Live updates: Georgia strikes down local mask mandates as U.S. approaches 3.5 million coronavirus cases - The Washington Post

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The Republican Party will hold a scaled-back convention in Jacksonville next month that includes a mix of outdoor and indoor venues, according to a letter sent to delegates.

The Thursday letter from Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, obtained by The Washington Post, said admittance will be limited to only regular delegates for the first three days of the convention — or about 2,500 people.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said Wednesday school districts “should prioritize” reopening schools, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs, but federal and state government must provide “substantial” new funding to school districts to help.

Brian Kemp (R) signed an executive order Wednesday night explicitly banning cities from enacting their own mask mandates, even as the state experiences a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and other Republican governors are turning to mask orders to try to quell the surge.

The governor had previously tried to ban cities and counties from passing any coronavirus restrictions that went further than Georgia’s guidelines.

Spain held a state memorial ceremony on Thursday for the more than 28,000 people in the country who died of the novel coronavirus, amid concerns over new outbreaks in the country, including in Catalonia.

The European Union was criticized early in the pandemic for being ill-prepared and too slow in its efforts to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, but Spain and other countries hope that the European Union will play a key role in the economic recovery phase.

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Unemployment in Britain has remained low during the coronavirus pandemic, according to new government data released Thursday, but that may not be the case for long.

BEIJING — China’s economy has recovered rapidly from coronavirus shutdowns and has started to grow again, figures showed Thursday, leading analysts here to crow that the country was best-in-class at dealing with the pandemic.

Indeed, President Xi Jinping said in a letter released Thursday that China was dealing with the pandemic and making progress on his top two economic goals.

Nearly 1 in 3 Florida children screened for the novel coronavirus have tested positive, according to data published by the state, spurring fears about the virus’s little-understood impact on young people and asymptomatic spread.

More than 17,073 children had tested positive for the virus in Florida by July 9, according to the state’s data.

… We don’t know how that is going to manifest a year from now or two years from now,” Alonso said, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Florida has reported 13 cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children with the virus, with more than half of those diagnoses occurring in children younger than 14.

Across the state, 31 percent of the 54,022 children who have been screened for the virus or its antigens tested positive.

The number of positive cases in children has jumped considerably since June 26, when the state was reporting that 7,197 children had tested positive.

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The owner of two Bangladesh hospitals is accused of falsifying thousands of coronavirus test results before attempting to flee the country disguised in a burqa, Agence France-Presse reported.

Fraudulent test certificates are a growing problem in Bangladesh, which has seen an uptick in new coronavirus cases this month.

According to the Dhaka Tribune, some office workers seek out forged documents so that they can claim to have tested positive and get time off.

A number of Bangladeshis who tested positive upon arriving in Rome last week had certificates claiming that they were negative, he said.

Bangladesh has reported nearly 196,000 coronavirus cases to date, a number widely believed to be an undercount.

Two days after a WNBA-appointed panel of doctors denied an exemption to Delle Donne, who has battled Lyme disease for 12 years, the player penned “An Open Letter About My Health” that detailed the measures she takes to fight the disease and some of her frustrations with the league for denying her a medical exemption amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic has for the first time infected one of the nation’s governors.

After President Trump posted a photo that showed him beaming behind a spread of Goya-brand food products, his critics lashed out over what they saw as a frivolous distraction amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic.

“You tell me how a president, in the middle of a pandemic, has time for this bulls---,” Cuomo said.