June 26 coronavirus news

Gov. Gavin Newsom has advised Imperial County’s health officials to reinstate its stay-at-home order, he announced in a news conference.

Imperial County has a coronavirus positivity rate of 23%, with a case rate of 680 in the past week. The population of Imperial County is approximately 181,000.

These rates are well above state thresholds, said Sonia Angell, the state's health director. The state guidelines are a case rate of 100 and a positivity rate of 10%.

More than 500 patients have been transferred out of Imperial County in the past five weeks, the governor said, and reinforcements from the state, including 44 National Guard members, have been sent in to assist.

More details: Imperial County lies just east of San Diego along the borders of Arizona and Mexico.

Some drivers of the uptick include US citizens returning to the states to seek health care, the California Department of Public Health said earlier this week.

The governor said “it’s too early to tell” if the high number of cases in Arizona are a contributing factor to increases in Imperial County, but a "deep dive" study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is underway to look at that data.

Imperial is one of 15 counties under what Newsom calls a "watch list" as concerns mount in the state.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he isn't mandating masks statewide but will continue to provide guidance that people should social distance and use masks when that's not possible.

The governor said to make masks a mandate punishable by law could backfire.

DeSantis said that if local governments want to create an ordinance, it's up to them. Businesses also have the right to ask customers to wear masks

The governor said that some local sheriffs have said they won't enforce it and there are parts of the state where a mandate wouldn't make sense.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said an increased positivity rate and expanded testing is creating the large new case counts that have been announced this week.

DeSantis said during a news conference Friday that the state is now seeing 45,000 new test results reported daily, up from 24,000 test results that were reported daily the last week of May. 

He attributed the high case count of nearly 9,000 reported Friday to a "test dump."

The majority of new cases are now people who are younger, with the median age ranging from 33 to 35 years old, DeSantis said.

He said the new cases are typically asymptomatic and primarily due to community transmission. 

DeSantis told vulnerable populations to be vigilant and continue to avoid large crowds and other situations where transmission could be possible.

New York City has 17,753 confirmed coronavirus fatalities and 4,668 probable coronavirus deaths as of June 26, according to the most recent data on the city website.

The New York City Health Department defines probable deaths as people who did not have a positive Covid-19 laboratory test, but their death certificate lists as the cause of death “Covid-19” or an equivalent.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus deaths and probable coronavirus deaths in New York City is 22,421.

There have been 210,908 coronavirus cases in the city and 54,578 people have been hospitalized, according to the city.

The data is from the New York City Health Department and was updated on June 26 at 1 p.m., according to the website.

The numbers may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.

The federal government has granted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's request to extend operations of community-based Covid-19 testing sites across the state today. 

According to a statement, the federal government will maintain the program's support while surging resources to Dallas and Houston.

"These federally-supported testing sites are a vital component of this commitment," Abbott said in the statement. "I thank our federal partners for extending these operations in Texas, and for their flexibility in allocating their resources to the communities of Dallas and Houston that are experiencing a high number of COVID-19 cases right now."

Cases surge: Abbott ordered further restrictions on businesses today, a day after he "paused" a phased economic reopening following a surge in coronavirus cases.

The state reported a record of almost 6,000 new cases on Thursday.

The US needs to start considering "flooding the system with testing" in light of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that for every person infected with Covid-19, 10 more people in the country go undiagnosed, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday.

Speaking during a pre-recorded interview with CNBC, Fauci called the CDC's findings "sobering news."

Fauci said contact tracing was not going well ⁠— with some exceptions ⁠— and argued for pool testing over individual identification, particularly in areas where people don't want to cooperate with contact tracing efforts.

"Instead of I test me, and I test you... you could take 20, 30, 40 pool them, do one test. If they're all negative, then you know that that's negative. You now have 40 people who are negative. If you get a positive, then you backtrack and try and figure out who that positive is," Fauci said.

The governors of Florida and Texas pulled back some of the measures put in place to reopen those states as coronavirus infections rise.

Additionally, governors of Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina have announced they will not move ahead to the next phase of reopening.

Florida has erupted as a hotspot in the US's coronavirus pandemic.

Here's a look at the rise of coronavirus cases in Florida:

Contrasting some of the optimistic messaging coming out of the Trump administration in recent days, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said it may be time to “drop back a few yards” to think about the original reopening guidelines.

He had a stark message for anyone comfortable with the risks of Covid-19: “A risk for you is not just isolated to you because if you get infected, you are part, innocently or inadvertently, of propagating the dynamic process of a pandemic.”

Fauci began his comments at the White House coronavirus task force briefing by admitting that some states may have opened too soon.

“So, we're not going to say blame we're not going to try and analyze it,” he continued, “but there is something that's very important about it, that I'd like to get a message to the country in general.”

Fauci said it may be necessary to think about the original guidelines from the task force about reopening the country, some of which were ignored by the states.

“When the vice president went back, pulling back a couple of months ago, when we showed about the guidelines to safely reopen the country, we've got to make sure we drop back a few yards and think about that, that this is part of a process that we can be either part of the solution or part of the problem.” 

“We need to take that into account because we are all in it together,” he said. “And the only way we're going to end it is by ending it together.”

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