September 11 coronavirus updates

Executives at America's largest bank are calling its senior managers back into the office after months of remote work, according to a person familiar with the plans.

JPMorgan Chase conducted calls with senior managers in its sales and trading unit in London and New York Wednesday, the person said. Those managers have been asked to return to the offices starting Sept. 21, with some exemptions allowed.

Employees will not be asked to come in if they are high-risk, live with someone who is high-risk or have issues coordinating child care or homeschooling, this person said.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and most of the firm's operating committee have been in the office for most of the summer, the person said.

The decision to call senior managers back was important for training, the person said, especially with a new analyst class joining the company.

Used car sales are booming so much they pushed up consumer price inflation last month. Prices for used cars and trucks climbed 5.4%, the largest monthly increase since March 1969, and contributed 40% to the core inflation index, which strips out items that tend to be volatile in price, like food and energy. 

People are also abandoning air travel during the pandemic and hitting the road after being cooped up at home for much of the spring and summer. And it doesn't hurt that gas prices in the US cheaper than they've been in years. 

US core consumer prices rose 0.4% in August on a seasonally adjusted basis, less than the 0.6% increase in July, 

Prices for air travel, shelter, recreation and household furnishings also rose, contributing to the increase. 

Meanwhile, the overall consumer price index also increased 0.4% in August on a seasonally adjusted basis. 

Over the past 12 months, the index increased 1.3% before seasonal adjustments. That's a significant jump, as back in May the 12-month increase was only 0.1% after prices got clobbered during the spring lockdown.

The coronavirus reproduction rate, or R-number, in the UK has risen to above 1.0, the country’s Government Office for Science said Friday, indicating the number of cases is growing. 

The office puts the R-number as being between 1.0 and 1.2.

Here's what that means: “An R-number between 1.0 and 1.2 means that on average every 10 people infected will infect between 10 and 12 other people,” the office said.

The R-number is highest in London and in the northwest of England.

Demetria Bannister, a 28-year-old elementary school teacher in Columbia, South Carolina, was diagnosed with coronavirus last Friday and died Monday from Covid-19 complications, a week into the start of the school year there, CNN affiliate WIS reported.

Bannister had taught at the Windsor Elementary School for five years, WIS reported. She started her third year of teaching third-grade students virtually on Aug. 31.

Patricio Aravena, her friend and coworker, spoke to CNN about Bannister's impact as a teacher and person.

Watch the interview:

An ensemble forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now projects there will be 205,000 to 217,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States by Oct. 3. 

More than 191,800 people have already died from Covid-19 in the US, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That means the new forecast projects between approximately 13,000 and 25,000 more people could die in the next three weeks.

About the forecast: Unlike some individual models, the CDC’s ensemble forecast only offers projections a few weeks into the future.

The previous ensemble forecast, published September 3, projected up to 211,000 coronavirus deaths by September 26.

When an elderly resident at an assisted living facility in Texas returned from the hospital after a surgery, she needed round-the-clock care -- and the management put six workers on the case.

Among them were Monica Montgomery and her daughter Nya Patton.

It turns out the elderly resident had tested positive for Covid-19 at the hospital during her stay in early April, according to court records. Four of the six workers, the records say, later also tested positive -- including both Montgomery and Patton, who was pregnant.

Patton recovered, but Montgomery, 44, died on May 10 -- Mother's Day. She never met her first grandson, who was born in August.

Her family has filed a wrongful death suit against the assisted living facility, charging not only that the six workers didn't know about the resident's infection, but also that the management was aware of it and neglected to tell the workers -- allegations the owner of the company vehemently denies.

As the coronavirus continues its assault on the United States, throwing all aspects of everyday life into upheaval, the courts offer a lens into how treacherous things have gotten in one of those arenas -- the American workplace.

Read the full story.

President Donald Trump is now not just downplaying the coronavirus -- he's resorting to absurd historical allusions about great World War II leaders to try to disguise his culpability in 190,000 American deaths.

Trump ridiculously invoked former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a Thursday night rally, claiming that like them, he had tried hard to calm public panic in a dark hour.

It was a historically illiterate gambit, since unlike Trump in the pandemic, both statesmen leveled with their people about grave national crises.

But it reflected his struggle to explain his failure to tell the American people the truth about the seriousness of the virus -- even though he told Bob Woodward in interviews for his new book in February that it was "deadly stuff."

In a low-energy news conference earlier in the day, Trump doubled down on falsehood, declaring that "I did not lie" when he warned Woodward the pathogen was worse than the flu while publicly comparing it to the seasonal illness.

In one stunning moment, he said that if the Washington Post reporter, whose book "Rage" comes out Tuesday, was so concerned about what was said in their taped conversations, he should have gone to the "authorities" so they could prepare the country. Of course, under the Constitution, the President is the ultimate authority and whether Trump likes it, the buck stops with him for the pandemic and every other national crisis.

Read the full analysis:

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Analysis: Trump twists history of Churchill and FDR to cover up pandemic denialism

Britain has stumbled through a highly political pandemic.

Virtually every move Boris Johnson's government has made in response to the Covid-19 crisis has sharply divided the weary nation — starting with his refusal to sack a roaming chief aide in May, and encompassing since his struggles on testing, contact tracing, technology, schools and lockdown restrictions.

But as the country enters a new stage in its coronavirus response and cases tick upwards at an alarming rate, the political back-and-forth is entering a new arena: the lounges, bedrooms and studies of millions of British workers.

Nearly half of the United Kingdom's 30 million employees have worked from home during the pandemic, according to the country's statistics body, with an additional 9 million placed on the country's furlough scheme.

They were sent there by the government, who ordered workplaces to shut as the virus started spreading.

But now, despite rising cases and a growing public desire for flexible work arrangements, the government desperately wants employees back in offices.

Ministers and business leaders cite the economic impact on city centers as the driving force behind their push — but their rhetoric is irking many employees, who feel it suggests they're not working hard enough from home.

Read the full story here:

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The UK government sent millions of workers home during the pandemic. They may never return

Globally, there have been more than 28 million recorded cases of coronavirus, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University. More than 900,000 people have died. Here’s the latest on the pandemic.

India again reports the most new coronavirus cases anywhere in the world: India reported a new highest daily increase today with 96,551 new Covid-19 cases, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. This is the second day in a row India has reported the highest number of new coronavirus cases registered by a single country, according to John Hopkins University data.

Americans need to "hunker down" this fall and winter as Covid-19 pandemic will likely worsen, Fauci says: Coronavirus is not going to ease up and is in fact likely to worsen again in the fall and winter in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday. The warning isn't new: experts -- including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director -- have long warned the months ahead will be challenging. It doesn't help that the US continues to see about 36,000 new cases each day -- which is better than where we were in August, but still too high, according to Fauci.

CDC says Covid-19 death rate is under 1% for everyone but people over 70: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday it had changed the way it was reporting death rates for coronavirus, and will now report the infection fatality ratio by age.

According to the updated “best estimate” numbers posted on the agency’s website, 0.003% of children aged 18 and younger who are infected with coronavirus die, while the fatality rate is 0.02% of people aged 20 to 49., 0.5% of people aged 50 to 69, and 5.4% of people 70 and older. It’s all still based on approximations, and as part of the update the CDC also estimates it’s missing most cases of coronavirus in the US -- by a factor of 11.

WHO program to speed access to vaccines needs more money: A World Health Organization program aimed at speeding global access to coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines needs $35 billion, director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday. The Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, launched in April, is a partnership to catalyze the development of vaccines, diagnostics and thereputics, as well as equitable access to such treatments. But the program, which Tedros said is threatened by bilateral vaccine deals and vaccine nationalism, needs more funding.

Russia’s sovereign wealth fund will supply Brazilian state with up to 50 million doses of Sputnik-V: The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and Brazil's state of Bahia have signed a cooperation agreement to supply up to 50 million doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik-V. The agreement, made through the state's Health Secretariat, will also enable the parties to distribute the vaccine across Brazil in the future, the Russian Direct Investments Fund (RDIF) said in a statement on Friday.