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The W.H.O. reported more than 183,000 new cases, the largest one-day increase so far, as the global tally inched toward nine million. A Trump administration official said the White House was preparing for a potential wave of infections in the fall.
This briefing has ended. Read the latest updates here.
Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, said in an interview on Sunday that the White House was working to prepare for the possibility of a second wave of the coronavirus in the fall, though he said it wouldn’t necessarily come.
“We are filling the stockpile in anticipation of a possible problem in the fall,” Mr. Navarro told Jake Tapper on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “We’re doing everything we can.”
The comments come in contrast to President Trump’s repeated assertions that the virus will “go away” and his questioning of its ability to last into the fall and winter.
But if anything, the virus is gaining ground. Nationwide, cases have risen 15 percent over the last two weeks. Cases are rising in 18 states across the South, West and Midwest. Seven states hit single-day case records Saturday, and five others hit a record earlier in the week.
In Harris County, Texas, which includes most of Houston, more than 1,100 new infections were reported both Friday and Saturday, by far the two highest daily totals there. Public health experts in Texas warned of a dire outlook.
The Trump administration’s latest reckoning with the magnitude of the health crisis came on the same day that the World Health Organization reported the largest one-day increase in infections across the globe. It said that there were 183,020 new cases, with Brazil and the United States accounting for the most new infections.
The pandemic has now sickened more than 8,899,000 people, and at least 466,200 people have died, according to a New York Times database.
California reported 4,515 new cases on Sunday, setting a record for the highest daily increase in the number of infections since the pandemic began in March. Los Angeles County accounted for 47 percent of the total number of cases statewide, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Also Sunday, Missouri reported 397 new cases and Oklahoma reported 478 new cases, which were both records.
Across the United States, the number of new infections has steadily risen during the past five days after plateauing for the previous 80 days.
At the same time, overall deaths have dropped dramatically. The 14-day average was down 42 percent as of Saturday.
Strikingly, the new infections have skewed younger, with more people in their 20s and 30s testing positive, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said. These clusters may be especially worrying to colleges and universities that plan to bring students back to campus in the fall, when the coronavirus and the flu virus are expected to be circulating simultaneously.
In Florida — which “has all the makings of the next large epicenter,” according to model projections by the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — an advisory from the state’s Department of Health this weekend recommended that people avoid crowds larger than 50 people. It also encouraged social distancing and mask wearing at smaller gatherings.
Mr. Trump is set to deliver his national convention speech on Aug. 27 in Jacksonville, Fla., inside an arena that holds 15,000 people.
A detailed county map shows the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, with tables of the number of cases by county.
Health experts directly contradicted President Trump’s recent promise that the disease will “fade away” and his remarks at a rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night that disparaged the value of virus tests.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the spikes in confirmed cases were not simply a result of increased testing. Pointing to increased hospitalizations, he said, “That’s a real rise.”
On “Face the Nation” on CBS, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said, “We’re seeing the positivity rates go up. That’s a clear indication there is now community spread underway, and this isn’t just a function of testing more.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director for the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned on Sunday that the country was likely to experience one long stretch of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“I don’t think this is going to slow down. I’m not sure the influenza analogy applies anymore,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to a report he and colleagues wrote in April using influenza pandemics as a model for understanding the virus. “I think that wherever there’s wood to burn, this fire is going to burn it.”
“I don’t think we’re going to see one, two and three waves — I think we’re just going to see one very very difficult forest fire of cases,” Dr. Osterholm said.
Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, said that Mr. Trump’s comment at the campaign rally about wanting to slow down virus testing had been “tongue in cheek.”
At the rally, Mr. Trump said: “When you do testing to that extent, you will find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, tweeted on Sunday: “The president’s efforts to slow down testing to hide the true extent of the virus means more Americans will lose their lives.”
Mr. Trump’s call for fewer tests to be conducted also drew condemnation from prominent doctors, including Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
“He acknowledges what we’ve seen — active obstruction of testing in a pandemic which claimed 120K lives so far,” Dr. Gawande wrote Sunday on Twitter. “If I did this for 10 people at my hospital, it’d be a crime.”
At the rally, which drew roughly 6,200 attendees to a 19,000-seat indoor arena, according to the Tulsa Fire Department’s count of scanned tickets, Mr. Trump also boasted about his coronavirus response and blamed China for the pandemic’s economic damage in the United States, saying the country “sent us the plague.”
He referred to the virus disparagingly as “kung flu,” echoing past remarks of a White House official, despite criticism that the phrase, as well as “Chinese virus,” which Mr. Trump has also used, was racist. Public health experts have repeatedly noted that viruses have no ethnicity and expressed concern that associating them with an ethnic group encourages discrimination.
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