July 9 coronavirus news

Starbucks said it will require all customers to wear facial coverings when visiting any of its US locations starting on Wednesday.

As cases of coronavirus surge across the country, Starbucks said it made the decision to prioritize the health of its employees and customers.

Customers who do not want to wear a mask can still order at the drive-thru. They can also place orders for curbside pickup or delivery, the company said.

Gyms, outdoor pools, beauty salons and outdoor arts performances will allowed to reopen in England under a further easing of coronavirus restrictions, according to the UK’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Oliver Dowden. 

Starting Monday, beauticians, tattooists, spas, tanning salons and other close-contact services will be able to reopen, he said. 

Indoor gyms, swimming pools and sports facilities will reopen starting on July 25, but Dowden urged the public to do their part to ensure the new freedoms don’t compromise the country’s coronavirus strategy.

“All of these measures we are taking are conditional and they are reversible,” he said. “And we will not hesitate to impose lockdowns where there are local spikes as we saw in Leicester.”

When it comes to vaccine safety, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “the government is making the investment in order to save time — not to cut down on safety, but to save time.” 

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said on SiriusXM radio, “If it turns out that you have a candidate that is safe and effective, you gained multiple months by jumping ahead and already starting to manufacture.”

“If it turns out it's not safe and effective, and you're not going to use it, then you've lost a lot of money,” he said. “And if you lose out, you lose out money, but we feel it's worth the risk.”

Fauci hopes this “head start” will help them reach “the timetable that hopefully we will know by the end of the year, the beginning of 2021, whether we have a safe and effective vaccine. If we do, we'll be able to already start distributing it.”

States seeing a large increase in Covid-19 cases don't have to resort to shutting down in order to contain the spread of the virus, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

States can instead pause on their reopening process, he said while speaking Thursday at an event hosted by The Hill.

These fresh remarks come after he told The Wall Street Journal states with a coronavirus problem "should seriously look at shutting down."

"I would hope we don't have to resort to shut down. I think that would be something that is obviously an extreme. I think it would not be viewed very, very favorably, even by the states and the cities involved. So rather than think in terms of reverting back down to a complete shutdown, I would think we need to get the states pausing in their opening process. Looking at what did not work well and try to mitigate that," Fauci told The Hill's Editor-at-Large Steve Clemons. 

Fauci explained that California, Arizona, Texas and Florida — states that account for about 50% of new infections — need to start by implementing measures to keep people socially distanced such as closing bars and avoid congregations with large numbers of people.

Arizona has led the nation with the highest seven-day average of new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people for more than a month, according to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.

On June 7, Arizona overtook the top spot with a per capita rate of 13.84 per 100,000 people. Today, the state is averaging 48.10 per 100,000 people — that’s more than triple the rate from a month ago.

Florida has held onto the second spot every day since June 26, according to Johns Hopkins data. Their current rate is 43.08 per 100,000 people. 

The United States currently has a seven-day average of new cases per 100,000 people of 16.00.

While California, Arizona, Texas and Florida are being hit badly by Covid-19 right now, we need to keep an eye on states that border them, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said.

These border states are starting to show “a slight increase in the percent positivity” and that this is the sort of thing “that would have you at least put a red flag up to watch them,” Fauci said. 

What can border states do? What to do in these situations has been discussed at White House coronavirus task force meetings, according to Fauci. He said measures such as mask wearing, social distancing and handwashing need to be intensified. He also suggested that authorities in those states could do things such as consider shutting down places like bars “before you wind up seeing a really bad spike.”

Florida health officials on Thursday reported 8,935 new Covid-19 cases, according to data posted on the Florida Department of Health website. 

The state is also reporting at least 120 Covid-19-related deaths — a new single-day record for the state. The previous high was on April 28, when 83 new deaths were reported, according to CNN's tally. 

This brings the current total cases to more than 232,000, according the health department. There are now more than 4,000 Covid-19-related deaths in Florida.

The United States still has not gotten out of the first wave of Covid-19, the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on SiriusXM radio.

"The thing that confuses people — not only in our own country but throughout the world — we have a very large country and it is very heterogenous. I mean, the New York metropolitan area is very, very different from Casper, Wyoming, or a town in Montana or a city in the Southwest," Fauci added. "So things happen at different paces and different things really evolve." 

Fauci went on to explain how the metropolitan area of New York City was hit badly early on the pandemic and is now doing well — with cases, hospitalizations and deaths going down — compared with other regions of the United States.

"I believe that they will be successful. What we're seeing now in some of the southern states that you really had kind of a variability in how it was handled. Some states actually decided to open up, but did it probably prematurely and not adhering to the guidelines of a gateway to phase one to phase two. Other states actually did it well, but the people in the state took an all or none attitude," Fauci said.

The latest figures from several major Latin American states show that the rate of infection and deaths from the coronavirus are hitting new peaks.

A CNN analysis of figures from individual states and from WHO shows that Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are at or close to peak infection rates, when daily numbers are averaged over a week. (Averaging daily reports over seven days helps to establish trends and even out daily anomalies.)

Here's what the data shows:

Other Latin American countries are also showing little sign of being past the peak of infections and deaths, but both Uruguay and Paraguay continue to have very low infection rates.

However, Chile, which saw a spike in infections last month, has shown a consistent decline in its weekly averages of both deaths and new infections. CNN's tally of official statistics show that the average of new infections has fallen to 2,968 from 3,947 a day (in the week to July 8); deaths have fallen from 146 to 117 a day in the same period.