Global Death Toll From Virus Surpasses 800,000

The extraordinary rise in deaths, adjusted for the country’s population, is more than twice as high as that of the United States, and far higher than the increases in Britain, Italy and Spain.

In the United States, deaths continued to hover near a seven-day average of 1,000 per day, or 2 per 100,000, with more than 175,000 deaths recorded to date.

While statistics for the global death toll have been marred by backlogs, incomplete data and variations in reporting between different countries, the sobering milestone served as a reminder of the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, which has proved to be one of the most lethal in a generation.

A movie starring Ben Affleck will not be filmed in the U.S. as originally planned because of the country’s high number of coronavirus cases and its limited availability of tests, the studio said. Instead, production of the film, “Hypnotic,” will move to Canada.

It was the latest disruption among Hollywood studios, which have slowly resumed business after shutting down countless productions in the spring.

“There is nowhere in the U.S. where we can start a big movie now due to gathering restrictions — our crew is 100-plus people — shortage of tests and delays in lab results,” Mr. Gill said.

Mr. Gill said other Hollywood studios would probably also shift production to countries more equipped to handle the virus, at least until the outbreak in the United States has been brought under control.

As cases in California increased in April, the studio considered moving production to Austin, Texas, then to London. It settled on Canada because the country has sufficient testing and quick lab response time, Mr. Gill said.

According to guidelines set by the SAG-AFTRA, the union for the cast and crew, all of its members should be tested before they start work on a film, and at least three times a week during production.

Health officials in South Dakota said this week that they had traced several cases to a popular bar along Sturgis’s main street, where photos showed thousands of people congregating without masks over the course of the rally.

An analysis of the geographical footprint of the rally’s attendees by a company using anonymized cellphone location data showed that the event drew participants from across the country, prompting fears that infections could spread further. The map of migration patterns associated with the rally showed participants traveling to Sturgis from locations across the continental United States, and back.

The country’s Supreme Court on Friday allowed three Jain temples to open for a two-day festival in Mumbai, the Indian city hit hardest by the pandemic, raising concern that the religious shrines will become super-spreader sites.

After petitions were circulated by some religious groups, the court had last month advocated the reopening of places of worship, arguing that the livestreaming of rituals was an inadequate substitute for physical visits to the sites.

But many regional governments in the country are continuing to restrict public gatherings. In the northern state of Punjab, the chief minister has limited them to no more than four people.

India, a nation of 1.3 billion people, on Sunday announced 69,239 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the previous 24 hours — the fifth consecutive day on which more than 60,000 new cases were added. As of Sunday morning, it had recorded a total of 3,044,940 cases and 56,706 deaths, according to a Times database.

In recent months, there have been complaints across the country of shortages of hospital beds, and many people have accused the government of not making the most of the gains made during the lockdown.

As public markets and other spaces were allowed to reopen with little social distancing, cases began rising in congested localities. Now, India’s confirmed caseload has climbed from two million to more than three million in just over two weeks.

In other developments around the world:

• South Korea on Sunday reported 397 new cases, its highest daily increase since early March, amid fears that an outbreak at a church in Seoul, the capital, was spreading to the rest of the country. On Sunday, a ban in Seoul on large gatherings — as well as the shutdown of nightclubs, karaoke rooms and other high-risk facilities — was extended nationwide.

• Lebanon is under partial lockdown after a dramatic spike in virus cases in the aftermath of the devastating Aug. 4 explosion at the Beirut port. The rules, which took effect on Friday, include a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., with exceptions for pharmacies, grocery stores and disaster relief efforts around the port. Markets, gyms, restaurants and other public spaces were ordered to close until the lockdown ends on Sept. 7. The country has recorded 3,749 cases in the last seven days, according to a New York Times database, bringing its total number of cases to 12,191. Of the 121 total deaths, 24 of them were in the last seven days.

In Germany, researchers organized a concert to figure out how the virus spreads at big events.

Researchers from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg will spend weeks analyzing the data to determine when and where transmission of the virus was most likely to occur at the venue.

On Friday, the German authorities registered 2,034 cases, its highest daily total since the end of April, when the country managed to slow the spread of the virus through a countrywide lockdown.

Who is policing student behavior on campus? Residence hall advisers and students themselves.

Struggling to salvage some normalcy — and revenue — from a crippling pandemic, more than a third of the country’s 5,000 campuses are trying limited openings, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. There are strict rules: No parties. Mandated coronavirus tests or routine self-checks for symptoms. No setting foot into public spaces without masks.

Recent videos from several campuses — such as the University of North Georgia — have shown scores or hundreds of students gathering without masks or social distance. On Wednesday, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moved undergraduates to remote instruction after at least 177 students tested positive, largely in clusters linked to dormitories, sororities and fraternities.

The Republican convention, which begins on Monday, will feature a gathering of 336 representatives who will nominate President Trump from the city’s Convention Center.

The final design for the event still bows to the dangers of the pandemic. Much of the convention will take place online, and attendees of the in-person segment will be instructed to wear masks and observe social distancing.

But Republican operatives have said that the decision to preserve the in-person segment was choreographed to contrast with the fully-online Democratic convention and drum up enthusiasm from voters about Mr. Trump’s nomination.

“Waving the middle finger to public health guidelines, the ‘political establishment’ and the ‘mainstream media’ in the form of an in-person roll call amid the pandemic is a great way to invigorate his hard-core base,” said Lucy Caldwell, a Republican strategist.

The House interrupted its annual summer recess on Saturday for a rare weekend session to approve legislation blocking cost-cutting and operational changes at the Postal Service — moves that Democrats, civil rights advocates and some Republicans fear could jeopardize mail-in voting this fall.

Djokovic is ranked No. 1 and remains a perfect 18-0 in 2020, just as he was when the pandemic-related hiatus began in March.

But he was hardly a big winner during the forced off-season. He generated concern and controversy by questioning vaccination and claiming that water could be affected by human emotions. And he dented his credibility and brand by organizing the Adria Tour, a charity exhibition series in Serbia and Croatia in June that lacked in social distancing and decorum, leading to a cluster of coronavirus cases. It was canceled before the finish with several leading players and some support staff testing positive.

Djokovic and his wife, Jelena, were among them, and they isolated for two weeks with their two young children in their native city of Belgrade, Serbia.

“We tried to do something with the right intentions,” Djokovic said of the tour. “Yes, there were some steps that could have been done differently, of course, but am I going to be then forever blamed for doing a mistake?” he told The Times’s Christopher Clarey.

Djokovic said his own virus symptoms were mild, lasting four to five days. He said he had no fever but did have fatigue and some loss of smell and taste and sensed some loss of stamina when he initially returned to practice. He’s monitoring himself for long-term effects.

Now this city, so linked with the natural wonder just off its shore that it can scarcely imagine life without the visitors who come in droves, has been forced to confront the prospect that it can no longer depend on tourists.

Foreign and local travelers, already deterred by last summer’s devastating bush fires and now locked out by Australia’s international and domestic travel bans, have all but vanished, and a $4.6 billion industry built around the world’s largest living structure has ground to a near halt.

The sudden disappearance of visitors feels all the more unreal because the virus itself has barely touched Cairns: The city of 150,000 people in far northeastern Australia has recorded only a couple of dozen cases, and currently has none.

But there is no escaping the pandemic’s reach.

In Cairns, visitors who usually cram the jetty every morning as they wait to pile onto boats have dwindled from the thousands to a few hundred, leaving operators out of work, boats moored at the dock, and some hotels and restaurants shuttered.

On the first day of school in Camden County, Ga., local Facebook groups were buzzing with rumors that a teacher had tested positive. The next day, a warning went out to school administrators: Keep teachers quiet.

“Staff who test positive are not to notify any other staff members, parents of their students or any other person/entity that they may have exposed them,” Jon Miller, the district’s deputy superintendent, wrote in a confidential email on Aug. 5.

In the weeks since, parents, students and teachers in the community have heard by word of mouth of more positive cases linked to district schools. Some parents said they had been called by local officials and told that their children should quarantine.

But even as fears of an outbreak have grown, the district has not publicly confirmed a single case, either to the local community or to The New York Times.

As schools in parts of the country have reopened classrooms amid a still-raging pandemic, some districts have sent weekly — and in some cases daily — reports to families and updated online dashboards with the latest positive test results and quarantine counts. Others districts have been silent, sometimes citing privacy concerns.

On the other end of the spectrum, Oklahoma does not require school districts to report Covid-19 cases to health departments. Tennessee this week backed away from a previous commitment by the governor to report the number of cases linked to schools, and is providing information only by county.

Almost from the moment the coronavirus upended the U.S. economy in March, there has been a persistent fear of widespread evictions.

Yet one way or another, through five months of economic dislocation, tenants have generally kept up their rent payments. They’ve done so with government checks and family help, with savings and odd jobs, or with church charity, nonprofit rescue funds and GoFundMe campaigns.

For all of the government’s problems in containing the virus, its financial rescue efforts were largely effective in keeping tenants in their homes. The $2 trillion CARES Act, with its $1,200 stimulus payments and $600 a week in extended unemployment benefits, helped laid-off renters stay current, while federal, state and local eviction moratoriums guaranteed stability for those who could not.

For many tenants, efforts to conserve money and avoid missing rent have caused them to retrench on investments like education, a decision that could limit their futures in the work force and permanently alter the trajectories of their lives.