "This virus has killed nearly 120,000 Americans and cost tens of millions their jobs, in large part because this president could not and would not mobilize testing as quickly as we needed it," Bedingfield said. "To hear him say tonight that he has ordered testing slowed — a transparent attempt to make the numbers look better — is appalling." (Quinn, 6/22)

NPR: White House Defends Trump's Use Of Racist Phrase About Coronavirus 
The White House on Monday denied any malicious intent behind President Trump's use of the racist term "kung flu" this weekend to describe the deadly coronavirus pandemic, saying that the president had no "regrets putting the onus back on China" for the deadly virus. "It's not a discussion about Asian Americans, who the president values and prizes as citizens of this great country. It is an indictment of China for letting this virus get here," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said at the Monday news briefing. (Wise, 6/22)

Politico: McEnany Defends Trump's 'Kung Flu' Comment At Rally
The phrase has been identified by many — including counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway — as racist. But McEnany insisted on Monday that the president's remark was far from out of line even as she avoided directly answering questions as to whether the term is indeed racist. “It's a fair thing to point out as China tries to ridiculously rewrite history, to ridiculously blame the coronavirus on American soldiers,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters during a news briefing, rejecting reporters’ characterization of the remark as racist. “President Trump is trying to say, 'no, China, I will label this virus for its place of origin.'” (Oprysko, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: White House Defends Trump Comments On ‘Kung Flu,’ Coronavirus Testing
Democratic lawmakers, activists and experts have said the phrase, a reference to Chinese martial arts, is rooted in racist stereotypes about Asian people.“121,000 Americans are dead. Thousands died alone. Isolated. Families could not grieve. Donald Trump’s response is to make racist jokes,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) said on Twitter. “He is linking it to its place of origin,” Ms. McEnany said, arguing that Mr. Trump was stressing that the virus started in China. Later, she said, “The president does not believe it’s offensive to note that the virus came from China.” (Restuccia, 6/22)

Reuters: Two More Trump Campaign Staff Members Test Positive For Coronavirus
“After another round of testing for campaign staff in Tulsa, two additional members of the advance team tested positive for the coronavirus,” spokesman Tim Murtaugh said. “These staff members attended the rally but were wearing masks during the entire event.” The White House and Trump campaign largely brushed away concerns ahead of the event about holding a rally with thousands of people despite warnings from health officials against gathering in large groups. (6/22)

The New York Times: Two More Trump Staff Members Test Positive For Coronavirus After Tulsa Rally
Two Trump campaign staff members who attended the president’s indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night tested positive for the coronavirus, a spokesman said Monday, despite earlier assurances that a small outbreak among campaign workers had been contained and no staffers who had tested positive had entered the arena. The two workers, members of the campaign’s advance team, tested positive when “another round of testing” was conducted after the rally, according to Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director. He said the staff members in question had attended the event, but had worn masks the entire time. (Karni, 6/22)

NBC News: 2 More Trump Campaign Members In Tulsa Test Positive For Coronavirus
Trump over the weekend fumed at his top political aides after the news about the six staffers broke, multiple people close to the White House told NBC News. Trump asked those around him why the information was exposed and expressed annoyance that coverage of the lead-up to his rally was dominated by that revelation. (Alba, Lee and Smith, 6/22)

The New York Times: White House Eases Virus Restrictions Except For Those Around Trump
The White House on Monday began easing up on restrictions that have been in place since Washington officials instituted a stay-at-home order in the city in March in response to the coronavirus. Temperature checks for visitors to the complex will be scaled back, allowing many White House staff members who have been teleworking to return to their offices, and the cafeteria in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the West Wing, will be reopened. But assuring that President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will not be exposed to the virus by visitors will remain a priority. (Karni, 6/22)

The Hill: Pence, In Call With Governors, Defends Trump Comments On Coronavirus Testing 
Vice President Pence while on a conference call with governors on Monday defended President Trump's recent comments downplaying the importance of coronavirus testing, according to a source on the call. Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) told Pence that Trump's comments at his campaign rally over the weekend in Oklahoma, where the president called testing a "double-edged sword" and quipped that he told aides to "slow the testing down," were "not helpful," the source said. (Samuels, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump Moves To Temporarily Suspend New H-1B, Other Visas Amid Covid-19 Pandemic
President Trump signed an order Monday temporarily barring new immigrants on a slate of employment-based visas, including the H-1B for high-skilled workers, from coming to the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic. The restrictions, which are set to take effect June 24 and last through the end of the year, will prevent hundreds of thousands of new immigrants who were expected to rely on the visas to work in industries ranging from tech and consulting to landscaping and seasonal jobs at resorts. (Hackman, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: Trump Announces New H1-B Visa Restrictions On Foreign Workers
The order primarily affects H-1B visas, broadly set out for high-skilled workers; H-2B visas, for seasonal employees; L-1 visas, for corporate executives; and J-1 visas, for scholars and exchange programs, restricting new authorizations through Dec. 31. The new measure takes effect Wednesday. Yet it also comes with broad exemptions, such as for many potential agricultural, healthcare and food industry workers. It does not change the status of immigrants already in the U.S. In the order, Trump wrote that admitting workers to the country within the targeted visa categories “poses a risk of displacing and disadvantaging United States workers during the current recovery” and “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” (O'Toole, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Trump Administration Extends Visa Ban To Non-Immigrants
“In the administration of our Nation’s immigration system, we must remain mindful of the impact of foreign workers on the United States labor market, particularly in the current extraordinary environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labor,” Trump wrote in his presidential proclamation. Trump imposed a 60-day ban on green cards issued abroad in April, which was set to expire Monday. That announcement, which largely targeted family members, drew a surprisingly chilly reception from immigration hardliners, who said the president didn’t go far enough. (Riechmann and Spagat, 6/23)

The Washington Post: Trump, Citing Pandemic, Orders Limits On Foreign Workers, Extends Immigration Restrictions Through December 
The ban expands earlier restrictions, adding work visas that many companies use, especially in the technology sector, landscaping services and the forestry industry. It excludes agricultural laborers, health-care professionals supporting the pandemic response and food-service employees, along with some other temporary workers. (Miroff and Romm, 6/22)

WBUR: Trump Expected To Suspend H-1B, Other Visas Until End Of Year
But other workers will also be affected, including foreign au pairs who provide child care. Professors and scholars are not to be included in the order, the official said. There will be a provision to request exemptions. The order is not expected to affect immigrants and visa holders already in the United States. Business groups are expected to oppose the move. But groups that want less immigration cheered it. (Ordoñez, 6/20)

The New York Times: Trump Suspends H-1B And Other Visas That Allow Foreigners To Work In The U.S.
Amid the pandemic, the Trump administration has seized on the threat to public health as a pretext to issue a series of policy changes affecting almost every aspect of the immigration system, including asylum and green cards. While many changes have been announced as temporary, they could remain in place indefinitely. But critics say the administration has used the health crisis and the economic meltdown it has caused as pretext to put in place restrictions that further its immigration agenda. (Shear and Jordan, 6/22)

Politico: Trump Team Weighs A CDC Scrubbing To Deflect Mounting Criticism
White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic. Trump administration aides in recent weeks have seriously discussed launching an in-depth evaluation of the agency to chart what they view as its missteps in responding to the pandemic including an early failure to deploy working test kits, according to four senior administration officials. Part of that audit would include examining more closely the state-by-state death toll to tally only the Americans who died directly of Covid-19 rather than other factors. About 120,000 people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus so far, according to the CDC’s official count. (Cook and Cancryn, 6/23)

ProPublica: An Illustrated History Of Government Agencies Twisting The Truth To Align With White House Misinformation
It has become a familiar pattern: President Donald Trump says something that doesn’t line up with the facts held by scientists and other experts at government agencies. Then, instead of pushing back, federal officials scramble to reconcile the fiction with their own public statements. It happened in March, when Trump pushed his opinion that antimalarial drugs could treat COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unusual directive that lent credence to the president’s perspective: “Although optimal dosing and duration of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 are unknown, some U.S. clinicians have reported anecdotally” on specific dosages that the CDC then lists. (Umansky, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Trump Is Increasingly Preoccupied With Defending His Physical And Mental Health 
The early June meeting in the Cabinet Room was intended as a general update on President Trump’s reelection campaign, but the president had other topics on his mind. Trump had taken a cognitive screening test as part of his 2018 physical, and now, more than two years later, he brought up the 10-minute exam. He waxed on about how he’d dazzled the proctors with his stellar performance, according to two people familiar with his comments. He walked the room of about two dozen White House and reelection officials through some of the questions he said he’d aced, such as being able to repeat five words in order. (Parker and Dawsey, 6/22)

Politico: Trump’s 2020 Strategy: A Never-Ending War With States
In 2020, President Donald Trump has found reusable scapegoats for the parade of crises that have afflicted the country — governors. When the country faced a shortage of medical supplies during the coronavirus outbreak, Trump accused governors of being unprepared. When stay-at-home orders left millions unemployed and businesses tittering on the brink, Trump blamed governors for not letting Americans return to work. And when massive protests erupted against racial injustice, Trump said governors were siding with “antifia-led anarchists.” (Kumar, 6/23)

CNN: Trump's Pandemic Failing Is Now Directly Impacting His Campaign 
President Donald Trump is now paying a direct, personal price for his pandemic denial -- the possible shelving of the thing he cares about most, the raucous rallies that defined his political rise and are crucial to his reelection hopes. Trump spent the weekend seething about the disappointing crowd for his comeback event in Oklahoma on Saturday night, according to CNN reporting. His hopes of a full-time return to the campaign trail then took another blow with news that eight staffers and two Secret Service agents at the event are now positive for the coronavirus. (Collinson, 6/23)

The fallout from Trump's Tulsa rally continues as attention turns to Arizona, the site of his next campaign event —

The Associated Press: Trump Rally Size Raises Question About Risk In Age Of Virus
President Donald Trump’s paltry crowd for his weekend campaign rally in Oklahoma raises new questions about politics in the age of the coronavirus: Maybe pandemic-scarred Americans just aren’t ready to risk exposure for close-up engagement in the 2020 presidential election. Only about a third of seats in the 19,000-seat BOK Center were filled for the rally, despite boasts by Trump and his campaign team that they had received more than 1 million ticket requests. (Madhani, Lemire and Jaffe, 6/23)

The Associated Press: After Tulsa, Trump Heads To Virus Hotspot Arizona And Border
Regrouping after a humbling weekend rally, President Donald Trump faces another test of his ability to draw a crowd during a pandemic Tuesday as he visits Arizona and tries to remind voters of one of his key 2016 campaign promises. Trump’s weekend rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had been meant to be a sign of the nation’s reopening and a show of political force but instead generated thousands of empty seats and swirling questions about the president’s campaign leadership and his case for another four years in office. (Lemire, 6/23)

NBC News: Trump Visit To Arizona Amid Coronavirus Surge Draws Concern
When President Donald Trump takes to a church podium Tuesday at a campaign event organized by Turning Point Action, the conservative advocacy group based here, he will be visiting a very different Arizona from the one he last traveled to just six weeks ago. This time around, the president is facing a spiking coronavirus pandemic that is ravaging the state with no signs of abating. (Hillyard and Farivar, 6/23)

ABC News: As Trump Visits Wall, Fears At The Border With Uptick In Coronavirus Cases 
As President Donald Trump plans to visit Arizona Tuesday to highlight his promised border wall project, he will be dropping into a region where there are growing fears that a novel coronavirus that respects no borders may be helping fuel fast-growing infection rates. The president is scheduled to hold a photo opportunity for the completion of the 200th mile of new border wall in Yuma, Ariz. Dave Nash, a spokesperson for the city, told ABC News that cases in Arizona are "going up like a hockey stick," rising alongside cases in Yuma itself, though he said he felt the county was prepared for uptick. (Kim, 6/23)

ABC News: Health Precautions A 'Game-Time Decision' For Trump’s Arizona Gathering, Organizers Say 
Organizers are expecting roughly 3,000 conservative activists to attend the event at a Phoenix megachurch. Attendees will be asked, but not required, to wear masks. "We are asking people to be responsible citizens, so while we won't tackle people in the pews if they aren't wearing [masks], we will be asking folks to be respectful of local ordinances and rules," Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for the Students for Trump convention, told ABC News. (Steakin and Siegel, 6/23)

In other Trump administration news —

CNN: Geoffrey Berman Refused To Sign DOJ Letter Criticizing New York's Covid Restrictions 
Geoffrey Berman, the federal prosecutor ousted over the weekend by the Trump administration, recently refused to sign a letter from the Justice Department that criticized New York City's coronavirus restrictions that affect religious institutions, a person briefed on the matter said. Attorney General William Barr wasn't aware of the dispute, and it had nothing to do with the ouster of Berman, the person said. The letter was sent Friday from the Justice Department. (Perez and Duster, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Fauci To Testify At A Fraught Time For US Pandemic Response
With coronavirus cases rising in about half the states and political polarization competing for attention with public health recommendations, Dr. Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill on Tuesday at a fraught moment in the nation’s pandemic response. The government’s top infectious disease expert will testify before a House committee, along with the heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services. (Neergaard and Alonso-Zaldivar, 6/23)

ABC News: 3 Questions To Watch For As Fauci, Redfield Testify Before House Panel 
As President Donald Trump heads to an Arizona megachurch to rally supporters, Anthony Fauci and other top health officials will be on Capitol Hill on Tuesday for the first time in weeks to answer questions on COVID-19 testing and treatments. Their testimony comes on the heels of several new developments regarding the virus. (Flaherty, 6/23)

ABC News: FDA Issues Warning About 9 Hand Sanitizers Made By This Company 
The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to use hand sanitizer manufactured by the Mexican company Eskbiochem SA de CV because the products contain methanol, a toxic substance that can cause short- and long-term health problems. "Methanol is not an acceptable ingredient for hand sanitizers and should not be used due to its toxic effects," according to the FDA. (Schumaker, 6/22)

NBC News: 9 Hand Sanitizers May Contain Toxic Methanol, FDA Warns
When FDA researchers tested two of the products, Lavar Gel and ClearCare No Germ, they detected methanol, the agency said in a statement on Friday. They noted, however, that they were not aware of any reports of adverse reactions related to the products. There is no safe level of methanol in hand sanitizer. It can cause skin irritation, and if ingested, lead to a range of problems including headache, dizziness, blurred vision, kidney failure, coma and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Miller, 6/22)

The Hill: FDA Warns Against 9 Hand Sanitizers After Dangerous Chemical Discovered 
The agency said consumers who have been espoused to hand sanitizer containing methanol should seek “immediate treatment.” The FDA identified the following products in its warning: All-Clean Hand Sanitizer (National Drug Code: 74589-002-01), Esk Biochem Hand Sanitizer (NDC: 74589-007-01), CleanCare NoGerm Advanced Hand Sanitizer 75% Alcohol (NDC: 74589-008-04), Lavar 70 Gel Hand Sanitizer (NDC: 74589-006-01), The Good Gel Antibacterial Gel Hand Sanitizer (NDC: 74589-010-10), CleanCare NoGerm Advanced Hand Sanitizer 80% Alcohol (NDC: 74589-005-03), CleanCare NoGerm Advanced Hand Sanitizer 75% Alcohol (NDC: 74589-009-01), CleanCare NoGerm Advanced Hand Sanitizer 80% Alcohol (NDC: 74589-003-01) and Saniderm Advanced Hand Sanitizer (NDC: 74589-001-01). (Klar, 6/22)

CNN: Hand Sanitizers By Eskbiochem May Contain Methanol, FDA Warns 
Exposure to significant amounts of methanol can result in nausea, vomiting, headache, blurred vision, permanent blindness, seizures, coma, permanent damage to the nervous system or death. Anyone exposed to these hand sanitizers should seek immediate treatment, the FDA warns. The FDA asked Eskbiochem SA to remove its hand sanitizer products from shelves on June 17 but has yet to receive a response from the company. The agency recommends that consumers stop using these products immediately and dispose of them in "appropriate hazardous waste containers." (Kim, 6/22)

In other news from the FDA —

Stat: The Likely Heir To An FDA Powerbroker Brings Expertise — And Controversy
Janet Woodcock, one of the FDA’s most powerful regulators, has an almost mythic reputation and an outsized personality to match. For years, rumors have swirled: Who could possibly succeed her? Now, it seems, there’s an answer to that question: The FDA official who has been tapped to step into Woodcock’s role for at least a temporary stint is a relative newcomer — and until now, a relatively quiet, low-profile presence at an agency that has been thrust into the spotlight amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Florko, 6/23)

The Associated Press: Medicare Data: Blacks Likelier To Be Hospitalized For COVID
Blacks were nearly four times more likely than whites to be hospitalized with COVID-19 among people with Medicare, the government said Monday. The analysis from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also found that having advanced kidney disease was an even more severe risk indicator for hospitalization than race, ethnicity, or being poor. “It reconfirms long-standing issues around disparities and vulnerable populations,” said Medicare administrator Seema Verma, adding that “race and ethnicity are far from the only story.″ (Alonso-Zaldivar, 6/23)

The Wall Street Journal: Federal Study Of Medicare Recipients Finds Coronavirus Impacting Black People Disproportionately
Black people on Medicare, a program for people 65 and older, had the highest hospitalization rate for coronavirus, with 465 cases per 100,000 beneficiaries. Hispanics had 258 hospitalizations per 100,000 people on Medicare and Asians had 187 hospitalizations per 100,000 people in the federal health insurance program for seniors. White people on Medicare had 123 coronavirus hospitalizations per 100,000. Each hospitalization costs Medicare about $23,000. Older Americans and those with medical conditions were the hardest hit. (Armour, 6/22)

NPR: Racial Disparities In COVID-19 Highlighted In New Medicare Claims Data 
New federal data reinforces the stark racial disparities that have appeared with COVID-19: According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Black Americans enrolled in Medicare were hospitalized with the disease at rates nearly four times higher than their white counterparts. Disparities were also striking among Hispanics and Asian Americans. Hispanics were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites, while Asian Americans were about 50% more likely. Black and Hispanic beneficiaries were more likely to test positive for the coronavirus as well, CMS Administrator Seema Verma said. (Godoy, 6/22)

Reuters: Black Americans Hospitalized For COVID-19 At Four Times The Rate Of Whites, Medicare Data Shows
“The disparities in the data reflect longstanding challenges facing minority communities and low income older adults,” said Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which released the data. The data showed that more than 325,000 Medicare beneficiaries were diagnosed with COVID-19 between Jan. 1 and May 16. Of those, more than 110,000 were hospitalized. (O'Donnell and Roy, 6/22)

WBUR: Black Medicare Patients With COVID-19 Nearly 4 Times As Likely To End Up In Hospital 
Previous data has already shown that older Americans in general are more likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19; but the new CMS data highlights that, even among this group, racial and health disparities are dramatic. (Godoy, 6/22)

The Hill: Black Americans Four Times More Likely To Be Hospitalized For COVID-19: Medicare Data 
More than 325,000 people on Medicare were diagnosed with COVID-19 between Jan. 1 and May 16, and 110,000 people on Medicare were hospitalized with a COVID-19 diagnosis this year through May 16, based on the data. Medicare payments for fee-for-service hospitalizations totaled $1.9 billion, with an average cost of $23,094 per hospitalization, CMS said. (Klar, 6/22)

Modern Healthcare: CMS Medicare Data Reveals Who Is At High Risk For COVID-19
Verma said the data show the need to focus on value-based care, rather than fee-for-service models that don't focus on quality of care for patients. "Our fee-for-service system is consistently showing itself to be insufficient for our most vulnerable Americans," Verma said. (Christ, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Income Emerges As A Major Predictor Of Coronavirus Infections, Along With Race - The Washington Post
Income is a potent force along with race in determining who among the nation’s vulnerable, older population has been infected with the novel coronavirus, according to a federal analysis that lays bare stark disparities in the pandemic’s toll. The findings released Monday are based on billing records for people on Medicare who have contracted the virus. They echo the commonly understood pattern that black Americans are more likely to test positive for the virus and to be hospitalized for covid-19, the disease it causes, than other racial and ethnic groups. But they also point to the role of poverty as the pandemic has sped through U.S. communities in the winter and spring. (Goldstein, 6/22)

In other news from CMS —

Modern Healthcare: Continuous Medicaid Eligibility Linked With Fewer Coverage Gaps
A new study by researchers at George Washington University found that children who are guaranteed continuous Medicaid eligibility are less likely to experience gaps in insurance coverage, but it's unclear if they had better health outcomes. Twenty-four states offered 12-month continuous eligibility for children in Medicaid, which helps ensure that kids don't lose coverage because of income changes and paperwork burdens, during the study period of 2016 to 2018. Researchers compared health measures for children under 18 in those states to those among children in states that don't offer continuous eligibility. (Livingston, 6/23)

The Associated Press: In NY, KY Primaries, Mail-In Deluge And Lines In Louisville
Overwhelmed Kentucky and New York officials faced a deluge of mail-in votes likely to delay results for days after high-profile primaries Tuesday, contests testing if establishment Democratic congressional candidates can withstand challengers fueled by voter fury over racism. The day’s poster child for voting nightmares loomed potentially in Louisville, Kentucky. The state’s largest city and hometown of a serious challenger for the Democratic nomination for the Senate, Louisville — population nearly 600,000 — had just one in-person polling place. (Fram, 6/23)

The Associated Press: Election Chaos Renews Focus On Gutted Voting Rights Act
When some Georgia voters endured a pandemic, pouring rain and massive waits earlier this month to cast their ballot, President Donald Trump and other Republicans blamed local Democrats for presiding over chaos. “Make no mistake, the reduction in polling places is a result of a concerted effort by Democrats to push vote-by-mail at the expense of in-person voting,” said Justin Clark, the Trump campaign’s senior counsel. “Nothing more and nothing less.” (Barrow, 6/23)

Detroit Free Press: U-M To Withdraw From Hosting October Presidential Debate
The University of Michigan is withdrawing from hosting a presidential debate between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, sources told the Detroit Free Press. The official announcement is expected to come Tuesday. U-M is making the move because of concerns of bringing the campaigns, media and supporters of both candidates to Ann Arbor and campus during a pandemic, two sources with direct knowledge of the move told the Free Press. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak on behalf of the university. (Jesse, 6/22)

The New York Times: University Of Michigan Plans To Withdraw From Hosting Trump-Biden Debate
Two people directly familiar with the debate planning said the Michigan gathering will be moved to Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, which hosted the first debates of the 2020 Democratic primary season last summer. ... The move, expected to be formally announced on Tuesday, comes as President Trump has sought to alter the debate schedule, add a fourth debate to the planned three and exert more control over the selection of moderators, which is typically handled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonprofit organization that sponsors presidential general election debates. (Epstein and Stevens, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Mail Voting: Pence, Aides Embrace Practice Panned By Trump
Vice President Mike Pence and a half-dozen other senior advisers to President Donald Trump have repeatedly voted by mail, according to election records obtained by The Associated Press. That undercuts the president’s argument that the practice will lead to widespread fraud this November. More than three years after leaving the Indiana governor’s residence, Pence still lists that as his official residence and votes absentee accordingly. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has permanent absentee voting status in her home state of Michigan. (Slodysko, 6/23)

The New York Times: G.O.P. Faces Risk From Push To Repeal Health Law During Pandemic
Republicans are increasingly worried that their decade-long push to repeal the Affordable Care Act will hurt them in the November elections, as coronavirus cases spike around the country and millions of Americans who have lost jobs during the pandemic lose their health coverage as well. The issue will come into sharp focus this week, when the White House is expected to file legal briefs asking the Supreme Court to put an end to the program, popularly known as Obamacare. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seizing on the moment, will unveil a Democratic bill to lower the cost of health care, with a vote scheduled for next week in the House. (Stolberg, 6/22)

Modern Healthcare: Dem ACA Improvement Plan Hikes Subsidies, Incentivizes Medicaid Expansion
House Democrats on Monday unveiled legislation that would tweak the Affordable Care Act to expand premium subsidies and incentivize states to expand Medicaid, among other changes. The bill was originally intended to be a messaging bill in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the ACA in March, but the plans were derailed by the crush of COVID-19 relief legislation. A House vote is expected before July 4 but the Republican-led Senate won't take it up. (Cohrs, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Lawmakers Ask Fed To Help Businesses Struggling To Make Mortgage Payments
More than 100 members of Congress are calling on the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve to help struggling businesses pause debt payments in a key real-estate financing market. Many of the hotels, shopping malls and office buildings that borrow money in the roughly $550 billion market for commercial-mortgage-backed securities said they have been unable to negotiate debt reprieves during the coronavirus pandemic. Some are worried they could lose their properties to foreclosure, The Wall Street Journal reported this month. (Eisen, 6/23)

NBC News: Top Democrats Say Trump Is Sitting On $14B For Coronavirus Testing, Contact Tracing
The Trump administration has been sitting on nearly $14 billion in funding that Congress passed for coronavirus testing and contact tracing, according to Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington. The top Democrats said in a letter Sunday to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that the Trump administration has "still failed" to distribute more than $8 billion out of $25 billion appropriated by Congress to expand testing and contact tracing. The letter indicated that Congress passed these funds as part of a coronavirus relief bill in April. (Shabad, 6/22)

Stat: Lawmakers Push Bill To Track Federal Funds Used To Discover Covid-19 Drugs
Amid ongoing concern that Covid-19 therapies and vaccines may be unaffordable, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a pair of bills Monday that would prohibit drug makers from price gouging and also require all taxpayer-funded Covid-19 research to be recorded in a federal database. The move comes as access to Covid-19 medical products emerges as a hot-button issue in the U.S. and elsewhere, with worries mounting over the extent to which a therapy or vaccine will be available in sufficient quantities at affordable prices. (Silverman, 6/22)

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill —

Politico: Senate Democrats Threaten To Block GOP Police Bill
Senate Democrats are strongly signaling they will filibuster Republicans’ police reform bill later this week absent more concessions from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky Republican set the Senate on a path to consider the legislation on Wednesday and must lure at least seven Democrats to support even opening debate on a GOP bill written without any Democratic input. So far, few Democrats have expressed any interest. (Everett and Levine, 6/22)

Modern Healthcare: After COVID-19 Delays, Healthcare Mergers Should Speed Up
COVID-19, which rapidly put healthcare transactions on hold, has exacerbated the conditions for organizations — especially smaller ones — that were seeking a partner due to financial distress or risk. At the same time, the financial fallout of losing revenues from nonessential surgeries and procedures has left larger systems rethinking plans to grow through acquisitions, mergers and other partnerships. (Coutré, 6/22)

Kaiser Health News: Pandemic Forced Insurers To Pay For In-Home Treatments. Will They Disappear?
After seven days as an inpatient for complications related to heart problems, Glenn Shanoski was initially hesitant when doctors suggested in early April that he could cut his hospital stay short and recover at home — with high-tech 24-hour monitoring and daily visits from medical teams. But Shanoski, a 52-year-old electrician in Salem, Massachusetts, decided to give it a try. He’d felt increasingly lonely in a hospital where the COVID pandemic meant no visitors. Also, Boston’s Tufts Medical Center wanted to free up beds for a possible surge of the coronavirus. (Appleby, 6/23)

The Wall Street Journal: Health Provider Gundersen Prioritizes AI Integration Amid Pandemic
Gundersen Health System is adopting artificial intelligence for collecting payments from health insurers and expanding telemedicine usage, measures it hopes will yield long-term cost savings even as the hospital operator suffers losses stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. “Once the pandemic hit, we said as an organization, if we were to thrive, we need all hands on deck to carry out our digital strategy,” said Gerald Oetzel, finance chief for the La Crosse, Wis.-based nonprofit health provider. (Chen, 6/22)

The Wire: GSK Found A Suspected Whistleblower. The Real One Is Still In The Shadows
Alarmed that colleagues were bribing Chinese doctors and giving kickbacks to hospital workers to boost drug sales, an employee at the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline began documenting the alleged crimes in the fall of 2010 and sending detailed notes to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. Using an anonymous email address, the GSK employee sent similar packages to regulators in China. No one responded — for years. (Barboza, 6/23)

Reuters: Sanofi Eyes Approval Of COVID-19 Vaccine By First Half Of 2021
French drugmaker Sanofi SA (SASY.PA) said on Tuesday it expects to get approval for the potential COVID-19 vaccine it is developing with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK.L) by the first half of next year, faster than previously anticipated. (Blamont, 6/23)

Stat: Sanofi, A Straggler In The Covid-19 Vaccine Race, Accelerates Its Plans
The drug maker Sanofi Pasteur has been more cautious than some of its rivals in projecting when its Covid-19 vaccines might be ready. Now, it’s announcing an acceleration of clinical trials to reach the market faster — and striking a $425 million deal to broaden its partnership with a smaller biotech company to develop one of them. (Branswell and Feuerstein, 6/23)

Modern Healthcare: University Of Illinois To Screen Students With COVID Test Developed On Campus
In a pre-print version of research manuscript, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, a UIUC research team proposes using saliva to test for COVID-19, rather than the more invasive nasal swab. The manuscript describes how the team is bypassing the RNA extraction step in testing, making it faster and less susceptible to shortages of scarce testing materials. (Asplund, 6/22)

Reuters: Chinese Firm Gets Approval To Begin Human Testing For Potential Coronavirus Vaccine
China has approved a coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products’ unit to begin human testing, the company said in a filing on Tuesday. The potential vaccine, co-developed by Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical and the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has received a certificate from the National Medical Products Administration to launch clinical trials. (6/23)

Reuters: Gilead Targets Remdesivir Supply For Two Million COVID-19 Patients By Year-End
Remdesivir is at the forefront in the fight against the virus after the drug helped shorten hospital recovery times in a clinical trial. It was granted emergency use authorization in the United States and full approval in Japan. But producing and supplying billions of doses remain major concerns as the fast-spreading virus that has infected over 9 million people globally threatens to overwhelm healthcare systems around the world. (Mishra, 6/22)

The New York Times: Gilead To Test A Version Of Remdesivir That Can Be Inhaled
The American biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences will soon start trials of an inhalable version of remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has shown promise as a therapeutic against the coronavirus in early trials, according to a statement released Monday. Remdesivir is currently given intravenously, which restricts its use to hospital settings. “That’s been the limitation” with this drug, said Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, a pulmonologist and regional director of critical care medicine at Northwell Health. Gilead’s inhalable version of the treatment would be administered through a nebulizer, a device that sends a mist of therapeutic liquid into the airway and is often used by asthma patients. (Wu, 6/22)

In other pharmaceutical industry news —

Stat: A Chinese Drug Maker Scores A Big Clinical Trial Win With A Novel Diabetes Therapy 
Two years ago, Hua Medicine turned to the public markets to help finance its ambitious diabetes program. “Our future success depends substantially on the success in China of our only clinical drug candidate, dorzagliatin,” the Shanghai-based pharma said in its IPO filing. The company kept plugging away at the effort quietly until last week, when it announced the completion of its first Phase 3 trial. (Chan, 6/22)

NPR: Experimental CRISPR Treatment For Sickle Cell Disease Appears Effective 
Like millions of other Americans, Victoria Gray has been sheltering at home with her children as the U.S. struggles through a deadly pandemic, and as protests over police violence have erupted across the country. But Gray is not like any other American. She's the first person with a genetic disorder to get treated in the United States with the revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR. And as the one-year anniversary of her landmark treatment approaches, Gray has just received very good news: The billions of genetically modified cells doctors infused into her body clearly appear to be alleviating virtually all the complications of her disorder, sickle cell disease. (Stein, 6/23)

NPR: Psychiatrist Explores Benefits Of Treating PTSD With Ecstasy And Cannabis 
People who have been taking antidepressants for several years sometimes hit a wall, a point when that treatment no longer seems to ease their symptoms. Psychiatrist Julie Holland says that's where psychedelic drugs could help.Holland was in charge of Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room on the weekends from 1996 until 2005, and currently has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. She's a medical monitor on the MAPS studies, which involve, in part, developing psychedelics into prescription medication. Her new book, Good Chemistry, explores how she thinks psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana, might be used more widely in psychiatry to make treatment more efficient and effective. (Gross, 6/22)

Modern Healthcare: Physicians Urge Cancer Screening To Avoid Second Health Crisis
Healthcare leaders are concerned that delaying cancer screening and care during the pandemic could contribute to another health crisis. Many patients are putting off preventive services and screenings, such as mammographies and colonoscopies, for fear of potential exposure to COVID-19. A recent survey by the American Cancer Society found that 50% of cancer patients and survivors reported some impact to their care as a result of the pandemic. (Henderson, 6/22)

WBUR: 'Invisible Wounds': Frontline Health Workers Face Recovery Period That Could Last Months 
Although the number of new coronavirus cases in Massachusetts has been steadily declining, there’s still plenty to do right now getting the unit back to normal and figuring out lessons learned. And staffers who worked long stints at the peak of the crisis are taking time to rest, Hayes says, "so they're home with their families now, and sort of recharging and refreshing, and then they'll be ready for the fall surge." (Goldberg, 6/22)

Boston Globe: Tick Populations Difficult To Predict Due To Coronavirus; Decrease In Hospital Visits Cited 
Summer signals the peak of tick season, when people spray on tick repellent and don long pants to safely enjoy the warm weather in tick-friendly areas — it’s also when state health officials gather information to predict the insects’ population size. But this year, estimating the tick population will be a challenge. Even with a mild winter, which allows ticks to more easily survive into the warmer seasons, health officials have reported significantly low counts of tick exposure due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to Dr. Catherine Brown, an epidemiologist for the state Department of Public Health. (Berg, 6/22)

KQED: Anorexia Patients Are Not All Super Skinny 
A recent UCSF study published in the journal Pediatrics found that atypical anorexia patients are just as likely as their underweight counterparts to have a slow heart rate, menstrual dysfunction and electrolyte imbalance. They may also experience an orthostatic heart rate increase, which normally occurs when someone lying down stands up.If you're not eating enough calories to sustain your body's basic metabolic needs, it is bad for your health no matter what your starting weight. (McClurg, 6/22)

The New York Times: Health Officials Had To Face A Pandemic. Then Came The Death Threats.
Leaders of local and state health departments have been subject to harassment, personal insults and death threats in recent weeks, a response from a vocal and angry minority of the public who say that mask requirements and restrictions on businesses have gone too far. One top health official, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, issued a statement on Monday condemning attacks on public health directors and disclosing that she faced repeated threats to her safety. (Bosman, 6/22)

CNN: Some Public Health Officials Are Resigning Amid Threats During The Covid-19 Pandemic 
During a live public briefing on Facebook last month, "someone very casually suggested" the Los Angeles County's public health director should be shot, the director said. "I didn't immediately see the message, but my husband did, my children did, and so did my colleagues," Dr. Barbara Ferrer said Monday in a statement. It's just one of the many threats of violence public health workers are facing across the nation "on a regular basis" as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, Ferrer said. (Mossburg, Waldrop and Thomas, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Amid Threats And Political Pushback, Public Health Officials Are Leaving Their Posts 
For Lauri Jones, the trouble began in early May. The director of a small public health department in Washington state was working with a family under quarantine because of coronavirus exposure. When she heard one family member had been out in the community, Jones decided to check in.The routine phone call launched a nightmare.“Someone posted on social media that we had violated their civil liberties [and] named me by name,” Jones recalled. “They said, ‘Let’s post her address. . . . Let’s start shooting.’ ” (Weiner and Eunjung Cha, 6/22)

Previous KHN coverage: Public Health Officials Face Wave Of Threats, Pressure Amid Coronavirus Response

The New York Times: Public Health Experts Reject President’s View Of Fading Pandemic
Public health experts warned on Sunday that the coronavirus pandemic is not going away anytime soon. They directly contradicted President Trump’s promise that the disease that has infected more than two million Americans would “fade away” and his remarks that disparaged the value of evidence from coronavirus tests. A day after Mr. Trump told a largely maskless audience at an indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., that he had asked to “slow down the testing” because it inevitably increased the number of confirmed coronavirus cases, infectious disease experts countered that the latest rise of infections in the United States is real, the country’s response to the pandemic is not working and rallies like the president’s risk becoming major spreading events. (Gorman, 6/21)

In other news on people on the front-lines of the pandemic —

Kaiser Health News/The Guardian: Lost On The Frontline
A nursing home certified medication aide who was Navajo and could speak to residents in their Indigenous language. A travel nurse from Tennessee who felt obliged to serve when he heard New York was short-staffed in the pandemic. These are the people just added to “Lost on the Frontline,” a special series from The Guardian and KHN that profiles health care workers who died of COVID-19. (6/23)

Politico: Swamped Mental Health And Addiction Services Appeal For Covid Bailout
Mental health and addiction treatment centers and counselors have been overwhelmed with work during the coronavirus pandemic and economic crash. But many are struggling to stay afloat amid confusion and delays over the federal bailout for the health care industry. Some have waited months for the release of promised aid. Others held out and didn't apply, believing they'd get a better deal in a future round of funding aimed at centers that see mostly low-income patients. As a result, nearly a third haven't received any of the $175 billion HHS is doling out to hospitals and other health providers on the front lines of the coronavirus response. And now, they’re appealing to the government for help. (Roubein and Ehley, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: America Is Reopening. Coronavirus Tracing Apps Aren’t Ready.
Local officials in Teton County, Wyo., home to Yellowstone National Park and resort town Jackson Hole, want to prevent a new wave of coronavirus cases as the area reopens. They decided to lean on technology. The county signed up for a location-tracking app developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help accelerate contact tracing, the process of notifying and isolating people who might have been exposed to the virus. But as tourists stream into Yellowstone—rangers spotted license plates from 41 states the day it reopened in mid-May—the app isn’t ready. It can’t accurately track location, it’s missing key features and its developers have struggled to protect sensitive user data. (Winkler and Haggin, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Hash Browns With A Side Of Hand Sanitizer: What Going To A Restaurant Is Like Now
When Scott Harkey decided to venture out for a meal recently, he made a reservation, drove to the restaurant—and then stopped at the entrance for a staffer to take his temperature. Then another staffer handed him a bottle of hand sanitizer. And the servers waiting on him all wore masks. “They looked like ninjas,” said Mr. Harkey, a 38-year-old advertising executive in Phoenix. “It was strange. ”Welcome to the new way of dining out. As coronavirus lockdowns ease, some people are cautiously inching back to restaurants and bars. But the experience is far different from what it used to be. (Needleman, 6/22)

The New York Times: Are Companies More Productive In A Pandemic?
When the online learning company Chegg started working remotely in March, Nathan Schultz, a senior executive, was convinced that productivity would plummet 15 to 20 percent. Hoping to keep his employees on task, Mr. Schultz tried to recreate the high-touch style of management that had served him well throughout his career. He set up a Slack channel with his two closest deputies, where they began communicating incessantly, even as they spent hours a day in the same Zoom meetings. He began regularly checking in on many of the other members of his team. (Gelles, 6/23)

WBUR: Child Care Reopens, But Many Ask For State Aid After 'Financially Devastating' Closure 
The state approved 48 providers to reopen Monday, with another 100 given reopening dates. About 4% of child care operators recently told the state they won’t be able to reopen under the new health and safety restrictions. But the Massachusetts advocacy group Daycares United reports that about 1 in 5 of its members said they’ll have to close indefinitely. (Jung, 6/22)

GMA: From Playgrounds To Play Dates And Pools: What Is Safe For Kids To Do This Coronavirus Summer 
Making plans for summer in the time of the coronavirus pandemic is a parenting dilemma. States, cities and towns are reopening as at least a dozen states have seen record highs of new COVID-19 cases. Some camps are closed, others are open. Some families are still quarantining and others are hosting birthday parties and sleepovers. The messaging that kids don't seem to be as severely impacted by COVID-19 as adults but they do seem to be asymptomatic carriers of the virus can be confusing for parents too. (Kindelan, 6/23)

NPR: Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race 
One common recommendation for reducing police brutality against people of color is to have police departments mirror a given area's racial makeup.President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended that law enforcement "reflect the demographics of the community"; the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said diversity on police forces can help build trust with communities. Rashawn Ray, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, studies race and policing. He says that diversity helps but that "officers, regardless of their race or gender, have similar implicit biases, particularly about Black people." Ray says it's not enough to have Black cops in a Black neighborhood if they don't know the area. (Doubek, 6/22)

Stateline: 'If The Police Aren't Needed, Let's Leave Them Out Completely'
Beginning this month, Denver’s emergency dispatch is sending social workers and health professionals, rather than police officers, to handle nonviolent situations. “If the police aren’t needed, let’s leave them out completely,” said Sailon, program manager for criminal justice services at the Mental Health Center for Denver. Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response, known as STAR, launched at the beginning of June as a six-month pilot program, funded by a grant from the Caring for Denver Foundation. The fact that STAR began at the height of demonstrations against police brutality was coincidental, Sailon said, but fitting. (Vasilogambros, 6/23)

The Washington Post: Activists Halt Street Protests In South Carolina As Some Demonstrators Become Infected
South Carolina racial justice activists said they would postpone future demonstrations or move them online after at least 13 people who took part in previous protests tested positive for the coronavirus. As the number of cases across the country continued to climb ominously Monday, organizers of “I Can’t Breathe” protests in South Carolina urged participants to get tested for the virus. (Shammas, Janes, Beachum and Bernstein, 6/22)

NPR: How Recommendations Of An Obama Task Force Have, And Haven't, Changed U.S. Policing 
The police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others — and the wave of protests that followed — have sparked a national conversation about how to prevent police killings and improve relationships between law enforcement and the communities they police. Six years ago, police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparking a similar conversation. As a result, President Obama convened a panel of experts, activists, authors and academics to rethink policing in America. (Sullivan, 6/22)

NPR: NYPD Officer Suspended For Using A Chokehold 
A New York City police officer has been suspended after apparently using a chokehold during an arrest in Rockaway, Queens. NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea said the department is investigating the incident, which happened Sunday. Cellphone video shot by a bystander shows several police struggling to subdue a Black man, including one officer who had his arm around the man's neck. One bystander shouts, "Stop choking him!" (Lawrence, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Rayshard Brooks Body On Display At Atlanta's Ebenzer Baptist Church 
Anger ebbed into grief on Monday as hundreds of mourners visited a historic church here to pay their respects to Rayshard Brooks, the latest black man to become a household name after dying at the hands of police. Brooks’s death became the latest flash point in a national movement against police brutality and racism. Hundreds trickled through Ebenezer Baptist Church on Monday to see the man who galvanized them into action lying in repose. (Nirappil, 6/22)

WBUR: Protesters Call For Action From Baker On Police Brutality 
Hundreds of people marched from Roxbury to the State House to honor Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was fatally shot by an Atlanta police officer in a fast food parking lot last week. They also marched against police brutality and in favor of changes to policing beyond what's already been proposed by state and local officials. The protests have drawn promises from politicians to reform the police. (Ma, Rios and Kelly, 6/22)

NPR: Protest Arrests Led To Surge Of Bail Fund Donations: Impact Could Be Long Lasting
The Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bails low-income people out of jail or immigration detention, used to run on a shoestring budget. "We were always in need of more money," says board member Mirella Ceja-Orozco, " constantly writing grant proposals ... to kind of figure out how we could obtain money to last us for the next few months." In 2018, the last year it filed its taxes, the group had about $150,000. It had to turn down a lot of requests for assistance because of a lack of funds. But in the past few weeks, the group received $31 million from more than 900,000 individual donations. "It's just completely changed our world," says Ceja-Orozco. (Domonoske, 6/23)

NBC News: To Amplify Black Voices In Medicine, Non-Black Doctors Hand Over Their Twitter Accounts
Voices of Black women in the field of medicine are reaching a broader audience Monday, as non-Black doctors handed over their Twitter accounts to Black female colleagues. The online event called #ShareTheMicNowMed is meant to highlight the work of Black female physicians and encourage more diversified conversations on social media. (Edwards, 6/22)

Kaiser Health News: Listen: Navigating The Pandemic And Protests As The U.S. Reopens
KHN Midwest correspondent Cara Anthony appeared on Illinois Public Media’s “The 21st” with host Brian Mackey in a reporter’s roundtable about the latest on the coronavirus pandemic and the civil rights protests. After the protests highlighted police brutality and systemic racism, she reported on the unwritten rules that Black teens learn to try to cope with the mental health burden of other people’s racist assumptions. (6/22)

NBC News: Latino Leaders Demand Florida Governor Apologize For Linking 'Hispanic Farmworkers' To COVID-19 Rise
Florida Latino Democratic and civil rights leaders demanded Monday that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis apologize for and clarify his recent comments attributing the state's steep rise in positive COVID-19 tests to "overwhelmingly Hispanic farmworkers" and day laborers. "It's absolutely embarrassing, appalling," state Rep. Javier Fernández said during a news call Monday. "We're living in very dark and sad times" when the governor places blame not on "his failed leadership but on some of the most vulnerable members of our community here in Florida." (Sesin, 6/22)

The New York Times: White Americans Say They Are Waking Up To Racism. What Will It Add Up To?
One recent afternoon, while washing his car, Greg Reese, a white stay-at-home dad in Campton, Ky., peeled off the Confederate flag magnet he had placed on its trunk six years earlier. He did not put it back on. It was a small act for which he expected no accolades. It should not have taken the police killing of George Floyd, Mr. Reese knew, to face what he had long known to be true, that the flag he had grown up thinking of as “a beautiful trophy” was “a symbol of hate, and it’s obviously wrong to glorify it.” (Harmon and Burch, 6/22)

ProPublica/New Mexico In Depth: A Hospital Was Accused Of Racially Profiling Native American Women. Staff Said Administrators Impeded An Investigation.
Federal regulators are ramping up scrutiny of a prominent women’s hospital here after clinicians’ allegations that Native Americans had been racially profiled for extra COVID-19 screening, leading to the temporary separation of some mothers from their newborns. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will refer findings from state investigators about a violation of patient rights at Lovelace Women’s Hospital to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, state officials said. The state Department of Health declined to specify details of the violations it had found. (Furlow, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Once Reluctant, GOP's Only Black Senator Now Leads On Race
When he first ran for office in 1994, they scrawled the N-word on his lawn signs. By the time he came to Congress, he had to unplug the phone lines because callers brought the staff to tears. Even after he became a U.S. senator, the Capitol quickly became just another place where he would be stopped by the police. Initially reluctant to focus on race, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina is now a leading Republican voice, teaching his party what it’s like to be a Black man in America when the police lights are flashing in the rearview mirror. (Mascaro and Powell, 6/23)

WBUR: LGBTQ Clinics Sue Trump Administration Over Discrimination In Trans Health Care 
A coalition of LGBTQ clinics and organizations are suing to block a Trump administration rule that aims to strip "sex discrimination" protections for transgender people from laws that govern health care. The rule, issued in final form by the Department of Health and Human Services on June 12, is distinct from last week's landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that bars discrimination against LGBTQ people in the workplace. (Simmons-Duffin, 6/22)

The Hill: LGBTQ Advocates Sue Trump Administration Over Rollback Of Nondiscrimination Protections 
The Trump administration doesn't have the authority to allow health providers to discriminate against LGBTQ patients, according to a lawsuit filed by advocacy groups seeking to block a new rule from taking effect. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the plaintiffs include the Whitman-Walker Clinic and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, along with individual LGBTQ physicians, provider groups and LGBTQ organizations. (Weixel, 6/22)

CBS News: LGBTQ Organizations Sue Trump Administration Over Rule Erasing Health Care Protections
A group of LGBTQ organizations and medical professionals sued Monday to block new rules announced by the Trump administration that removed federal protections against health care discrimination for transgender patients. The 10 plaintiffs in the case argue that the June 12 regulations were made "with next-to-no legal, medical, or reasoned policy foundation, and contrary to the opinions of professional medical and public health organizations." (Kates, 6/22)

The New York Times: Bars, Strip Clubs And Churches: U.S. Virus Outbreaks Enter Unwieldy Phase
After months of lockdown in which outbreaks of the coronavirus often centered in nursing homes, prisons and meatpacking plants, the nation is entering a new and uncertain phase of the pandemic. New Covid-19 clusters have been found in a Pentecostal church in Oregon, a strip club in Wisconsin and in every imaginable place in between. In Baton Rouge, La., at least 100 people tested positive for the virus after visiting bars in the Tigerland nightlife district, popular among Louisiana State University students. (Mervosh, Smith and Tompkins, 6/22)

ABC News: As Cases Rise, Pence Warns Young People Increasingly Catching Coronavirus 
Vice President Mike Pence warned on Monday that young people across the country are increasingly testing positive for coronavirus, a trend that's been worrying experts as nearly half the states in the nation are now reporting overall increases in infections. "We are seeing more people test positive under the age of 35, particularly in our discussions with the leadership in Florida and in Texas," Pence said on a conference call with state governors Monday, according to audio of the call obtained by ABC News. (Faulders, Rubin, Kim and Romero, 6/22)

CNN: Public Restrooms: What You Need To Know About Using Them Safely Amid The Pandemic 
When Mariel Balaban drove across the United States in the middle of the pandemic, she knew that avoiding public restrooms was not an option for her young family. "Traveling with a toddler and being seven months pregnant means lots of 'potty stops,'" said Balaban, a communications professional who moved from San Francisco to the Philadelphia area in early April. But Balaban worried that finding safe, clean public restrooms was going to be a challenge. (Smith, 6/23)

ABC News: Coronavirus Is Pushing The US Child Care Industry To The Brink Of Collapse: Advocates 
Diana Limongi says she is heartbroken. "So I am here at my daughter's daycare, and that's it. You know, they're closing," Limongi said as she packed up her 3-year-old daughter's things from her now-closed child care center. "It's all empty. A beautiful space and both my kids went here. So I'm really, really sad." Limongi and many working parents are learning firsthand a tough reality -- the coronavirus pandemic is pushing the nation's child care industry to the brink of collapse. (Travers and Weinstein, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Movie Theaters’ Face Reopening Challenge: Becoming Covid Safe Without Alarming Customers 
As he gets ready to open his movie theaters across Illinois and Wisconsin, Chris Johnson faces a dilemma.Johnson is eager to emphasize all the measures he and his staff are taking to protect patrons from covid-19. But he’s also wary of overdoing medical talk and scaring off potential customers.“You don’t want to make all the health stuff too obvious,” said Johnson, the chief executive of Classic Cinemas, which operates 120 screens at 15 theaters. “Because if it feels like they’re checking in for a flight, they aren’t going to come. But you have to let them know somehow. So it’s really hard." (Zeitchik, 6/22)

The New York Times: A Multibillion-Dollar Opportunity: Virus-Proofing The New Office
Truework, an income verification start-up, recently introduced software to help employers keep track of their workers’ health status. Gensler, an architecture and design firm, has a workplace floor-planning app that generates social-distancing layouts for desks and other office furniture. PwC, the professional services firm, is using technology that it originally developed to track inventory for a new contact-tracing system that logs employee interactions so workers can be notified in the event of exposure to the coronavirus. (Singer and Creswell, 6/22)

The New York Times: 'Nature Deficit Disorder' Is Really A Thing
LaToya Jordan and her family have no green space by their Brooklyn apartment. So she, like many other New Yorkers, relies on the city’s playgrounds and parks to give her two children, ages 2 and 8, some exposure to nature. The outbreak of the coronavirus in New York City took away that access to green space when playgrounds closed across the city, and the city’s parks, like Prospect Park in Brooklyn, became too crowded for her children to properly social distance. (St-Esprit McKivigan, 6/23)

Kaiser Health News: The Hidden Deaths Of The COVID Pandemic
Sara Wittner had seemingly gotten her life back under control. After a December relapse in her battle with drug addiction, the 32-year-old completed a 30-day detox program and started taking a monthly injection to block her cravings for opioids. She was engaged to be married, working for a local health association and counseling others about drug addiction. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. (Hawryluk, 6/23)

The Wall Street Journal: Back To School With Covid-19 Rules: Temperature Checks, Few Sports And Lots Of Distance
As American parents and students begin to consider what school will look like in the fall, children across much of the world have returned to schools already, finding them barely recognizable, with new layouts and routines adapted for the coronavirus pandemic. Cafeterias look like exam halls with desks spaced out, temperatures are checked, shared computers are unplugged, and there are no sports. For some, yellow signs on the ground dictate which directions they should walk, with paths divided by ages. For others, school has been reduced to a few hours a day or takes place only on alternating days. (Craymer and Jeong, 6/23)

The Washington Post: College Football Faces Tougher Road To Recovery Than NFL, Former FDA Chief Says 
Playing football during the novel coronavirus pandemic presents a serious challenge, and it’s one that will be more easily solved by NFL teams than by college and high school teams, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said. “I think the professional leagues can do a lot to create a bubble around the players and test them and put in place measures to control what they do off the field as well,” Scott Gottlieb said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I think it’s going to be much more difficult for colleges to do that. First of all to implement the testing — they don’t have the resources to do it — but also to control behavior off the field.” (Boren, 6/22)

NPR: How To Start Journaling 
The term "journaling" encompasses a lot of different things: the list of birds you've seen in your neighborhood; the descriptions of sights you saw on your last vacation; the notes you jotted down about the dream you had last night. But the general, tried and true everything is a bit much in my life right now, and I have to write it down type of journaling can really help when, well, everything is a bit much. James Pennebaker, a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent decades studying "expressive writing." Basically, Pennebaker says, if you find yourself ruminating on something, "set aside some time to write about it for anywhere from five to 20 minutes a day, for one day, two days, maybe as many as five days." (Limbong, 6/23)

The New York Times: The Pets Left Behind By Covid-19
As a trained disaster responder, Dr. Robin Brennen was well versed in proper safety procedures when she entered a coronavirus patient’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in late March. She pulled on protective plastic bootees, a face mask and an eye shield. Then, with a gloved hand, she picked up the rest of her equipment: a 5-pound bag of cat kibble and a litter box. The pandemic’s devastating human toll in New York City has been well documented. But it has also affected people’s lives in ways that have gotten less attention, including what happens to the pets of those who become seriously ill. (Nir, 6/23)

CNN: Taxing Sugar Levels In Soda Could Prevent 2 Million US Cases Of Diabetes And Cardiovascular Disease, Study Says 
Cities, states and nations have been turning to sugar taxes as a potential way to improve public health in their communities, but the jury has been out on how best to implement the fine. Taxes on sugary drinks, a new study has revealed, can lead to major health gains and reductions in health care costs — but just how much of a benefit they provide can vary by the design of the tax. (Howard, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Governor Urges Masks But No New Steps As Cases Rise In Texas
Texas’ surging coronavirus numbers will not slow the state’s reopening as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday instead prescribed an emphasis on face coverings and social distancing to curtail sobering trends, including hospitalization rates that have doubled since Memorial Day. Abbott did not announce any new measures to reverse what he called “unacceptable” trends as Texas reached an 11th consecutive day of record COVID-19 hospitalizations. And while he didn’t rule out reimposing lockdown orders in Texas — describing it as a last resort — he said the virus did not require choosing “between jobs and health.” He instead emphasized long-established voluntary measures, such as staying at home if possible. (Weber, 6/22)

Houston Chronicle: Gov. Abbott Calls Coronavirus Surge ’Unacceptable,’ Urges Texans To Wear Masks In Public 
Less than a week after he downplayed rising caseloads, citing abundant medical resources and anomalies in the data, the Republican governor struck a more urgent and exasperated tone, saying many of those not yet infected seem unwilling to wear masks or take other steps that are proven to slow the spread of the virus. Abbott declined, however, to step up statewide restrictions, pointing instead to local leaders for guidance. He threatened to take “additional measures” only if infections continue to rise. (Blackman, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: With Record Texas COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Gov. Greg Abbott Warns Of More Restrictions If Cases Rise
“Wearing a mask will help us to keep Texas open because not taking action to slow the spread will cause COVID to spread even worse, risking people’s lives, and ultimately leading to the closure of businesses,” [Abbott] said. The number of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have been marching upward, including in Dallas County, since mid-June. On Monday the state reported that 3,711 people were in Texas hospitals with COVID-19 -- the most since the pandemic began and the 11th day of steady increase. (Morris, Barragan and Garrett, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: As Coronavirus Cases Rise In Arizona, New Mask Rules Spark A Fight
For weeks, even as Covid-19 cases have risen rapidly across this state, Friday night bull riding at the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse has regularly drawn nearly 1,000 people—with few of them wearing masks, according to the owner of the sprawling restaurant and entertainment venue. As photos rocketing around the internet have shown, the same has been true at many restaurants and bars in the Phoenix region. For some people, it is a matter of personal freedom. Others argue that healthy people don’t need to wear masks, though public health experts warn that asymptomatic carriers can still spread the disease to others. (Caldwell, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: Many Men Dislike Coronavirus Masks. How Can We Change That?
Darth Vader, the Minnesota Vikings and Mike Pence, who’s wearing a “Make America Great Again” face mask, walk into a bar. That may sound like the setup to a very funny (and perhaps risqué) joke, but it also hints at how to solve a deadly serious problem: getting more people — particularly the swaggeringly toxic mask-averse males of the species — to don face coverings in public to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. (Tschorn, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: As States Reopen, Workers, Executives Want Government To Make Masks Mandatory
Business executives and front-line workers are pushing government officials to require customers to wear masks, a step that could allow companies to avoid alienating a portion of the public. As coronavirus cases surge around the U.S. following reopenings in numerous states, public-health experts and many in the broader public consider the face coverings essential for slowing the spread of the new coronavirus. An equally vocal group opposes mask requirements because they think they curtail personal liberty or for other reasons. (Sayre and Sider, 6/22)

The New York Times: Virus Cases Grow, But Some Police Officers Shed Masks
When America first reported an alarming wave of coronavirus cases this year, police departments across the country swiftly raised alarm about a lack of masks and other equipment that would protect officers as they went about their essential jobs. “We just don’t have enough,” a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department complained in March about a shortage of personal protective equipment for officers. But in Chicago as well as in other cities across the nation, police officers have been seen doing their jobs in recent weeks without masks, even in places where officials have mandated they wear them and even in situations such as crowded protests over racial injustice and police abuse, in which social distancing is nearly impossible. (Searcey, Tompkins and Chiarito, 6/23)

In other equipment news —

CIDRAP: Only Half Of US States Have Ventilator Allocation Guidelines
Only 26 US states have publicly available guidelines for allocation of ventilators in a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice they contain varies widely, according to a study published late last week in JAMA Cardiology. The investigators, from Rush University in Chicago and the University of Chicago, conducted a systematic review to determine if the lack of and variation in guidelines could lead to unfair allocation of potentially scarce ventilators and whether any guidelines suggested using unique criteria for pediatric patients. (Van Beusekom, 6/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: Federal Judge: San Quentin COVID-19 Outbreak Result Of ‘Significant Failure’
A federal judge wiped away tears Friday as he addressed an increasingly disastrous coronavirus outbreak at San Quentin prison, calling the recent transfer of infected prisoners to the facility a “significant failure of policy and planning. ”U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of Oakland said during the hearing that prison officials could still save lives if they act fast in transferring medically vulnerable prisoners to a brand-new facility, use a furlough-like system of releases or allow some inmates to serve their sentences at home under house arrest. (Cassidy and Fagone, 6/22)

The Associated Press: More Than 1,100 Virus Cases Reported Behind Bars In Arizona
The combined total of county jail inmates, state prisoners and federal immigration detainees in Arizona who have tested positive for the coronavirus has surpassed 1,100 cases. Authorities report 496 positive cases among inmates in county jails, 318 among state prisoners and 317 among immigration detainees. More than 90% of the county-jail cases came in Maricopa County. Three-hundred and sixty-nine employees at jails, prisons and immigration detention centers in Arizona also have tested positive, with 147 at state prisons, 131 at detention centers and 91 in county jails. (Billeaud, 6/22)

Houston Chronicle: ‘SOS COVID-19’: Immigrants Fear For Their Lives In Houston Detention Facilities Plagued By Virus 
As COVID-19 cases continue to grow across the state and the nation, most of the attention about how the virus has impacted the incarcerated has focused on outbreaks in local jails and state prisons. Federal lockups under Immigration and Customs Enforcement responsibility, such as the Houston facility, have come under scrutiny by the courts, as well as lawmakers who have criticized how the agency is dealing with the pandemic. (Tallet, 6/11)

Politico: Partially Reopen, New York City Bears Little Resemblance To Its Former Self
Two middle-aged men stood on the corner of Maiden Lane and Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan Monday morning, surveying the quiet calamity: New York City was finally open for business, but their corner of the once bustling neighborhood was a ghost town. “People don’t want to come back to work, I guess,” the manager of Friendly Pizza remarked shortly after 9 a.m. He shifted his face mask to sip coffee from a paper cup he held with a gloved hand, as his workers inside stared at rows of untouched baked goods. “We rely on office people and if offices don’t come back, we’re done.” (Goldenberg, Durkin, Chadha and Toure, 6/22)

The New York Times: New York Tenants Fearful After Moratorium On Evictions Ends
A moratorium on evictions that New York State imposed during the coronavirus pandemic expired over the weekend, raising fears that tens of thousands of residents struggling in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression will be called into housing courts, which reopened on Monday. Housing rights groups estimate that in the coming days, 50,000 to 60,000 cases could be filed in New York City’s housing courts. In addition, thousands of cases that were already in progress but were paused in March can now resume. (Haag, 6/22)

The New York Times: N.Y.’s Legal Limbo: Pandemic Creates Backlog Of 39,200 Criminal Cases
The coronavirus outbreak is putting extraordinary stress on New York City’s judicial system, forcing lengthy delays in criminal proceedings and raising growing concerns about the rights of defendants. Since February, the backlog of pending cases in the city’s criminal courts has risen by nearly a third — to 39,200. Hundreds of jury trials in the city have been put on hold indefinitely. Arraignments, pleas and evidentiary hearings are being held by video, with little public scrutiny. Prosecutions have dropped off, too, as the authorities have tried to reduce the jail population. (Feuer, Hong, Weiser and Ransom, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: New York City Commuters Return As Phase Two Of Reopening From Coronavirus Lockdown Begins
After more than three months on lockdown, New York City began the biggest phase of its reopening on Monday, bringing a mixture of excitement and unease as some workers returned to their offices and retail businesses resumed in-store shopping. At Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, a thin but steady trickle of commuters exited their trains in the morning, many dressed in office attire for the first time in months. (Li, Yang and Honan, 6/22)

Reuters: Traffic Jams Signal Return To Normal In New York But COVID-19 Cases Jump Elsewhere
New York City residents, gradually emerging from more than 100 days of coronavirus lockdown, celebrated an easing of social-distancing restrictions on Monday by shopping at reopened stores, dining at outdoor cafes and getting their first haircuts in months. (Caspani and Layne, 6/22)

The Associated Press: California Governor, Lawmakers Agree How To Close Deficit
California will make up its estimated $54.3 billion budget deficit in part by delaying payments to public schools and imposing pay cuts on state workers, according to an agreement announced Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders. The agreement avoids billions of dollars in permanent cuts to public schools and health care programs, including proposals from Newsom that would have made fewer low-income older adults eligible for government funded health insurance and would have eliminated programs aimed at keeping people out of nursing homes where the coronavirus has spread with deadly consequences. (Beam, 6/23)

San Jose Mercury News: Gov. Newsom: California Budget Deal Avoids Teacher Layoffs
As California struggles to manage the impact of the growing coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday announced a state budget deal that avoids deep education cuts to close a cavernous deficit created by the crisis. Newsom offered few details in the deal hashed out with legislative leaders late Sunday, but he stressed that the most feared cuts to public schools that he’d called for to help close a $54.3 billion shortfall will be averted. (Angst and Woolfolk, 6/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: Newsom, Legislators Reach California Budget Deal That Counts On Federal Bailout 
Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders said Monday they have reached a budget deal that will allow California to close the multibillion-dollar deficit that has opened up during the coronavirus pandemic. The deal avoids for at least a year the steep cuts to education and safety net programs that Newsom proposed last month, but makes reductions to other public services and state worker pay unless a federal bailout materializes. (Koseff, 6/22)

Kaiser Health News: California Lawmakers Block Health Care Cuts 
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers agreed Monday on a state budget plan that would avoid the deep cuts to essential health care services that the governor had initially proposed. Even though the state faces a massive budget deficit, legislators flatly rejected Newsom’s proposed cuts to safety-net programs intended help keep older adults and low-income residents out of long-term care homes, the epicenters of coronavirus outbreaks. (Young, 6/23)

Modern Healthcare: Calif. Governor, Lawmakers Reject Hospitals' Call For $1 Billion In Relief
California's governor and key lawmakers have rejected a request from the state's hospitals for $1 billion in immediate aid to offset losses related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The state's budget deal, announced Monday, does not include the California Hospital Association's request for $1 billion in the current budget year, which ends June 30, nor does it include its $3.1 billion request from the state's share of a federal emergency waiver in next year's budget, which begins July 1. (Bannow, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: Newsom Flags Notable Increase In California Coronavirus Cases
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that hospitalizations from COVID-19 grew 16% over the last two weeks as the state reported more than 46,000 new cases of the virus, marking significant increases as more Californians begin to return to a sense of normalcy. The Democratic governor started easing his stay-at-home order roughly six weeks ago and has now allowed 54 of 58 counties in the state to open businesses again. Newsom also noted a modest uptick in the rate of positive cases — from 4.5% to 4.8% — in the last week. The number of patients in intensive care has also increased by 11% over two weeks, he said. (Luna, 6/22)

WBUR: California Hits New High In COVID-19 Hospitalizations 
As of Sunday, the latest publicly available data show that state had 3,702 hospitalized patients with confirmed cases of COVID-19, of which 1,199 were in intensive care. There were an additional 1,102 hospitalized patients with suspected COVID-19. Hospitalizations are seen as a more reliable metric for tracking the coronavirus pandemic than new case numbers as the figure does not hinge on the availability of testing. (Wamsley, 6/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: SF Looks To Speed Up Reopening Salons And Bars, Citing Encouraging Health Stats 
San Francisco officials are looking to accelerate the city’s emergence from the economic shutdown prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic by moving up the date at which certain businesses, including hair salons, museums and outdoor bars, can reopen. The next phase of San Francisco’s reopening will now take effect June 29 — rather than mid-July — provided the city gets permission from the state and that critical health indicators, like the number of hospitalizations and new cases, remain stable. (Fracassa, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: Social Gatherings Fuel Rising California Coronavirus Spread
Elevated coronavirus transmissions and related hospitalizations are worsening in some parts of California, and a failure to wear masks in public and increased gatherings are partly to blame, health officials said. Riverside and San Bernardino counties have recently appeared or reappeared on the state’s list of counties needing targeted monitoring by state officials. In both counties, increases in gatherings were a factor in elevated disease transmission, as were outbreaks at state prisons, nursing homes and patients being transferred from Imperial County, which is home to a particularly bad outbreak. (Lin, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County COVID-19 Cases Top 2,000 For Third Day In A Week
Los Angeles County health officials reported 2,571 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, the third day in the last week that the county has reported more than 2,000 infections. The number is especially high considering that cases reported on Mondays are typically lower because of limited testing on weekends and a lag in reporting. In addition, the county announced 18 additional COVID-19 deaths, bringing the death toll to 3,137. (Shalby, 6/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: Newsom Says California Could Reverse Reopening Economy If Coronavirus Cases Surge 
California could shut down part of its economy again if the state loses control of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday. Newsom warned that troubling signs have developed since the state began gradually allowing businesses to reopen last month, including a sharp increase during the past two weeks in the number of people hospitalized with coronavirus-related problems and those needing intensive care. (Gardiner, 6/22)

WBUR: California Surgeon General: Systemic Racism Is Linked To COVID-19 Pandemic 
A new California rule requires everyone to wear face masks in public as more businesses and public spaces reopen in the state this week. For some residents, the mandate is controversial even as COVID-19 hospitalizations are surging. California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris says public health officials are considering how to boost economic activity in the safest way possible. (Mosley and Hagan, 6/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: How Can Bay Area Counties Prove They Remain Safe? ‘It’s A Scoreboard’
A new state watch list meant to closely monitor counties that are struggling to contain local COVID-19 outbreaks underscores the varied complications health officers are running up against as they lift shelter-in-place restrictions and try to jump-start economies. On Monday, 11 counties were on the list, which state officials quietly unveiled last week. Contra Costa County is the only Bay Area county to to fall under scrutiny so far, though it was removed from the list after just three days when its hospitalization numbers improved. (Allday and Ho, 6/22)

The Washington Post: LAX Is Testing Thermal Cameras As A Coronavirus Health Measure 
Officials on Monday planned to announce a pilot program to test the use of thermal imaging cameras at the departures entrance and the corridor for international arrivals in the airport’s Tom Bradley International Terminal. “We’re trying to do everything we can to make sure that our airport terminals are a safe environment, and we’re making sure that we’re doing everything we can to make it healthy for people to come in,” said Justin Erbacci, chief executive of Los Angeles World Airports. (Sampson, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: Health Care School Is Ready To Start Richardson Campus Construction
A California-based vocational college is moving ahead with plans to move its local campus from Dallas to Richardson. West Coast University reached a deal with the city of Richardson last year to move its Texas nursing and health care school to a three-story building on North Central Expressway. The long-vacant Richardson office building had been owned by real estate developer KDC since 2011. The building sold to a California-based investor in September. (Brown, 6/22)

In other state news —

NBC News: California Man Who Served 30 Years For Stepmom's Murder Pleads Guilty To Killing Doctor
A Southern California man who served nearly 30 years for killing his stepmother pleaded guilty Monday to killing a retired doctor last year after he was released on parole, prosecutors said. The man, Timothy Chavira, 57, was immediately sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in the death of Dr. Editha Cruz de Leon, 76, who was killed with a sharp object in her home Dec. 7, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said in a statement. (Helsel, 6/22)

KQED: Supporters Of Sports Gambling Legalization Halt Effort For 2020 Ballot Measure 
A push to legalize sports wagering in California through a November 2020 ballot measure has been abandoned, supporters announced on Monday. The sports gambling proposal, or Senate Constitutional Amendment 6 (SCA 6), could have added California to the growing list of states that permit gambling on sporting events. But provisions in the measure that tackled thorny issues around state gaming laws drew fierce opposition from many of the state's Indian tribes, which own and operate lucrative casinos throughout the state. (Marzorati,6/22)

The Associated Press: Governor Urges Masks But No New Steps As Cases Rise In Texas
Texas’ surging coronavirus numbers will not slow the state’s reopening as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday instead prescribed an emphasis on face coverings and social distancing to curtail sobering trends, including hospitalization rates that have doubled since Memorial Day. Abbott did not announce any new measures to reverse what he called “unacceptable” trends as Texas reached an 11th consecutive day of record COVID-19 hospitalizations. And while he didn’t rule out reimposing lockdown orders in Texas — describing it as a last resort — he said the virus did not require choosing “between jobs and health.” He instead emphasized long-established voluntary measures, such as staying at home if possible. (Weber, 6/22)

Houston Chronicle: Gov. Abbott Calls Coronavirus Surge ’Unacceptable,’ Urges Texans To Wear Masks In Public 
Less than a week after he downplayed rising caseloads, citing abundant medical resources and anomalies in the data, the Republican governor struck a more urgent and exasperated tone, saying many of those not yet infected seem unwilling to wear masks or take other steps that are proven to slow the spread of the virus. Abbott declined, however, to step up statewide restrictions, pointing instead to local leaders for guidance. He threatened to take “additional measures” only if infections continue to rise. (Blackman, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: With Record Texas COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Gov. Greg Abbott Warns Of More Restrictions If Cases Rise
“Wearing a mask will help us to keep Texas open because not taking action to slow the spread will cause COVID to spread even worse, risking people’s lives, and ultimately leading to the closure of businesses,” [Abbott] said. The number of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have been marching upward, including in Dallas County, since mid-June. On Monday the state reported that 3,711 people were in Texas hospitals with COVID-19 -- the most since the pandemic began and the 11th day of steady increase. (Morris, Barragan and Garrett, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: As Coronavirus Cases Rise In Arizona, New Mask Rules Spark A Fight
For weeks, even as Covid-19 cases have risen rapidly across this state, Friday night bull riding at the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse has regularly drawn nearly 1,000 people—with few of them wearing masks, according to the owner of the sprawling restaurant and entertainment venue. As photos rocketing around the internet have shown, the same has been true at many restaurants and bars in the Phoenix region. For some people, it is a matter of personal freedom. Others argue that healthy people don’t need to wear masks, though public health experts warn that asymptomatic carriers can still spread the disease to others. (Caldwell, 6/22)

Los Angeles Times: Many Men Dislike Coronavirus Masks. How Can We Change That?
Darth Vader, the Minnesota Vikings and Mike Pence, who’s wearing a “Make America Great Again” face mask, walk into a bar. That may sound like the setup to a very funny (and perhaps risqué) joke, but it also hints at how to solve a deadly serious problem: getting more people — particularly the swaggeringly toxic mask-averse males of the species — to don face coverings in public to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. (Tschorn, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: As States Reopen, Workers, Executives Want Government To Make Masks Mandatory
Business executives and front-line workers are pushing government officials to require customers to wear masks, a step that could allow companies to avoid alienating a portion of the public. As coronavirus cases surge around the U.S. following reopenings in numerous states, public-health experts and many in the broader public consider the face coverings essential for slowing the spread of the new coronavirus. An equally vocal group opposes mask requirements because they think they curtail personal liberty or for other reasons. (Sayre and Sider, 6/22)

The New York Times: Virus Cases Grow, But Some Police Officers Shed Masks
When America first reported an alarming wave of coronavirus cases this year, police departments across the country swiftly raised alarm about a lack of masks and other equipment that would protect officers as they went about their essential jobs. “We just don’t have enough,” a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department complained in March about a shortage of personal protective equipment for officers. But in Chicago as well as in other cities across the nation, police officers have been seen doing their jobs in recent weeks without masks, even in places where officials have mandated they wear them and even in situations such as crowded protests over racial injustice and police abuse, in which social distancing is nearly impossible. (Searcey, Tompkins and Chiarito, 6/23)

In other equipment news —

CIDRAP: Only Half Of US States Have Ventilator Allocation Guidelines
Only 26 US states have publicly available guidelines for allocation of ventilators in a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice they contain varies widely, according to a study published late last week in JAMA Cardiology. The investigators, from Rush University in Chicago and the University of Chicago, conducted a systematic review to determine if the lack of and variation in guidelines could lead to unfair allocation of potentially scarce ventilators and whether any guidelines suggested using unique criteria for pediatric patients. (Van Beusekom, 6/22)

ABC News: Minnesota Sees No Rise In COVID-19 Cases Tied To Protests: Health Official 
Infectious disease experts have warned that mass protests over the death of George Floyd could lead to another wave of COVID-19 infections. So far, Minneapolis, where the protest activity originated, has not seen a dramatic uptick in cases related to the demonstrations, the state's Department of Health told ABC News Monday. As of late last week, 4,487 tests conducted across four testing sites specifically for protesters resulted in 62 positive cases of COVID-19, for a positivity rate of 1.4%, the department said. (Deliso and Hoyos, 6/22)

NPR: Meatpacking Workers Are Getting Tested — But Some Say Not Often Enough 
Back in April, the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, was a poster child for corporate failure to protect workers from the coronavirus. Dozens of plant employees every day were showing up in clinics with symptoms of COVID-19. Nafissa Cisse Egbuonye, the public health director for Black Hawk County, Iowa, where the plant is located, recalls telling plant managers: "There is a huge volume [of cases]. There is an outbreak!" At the time, no one knew the scale of the outbreak. Cisse Egbuonye told Tyson's managers that they needed to test every single one of their employees: "You have to get a sense of what's going on in the plant." (Charles, 6/22)

Reuters: Life Care Fired Staffer Who Revealed Nursing Home Nightmare To Reuters
A nursing home owned by Life Care Centers of America Inc has fired one nurse and banned another from the premises after the two were quoted in a Reuters investigation detailing horrific conditions, a staff exodus and a botched management response to the facility’s deadly COVID-19 outbreak. (Kirkham, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Kansas Labor Secretary Resigns Amid Unemployment Missteps
Kansas Labor Secretary Delia Garcia, who was already under attack for the slow processing of unemployment claims during the pandemic, has resigned after her agency pushed the bank accounts of an unknown number of jobless residents into the red, the governor said Monday. Gov. Laura Kelly announced she had accepted Garcia’s resignation on Sunday night and appointed the governor’s Deputy Chief of Staff Ryan Wright to serve in an acting role until a permanent candidate can be nominated. (6/22)

The Associated Press: South Carolina Beaches Fill, But COVID-19 Takes No Vacation
The elevator doors opened and inside were 10 people crammed into a space no bigger than a closet, none of them wearing a mask. In bathing suits, they walked out of the hotel, across the pool deck and into the sand in what is fast becoming South Carolina’s hot spot for COVID-19 — Myrtle Beach. People in this resort city are leaving their cares — and sometimes their face coverings — at home after months of worry as hotels, restaurants and beaches reopen. (Collins, 6/23)

The Washington Post: Metro To Reopen 15 Stations As Coronavirus Restrictions Are Lifted 
Metro has accelerated its plan to restore service from the skeletal operation it has been running during the coronavirus pandemic, a shift partly driven by federal agencies that are headed back into the office sooner than expected. On Monday, the transit agency announced that on Sunday, 15 Metro stations that have been closed since late March, when most of the Washington region was shut down, will reopen. (George and Rein, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Budgets Put Limits On Social Distancing Options For Schools
As schools consider how and when to reopen their buildings during the pandemic, many are finding themselves overwhelmed by the potential expenses that would come with operating under social distancing guidelines: protective equipment, staff for smaller classrooms, and additional transportation to keep students spread out on bus rides. The burdens loom large in particular for urban, under-resourced districts that often have neither the space nor the budgets to accommodate new health protocols. (Catalini and Melia, 6/23)

CBS News: Coronavirus Cases Surging In Florida And Texas As States Barrel Ahead With Reopening Plans 
The U.S. is seeing a dangerous increase in coronavirus cases in the South and West. As the nation pushes forward with re-opening, half of all states are now averaging more new cases each day than they have in weeks. A fifth of new infections globally are in the U.S. Florida and Texas are setting records for positive tests, and their governors are warning they may need to crack down on people who aren't social distancing. (Bojorquez, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: ‘Alarming’ Trend Of Dallas County COVID-19 Cases Could Worsen By Fourth Of July, UTSW Experts Say
With the Fourth of July weekend approaching, local disease experts are warning of troubling trends in the coronavirus epidemic. The number of people requiring hospitalization for the disease is rising. A bigger proportion of tests at hospitals are coming back positive. And the disease is increasing in younger residents, with some so sick they need care in the ICU. (Hacker, Ambrose and Keomoungkhoun, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: Dallas County Again Sets Single-Day Coronavirus Record As New Cases Jump To 454
Dallas County reported a record 454 new coronavirus cases Monday — 10% more than the previous single-day high of 413, set five days earlier. County officials also announced three more deaths from COVID-19: a Dallas man in his 30s who was found at his home, a Dallas man in his 40s who had been hospitalized and an Irving man in his 60s who also had been hospitalized. (Steele, 6/22)

Dallas Morning News: Poll Of North Texans Shows Big Concern About Jobs Lost To Coronavirus But Also About Safety
While a plurality of North Texans believe coronavirus-driven business closures are the most important issue facing the region, most consumers are personally wary about venturing back out to shop and work again, according to a new poll. Almost two-thirds of adults in the Dallas-Fort Worth area think it’s a risk to their health to return to their normal, pre-coronavirus lives and 62% see risk in going to the grocery store, the poll released Monday by the nonpartisan think tank Texas 2036 found. (Garrett, 6/22)

NBC News: End Of Lockdown, Memorial Day Add Up To Increase In Coronavirus Cases, Experts Say
The spike in coronavirus cases in Florida, Arizona, Oregon and other Southern and Western states can be traced back to around Memorial Day, when officials began loosening their lockdowns, health experts said Monday. And in about two weeks, hospitals in those states could find themselves struggling to find enough beds for patients, one of the nation's top public health experts warned. (Siemaszko, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Florida’s Surging Coronavirus Numbers Complicate Return Of Sports 
Needing a place to resume its season, the NBA in early June announced it would sequester all 22 of its teams that will return to competition in Florida. The state had opened its arms to sports leagues, and Disney World offered requisite court space and lodging. Crucially, Florida’s novel coronavirus statistics were under control. And the NBA crafted a 113-page plan, praised by outside experts for its thoroughness and feasibility. After months of toiling to salvage its season, the NBA had seemingly found a solution.Now it has a problem. (Kilgore, 6/22)

Politico: ‘Government Itself Can’t Solve This Problem’: Florida Officials Alarmed As Virus Rages
Florida officials expressed new concern on Monday that the tactics used to slow the spread of the coronavirus are falling short and may not be enough to stop a resurgence of positive cases before the state hosts part of the Republican National Convention in August. Top Republican politicians and the state official leading Florida’s response to the pandemic urged businesses and residents — particularly young people — to stay vigilant about social distancing, leaving the fight in the hands of some of the same people who helped fuel the latest uptick in cases. (Sarkissian and Oprysko, 6/22)

CIDRAP: Florida 1 Of 7 States With More Than 100,000 COVID-19 Cases
According to the Washington Post, 29 states in the past 7 days have recorded increasing COVID-19 case counts, and Florida has joined New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California, Texas, and Massachusetts in states reporting more than 100,000 cases. Today the Sunshine State recorded 2,926 cases, bringing its official total to 100,217 cases, including 3,173 deaths. The Miami Herald says new cases have been trending upward since mid-May, when the state started relaxing physical distancing and stay-at-home measures. The uptick could not be solely explained by an increase in testing, the paper argues. (Soucheray, 6/22)

Boston Globe: Rhode Island Is The First State To Test 20 Percent Of Its Residents For The Coronavirus 
Rhode Island is the first state to test 20 percent of its population for the coronavirus, Governor Gina M. Raimondo announced Monday. And while President Trump suggested during a campaign rally Saturday that he directed his administration to slow coronavirus testing to keep the national case count down, Raimondo said Rhode Island is planning to speed up testing. (Fitzpatrick, 6/22)

The Washington Post: At The Woodner, D.C.’s Largest Apartment Building, Coronavirus Has Sickened Some Residents And Scared Many More
The secret social hub of the Woodner apartment building in Northwest Washington used to be its mailroom. Residents who took the elevator down from their apartments overlooking the P-shaped swimming pool and walked through the lobby where Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington once lounged would duck in to pick up packages and find themselves staying for half an hour. (Zauzmer, 6/22)

In other state news —

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Georgia Senate Backs Maternal Mortality Bill
Georgia senators unanimously approved a bill Monday designed to cut back on the state’s stubbornly high maternal mortality rate. An amended version of House Bill 1114 now heads back to the House, where legislators have only a few days to act before the end of the 2020 session. (Hallerman, 6/22)

Albuquerque Journal: NM Again Ranks Last In Child Well-Being  
New Mexico may be on top of things in tamping down coronavirus, but it’s still dead last in the nation in child well-being, according to the national 2020 Kids Count Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. (Nathanson, 6/22)

Reuters: Coronavirus Cases Soar In Big Countries, Especially Brazil, WHO Says
Coronavirus cases are soaring in several major countries at the same time, with “worrying increases” in Latin America, especially Brazil, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. The world recorded more than 183,000 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, the most in a single day since the outbreak started in December, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. (Nebehay and Revill, 6/22)

CIDRAP: Global COVID-19 Total Quickly Tops 9 Million
Fueled by surges in countries with large populations such as Brazil, the United States, and India, the global COVID-19 total jumped to 9 million cases today, as the world registered its highest 1-day total of 183,000 cases. It only took 6 days for the pandemic total to rise from 8 million to 9 million cases, 2 days less than it took for the number to rise from 7 million to 8 million. The total now stands at 9,015,582, and 469,378 people have died from their infections, according to the Johns Hopkins online dashboard. (Schnirring, 6/22)

The Associated Press: Virus Numbers Surge Globally As Many Nations Ease Lockdowns
The number of global coronavirus cases continued to surge Tuesday in many large countries that have been lifting lockdowns, including the U.S., even as new infections stabilized or dropped in parts of Western Europe. India has been recording about 15,000 new infections each day, and some states Tuesday were considering fresh lockdown measures to try to halt the spread of the virus in the nation of more than 1.3 billion. The government earlier lifted a nationwide lockdown in a bid to restart the ailing economy, which has shed millions of jobs. (Perry, 6/23)

The Washington Post: Experts Abroad Watch U.S. Coronavirus Case Numbers With Alarm 
As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored. “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines. (Noack, 6/22)

The Hill: US COVID-19 Cases Rise, Marking Ugly Contrast With Europe 
New U.S. coronavirus cases are rising again in a worrying new sign for the country’s outbreak. The number of new cases nationally climbed above 30,000 per day over the weekend, after having leveled off at around 20,000 per day for weeks. The new spike is even more striking given the contrast with major European countries that were hit hard by the virus but are now doing much better and have so far been able to keep new cases low. (Sullivan, 6/22)

NPR: Saudi Arabia Announces This Year's Hajj Will Be 'Very Limited'
The Ministry of Hajj and Umrah cited the lack of an available vaccine and the risks of crowded gatherings. "This decision is taken to ensure Hajj is performed in a safe manner from a public health perspective while observing all preventative measures and the necessary social distancing protocols to protect human beings from the risks associated with this pandemic and in accordance with the teachings of Islam in preserving the lives of human beings," the statement said. (Treisman, 6/22)

NPR: Barcelona Opera Reopens With An Audience Of Plants
When Barcelona's Liceu opera opened on Monday for its first concert since mid-March, it did so to a full house — of plants. The Gran Teatre del Liceu filled its 2,292 seats with plants for a performance by the UceLi Quartet, which it called a prelude to its 2020-2021 season. The string quartet serenaded its leafy audience with Giacomo Puccini's "Crisantemi," in a performance that was also made available to human listeners via livestream. (Treisman, 6/22)

NPR: Johnson & Johnson To Stop Selling 2 Lines Of Skin-Lightening Products Popular In Asia 
Johnson & Johnson has announced it will discontinue two lines of skin-lightening products popular in Asia, making it one of the latest major companies to change business tactics seen as racist amid the global debate over racial inequality. "Conversations over the past few weeks highlighted that some product names or claims on our Neutrogrena and Clean & Clear dark spot reducer products represent fairness or white as better than your own unique skin tone," Johnson & Johnson said in a statement emailed to NPR. "This was never our intention – healthy skin is beautiful skin." (Westerman, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Britain Coronavirus: Can London's The Eagle Pub Survive Pandemic? 
Michael Belben paces the wooden floor of The Eagle, trying to imagine pub life in a coronavirus world. Chairs are stacked in a dusty jumble. A box of blue latex gloves sits on a ledge. A worn, green leather sofa, a choice seat at Sunday brunch, has been shoved aside, under a window bearing a message in jaunty script: “We’ll Be Back!” Belben, gray hair flopping, is focused on making that happen. (Spolar, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Train Drain: How Social Distancing Is Transforming Mass Transit
As coronavirus-related restrictions are lifted around the world with the reopening of economies, authorities face a new challenge: how to enforce social distancing and prevent new outbreaks while allowing more people to return to mass transit. Asian cities like Hong Kong and Seoul have decided against imposing strict social-distancing measures to facilitate a return to pre-pandemic passenger traffic. (Morenne and Ngo, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Two Meters? One Meter Plus? Social Distancing Rules Prompt Fierce Debate In U.K. 
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is being asked to answer one of the most devilish questions of the pandemic: What's the difference between two meters and one meter of social distancing, for public health and for saving the economy? Or, asked another way, how much does it matter if restaurant diners or pub crawlers are required to be separated by six feet vs. three feet, more or less, with one meter being equal to 3.28084 feet? (Booth, 6/22)

The New York Times: Sweden Tries Out A New Status: Pariah State
Every summer for the past 13 years, fans of Nordic culture have gathered on the Norway side of the border with Sweden for the outdoor festival Allsang pa Grensen, which translates roughly to, “Singsong Along the Border.” But this summer, there will not be any Swedish singers in the live broadcast event, nor will there be any Swedish fans in the audience, singing and clapping along. This year, Swedes are forbidden to enter Norway. And Norway isn’t the only Scandinavian neighbor barring Swedes from visiting this summer. (Erdbrink, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Carnival Cruise Ship Nurses Delivered A Baby Girl — On A Plane 
When a woman went into labor on an Emirates flight from London to Manila, there were two fellow passengers well equipped to help: nurses heading home from their jobs on a Carnival cruise ship.The drama unfolded Saturday at 37,000 feet, according to Carnival Cruise Line, when the unidentified expectant mother went into labor. It was not clear how far along she was in her pregnancy; Emirates did not immediately respond to questions about the birth Monday. (Sampson, 6/22)

The Washington Post: The U.S. Is Falling Behind Its Peers. Americans — If Not Their Leaders — Are Starting To Notice.
Americans’ belief in American exceptionalism is declining — and that could be a good thing. National narcissism has rendered us complacent, even impotent, in the face of multiple crises. On our biggest societal problems, the United States seems to have given up. Not because we can’t do better — but because many political leaders, particularly Republicans, apparently don’t think we need to. Their faith that America is already Living Its Best Life means there’s no need to learn from peer countries, or even gauge our relative performance. (Catherine Rampell, 6/22)

The New York Times: America Is Too Broken To Fight The Coronavirus
Graphs of the coronavirus curves in Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy look like mountains, with steep climbs up and then back down. The one for America shows a fast climb up to a plateau. For a while, the number of new cases in the U.S. was at least slowly declining. Now, according to The Times, it’s up a terrifying 22 percent over the last 14 days. As Politico reported on Monday, Italy’s coronavirus catastrophe once looked to Americans like a worst-case scenario. Today, it said, “America’s new per capita cases remain on par with Italy’s worst day — and show signs of rising further.” (Michelle Goldberg, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Trump Has Raised The White Flag In The Fight Against Covid-19
In addition to being a poorly attended political flop featuring a defensive, bigoted and barely coherent harangue, President Trump’s recent campaign rally in Tulsa was a presidential declaration of surrender to covid-19. It is not possible to maintain that the United States is in a public health crisis while inviting thousands of people to yell spittle-flinging approval in an enclosed space. The provision of masks at the event was a transparent pretense. The Trump campaign must have known that the hardest core of Trump supporters would follow the example of their dear leader by going maskless. It has become a defining characteristic of MAGA macho to practice unprotected social intercourse. (Michael Gerson, 6/22)

Bloomberg: Arizona, Florida, Texas Can Cut Covid Spread Without Lockdowns
Whether you call it a second wave or, more accurately, the easily foreseeable continuation of a pandemic, Covid-19 is still spreading unchecked in several American states. Florida, Arizona, Texas and other states are reporting record numbers of new cases. And many are neglecting to take steps that could prevent outbreaks from expanding into possibly unmanageable surges in Covid-19 cases and deaths. State leaders understandably resist the notion of issuing new stay-at-home orders, which would be painful, unpopular and at this point difficult to enforce. (Max Nisen, 6/22)

The New York Times: A Plague Of Willful Ignorance
In the early 20th century the American South was ravaged by pellagra, a nasty disease that produced the “four Ds” — dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death. At first, pellagra’s nature was uncertain, but by 1915 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a Hungarian immigrant employed by the federal government, had conclusively shown that it was caused by nutritional deficiencies associated with poverty, and especially with a corn-based diet. However, for decades many Southern citizens and politicians refused to accept this diagnosis, declaring either that the epidemic was a fiction created by Northerners to insult the South or that the nutritional theory was an attack on Southern culture. And deaths from pellagra continued to climb. Sound familiar? (Paul Krugman, 6/22)

Stat: Challenge Trials Aren't The Answer To A Speedy Covid-19 Vaccine 
More than 25,000 people have volunteered so far to be infected with the novel coronavirus through 1DaySooner, an online recruitment organization, as an aid in testing vaccine candidates to prevent Covid-19. These volunteers know that Covid-19 can cause suffering and even death yet they are stepping forward, willing to risk their lives, because some researchers and academics contend that such experiments in humans could accelerate vaccine development. (Michael Rosenblatt, 6/23)

The Wall Street Journal: Lockdown States And The Jobless
The Labor Department on Friday reported jobless rates in May for the 50 states, and the news is the greater than usual variation. Some state economies are recovering much faster than others, and the worst performing tend to be those that have imposed the most severe lockdowns. The national jobless rate was 13.3% in May, but 10 states still have unemployment rates above 15%. From highest down, they are: Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California, Rhode Island and Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois and New Jersey (15.2%), and Washington state (15.1%). (6/21)

The Hill: CEOs Need To Do More For COVID
Even as most businesses reopen across the nation, the economic recovery is anemic. As of June 10, consumer spending is down 11.3 percent compared to January 2020 levels. The lackluster performance is partly due to high unemployment, but customers’ fear of contracting the virus is also significant. At the end of May and early June, 70 percent of Texans reported avoiding some or all restaurants, even though the state allowed all restaurants to open at 50 percent capacity. (Vivian Ho, 6/22)

The Hill: Get The 'F' Out Of The FDA
The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way Americans think about public health. There’s little doubt that government officials, corporations and citizens need to do a much better job of working together — and some regulatory agencies are clearly getting in the way. As our Mercatus Center colleague, the noted economist Tyler Cowen, bluntly (but fairly) put it, “Our regulatory state is failing us.” When it comes to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the failure is so dramatic that it might be time for the agency to be dismantled, at least partially.  (Patrick McLaughlin and Trace Mitchell, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Colombia Planned Well For The Pandemic. The Region Is Reeling.
Colombian President Iván Duque began a lockdown in March that has spared his country some of the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. But that hasn’t helped his neighbors in hard-hit Latin America, and Duque says the lesson is that countries must work better together to prevent the spread of disease. “This pandemic could have been better managed by all of us if we had better multilateral coordination when the problem first started,” Duque said in a telephone interview Wednesday from Bogota. Countries in Latin America that resisted “draconian measures” like those taken in Colombia, hoping to protect their economies, have been hit hardest, he said. (David Ignatius, 6/22)

The Hill: Another COVID-19 Victim: International Education 
Whether COVID-19 is the “last nail” in the coffin of globalization, as Carmen Reinhart, the incoming chief economist of the World Bank, recently remarked, remains to be seen. One thing is more certain: The United States’ prominence in international education is likely to be COVID-19’s latest fatality. That will be yet another heartbreaking loss we will all share if we don’t act quickly. (Phyllis Pomerantz, 6/22)

Modern Healthcare: Amid COVID-19, Telehealth May Help Advance Precision Medicine
Despite precision medicine being touted as the future of healthcare, many Americans are still not familiar with it. This is unfortunate as precision medicine can help identify which therapies will be most effective for individual patients based on their genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. Yet, cost and access remain two primary barriers to its adoption, as not all insurance plans cover these services and genetic testing is often done in academic settings or urban centers. (Fuki Hisama, 6/19)

Dallas Morning News: At An Inflection Point, Texas Can Emerge As A Leader For The Nation’s Biggest Challenges
There are people marching in the streets, marking almost a month now of daily demonstrations to encourage America to deal with its history of injustice and inequality.Against the backdrop of all that, state and local governments are about to navigate a budgeting process that will undoubtedly be affected by this moment. Dallas ISD is moving forward with the largest bond election in its history — something voters might be hesitant to embrace this year. The city of Dallas is reviewing its public safety budget. And in a few months, state lawmakers will return to Austin to hash out new political maps for the House, Senate and Board of Education, among other important topics. (6/21)

Dallas Morning News: DACA Texans Are Essential To Our COVID-19 Response And Economic Future
While the court ruling is a temporary win, it’s just that — temporary. We need DACA recipients’ economic and community contributions to become permanent. Please help us urge Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz to pass legislation such as the American Dream and Promise Act. It’s what’s best for our state and our economy and we can’t afford to lose these workers, DACA recipients, especially now. (Chris Wallace, 6/22)

The Wall Street Journal: What The Data Say About Police
I have led two starkly different lives—that of a Southern black boy who grew up without a mother and knows what it’s like to swallow the bitter pill of police brutality, and that of an economics nerd who believes in the power of data to inform effective policy. In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force. To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often. (Roland G. Fryer, 6/22)

The Washington Post: Congress Must Reopen The Courts To People Whose Rights Are Violated By Police
As white supremacist terrorist violence raged across the South in April 1871, Congress adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act to protect African Americans. Its first section authorized those whose constitutional rights had been violated by anyone acting “under color of” state law to sue for damages. Still on the books, that provision is the legal basis of most police brutality claims today. (6/21)

The New York Times: Trump Exploits The Coronavirus Pandemic To Hurt Immigrant Children
The Supreme Court decision last week protecting the DACA program was reason for celebration, but the Trump administration’s assault on immigration isn’t over. President Trump has already said he plans to keep pushing to end DACA. But more immediately, under the guise of the pandemic, the Trump administration is turning back unaccompanied children at the border in violation of federal law. In October 2017 the White House issued a wish list of immigration policies it wanted to carry out. First on the list was building the border wall. No. 2 was deporting children who were traveling on their own. That is quietly happening right now, with public health as the excuse. (Maria Woltjen, 6/22)

The Washington Post: A Cruel HHS Regulation Shows The Battle For Transgender Rights Isn’t Over
When President Trump's administration proposed a rule last summer seeking to roll back non-discrimination protections for transgender people in health care, 155,966 public comments came through in response. Yet the final product released this month is nearly identical to the original — just as insidious and now, according to the precedent set by the Supreme Court last week, just as likely illegal. The Department of Health and Human Services regulation is part of a pattern: This White House has made it its mission to restrict transgender rights in areas from housing to education to, now, health. The Affordable Care Act, like many other laws, has a provision preventing discrimination on the basis of sex. (6/22)