SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has reported 324 new cases of the coronavirus, its highest single day total since early March as the recent surge of COVID-19 in the greater capital area now appears to be spreading nationwide.

Friday was the eighth consecutive day that South Korea has reported a triple-digit daily increase, for an eight-day total of 1,900 infections.

Most of the recent new cases have been in the densely populated Seoul metropolitan region. But officials said Friday the latest new infections were recorded in practically all major cities nationwide.

The daily jump was the highest since 367 cases were reported March 8. The country’s caseload is now at 16,670, including 309 deaths.

California OKs some waivers for reopening schools

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California has begun approving applications to reopen elementary schools for in-person instruction under special waivers approved by counties that were put on a state monitoring list because of high numbers of coronavirus infections.

The state hasn’t said how many have been approved statewide. But data from San Diego and Orange counties on Thursday showed that together they have had 50 schools approved. All of them are private and mostly religious, along with two small public school districts.

Orange County’s acting health officer says he has concerns about the reopenings but knows staying home causes hardship for children and parents.

Pfizer to take vaccine candidate into final-stage testing

NEW YORK — Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech will take its COVID-19 vaccine candidate with the fewest side effects into final-stage testing.

In an online report Thursday, Pfizer researchers compared data from early-stage testing of two vaccine candidates. Both revved immune systems similarly, and neither caused severe side effects.

But one candidate caused considerably fewer injection reactions, particularly in older adults — symptoms such as fever, headache, chills or muscle pain that are temporary but unpleasant, Pfizer reported.

Final testing of Pfizer’s lead candidate has begun as researchers recruit about 30,000 people in the U.S. and other countries. It’s one of a handful of experimental vaccines to reach end-stage tests around the world.

It generally takes years to develop a safe and effective vaccine for widespread use and distribution. U.S. health officials hope to start offering vaccinations sometime next year.

Pandemic pushes expansion of ‘hospital-at-home’ treatment even for the acutely ill

As hospitals care for people with COVID-19 and try to keep others from catching the virus, more patients are opting to be treated where they feel safest: at home.

Across the U.S., “hospital at home” programs are taking off amid the pandemic, thanks to communications technology, portable medical equipment and teams of doctors, nurses, X-ray techs and paramedics. That’s reducing strains on medical centers and easing patients’ fears.

The programs represent a small slice of the roughly 35 million U.S. hospitalizations each year, but they are growing fast with boosts from Medicare and private health insurers. Like telemedicine, the concept stands to become more popular with consumers hooked on home delivery and other Internet-connected conveniences.

Eligible patients typically are acutely ill with — but don’t need round-the-clock intensive care for — common conditions including chronic heart failure, respiratory ailments, diabetes complications, infections and even COVID-19.

They are linked to 24/7 command centers via video and monitoring devices that send their vital signs. They get several daily home visits from a dedicated medical team. Just like in a hospital, they can press an emergency button any time for instant help.

Research on such programs around the world over the past 25 years shows patients recover faster, have fewer complications and are more satisfied, while costs can be a third lower.

Doctors, hospital officials and patients tout other advantages: People get more rest sleeping in their own bed. They can eat what they want, start moving around quicker and go outside for fresh air. They’re less likely to fall in their familiar surroundings, where they have support from family and even pets.

Read the full story.

University of Kansas finds 89 coronavirus cases on campus

LAWRENCE, Kansas — The University of Kansas says early testing of students and staff returning to the campus has turned up 89 coronavirus cases, with a majority in fraternities and sororities.

KMBC-TV reports 87 students and two faculty or staff members tested positive. Entry testing upon return to campus before the start of activities and classes showed a positivity rate of 1.25% for the 7,088 tests conducted so far.

Testing is mandatory for students, faculty, and staff on the university’s campuses in Lawrence or Overland Park before Sept. 7. The university plans targeted testing and random sampling later.

Parties at Penn State, Syracuse, Holy Cross fuel concerns of super-spreader events

Finally back on campus, U.S. college students are partying like it’s 2019, angering school administrators and alarming nearby residents who fear the gatherings will become super-spreader events.

Just since the weekend, swarms of students without masks or any apparent concern for social distancing partied on campus at Penn State and Syracuse University, and threw a house party near the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

Social media videos from late Wednesday showed crowds of Syracuse students noisily gathering on the campus Quad, according to the Daily Orange, the independent paper run by Syracuse students. Police in State College, Pa., reportedly broke up a campus party late Wednesday on Penn State’s campus where students were seen dancing and drinking. Both incidents were blamed on incoming freshmen who arrived on campus this week ahead of first classes on Monday.

At least one Holy Cross student who attended a weekend house party off-campus in Worcester, Mass., tested positive for COVID-19. A neighbor who lives near the house eventually called the police to break it up. “They’re not babies. They know better,” she told CBS Boston.

After COVID-19 infections spiked in Auburn, Ala., with 80 confirmed new cases Monday, local health officials pointed to the throngs of Auburn University students who had packed into downtown bars and parties the week before.

Other schools such as Notre Dame and Michigan State University have already scrapped plans for in-person learning. Universities allowing students back on campus have generally threatened suspension and other punishments for those who don’t wear masks or respect social distancing rules.

Person with COVID-19 may have infected others at South Dakota motorcycle rally

As hundreds of thousands flocked to rural South Dakota for a motorcycle rally this month, sparking fears of a coronavirus super-spreader event, photos captured people crowding the streets without masks and packing local businesses – including a bar on Main Street, One-Eyed Jack’s Saloon.

Now state health officials say a person who visited One-Eyed Jack’s for about five hours has tested positive for the coronavirus, and could have transmitted the virus to others at the time.

Experts have singled out bars as places ripe for spreading COVID-19, and the exposures could be just the beginning of health consequences stemming from the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a 10-day extravaganza that draws people from around the country and is hugely important to the local economy. With the coronavirus still rampant in many parts of the U.S. over the summer, most Sturgis residents polled by the city were against holding the rally from Aug. 7-16.

But Christina Steele, a spokeswoman for the city of Sturgis, said Thursday that she’s not concerned by the news about the virus case, echoing the attitudes many bikers expressed at the rally. Local officials had asked visitors to social-distance and wear masks but did not mandate those precautions at one of the biggest public gatherings of the pandemic.

“It could be one or two, could be more,” Steele said of coronavirus cases linked to the event. “But you know, it’s to be expected. Coronavirus is in South Dakota. It has been for months.”

“It was a good rally,” she told The Washington Post. “People had fun.”

Few details on the infected person at One-Eyed Jack’s were available in a brief news release, and beyond that, the rally’s contributions to coronavirus exposures are not yet clear. Coronavirus symptoms can take from two to 14 days to show up after exposure, experts say, meaning that infections stemming from the event could still be emerging.

State health officials did not say where the person is from or how many people may have exposed at the bar or at the broader rally. According to Sturgis, 462,182 vehicles were counted entering its limits over the course of the event, representing just a 7.5 percent dip from last year’s traffic.

Read the full story about the Sturgis rally here.

Under Trump administration guidance, teachers could stay in classroom even if exposed to virus 

ATLANTA — New guidance from President Donald Trump’s administration that declares teachers to be “critical infrastructure workers” could give the green light to exempting teachers from quarantine requirements after being exposed to COVID-19 and instead send them back into the classroom.

Keeping teachers without symptoms in the classroom, as a handful of school districts in Tennessee and Georgia have already said they may do, raises the risk that they will spread the respiratory illness to students and fellow employees. Multiple teachers can be required by public health agencies to quarantine for 14 days during an outbreak, which can stretch a district’s ability to keep providing in-person instruction.

South Carolina health officials also describe teachers as critical infrastructure workers, although it’s unclear if any district there is asking teachers to return before 14 days.

Among the first districts to name teachers as critical infrastructure workers was eastern Tennessee’s Greene County, where the school board gave the designation to teachers July 13.

“It essentially means if we are exposed and we know we might potentially be positive, we still have to come to school and we might at that point be carriers and spreaders,” said Hillary Buckner, who teaches Spanish at Chuckey-Doak High School in Afton.

Buckner, secretary of the county-level affiliate of the National Education Association, said it’s unethical for teachers to risk infecting students. Only prekindergarten and kindergarten students are currently attending class face-to-face in 7,500-student Greene County, going two days a week for two-and-a-half hours a day. Teachers are instructing others online from their classrooms, Buckner said, but she said the local school board could soon mandate a broader in-person return.

Read the full story here.

Big firms offer stressed parents new perks such as subsidized tutoring

Consulting firm Accenture has long offered cushy benefits for employees with very young children: as many as 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, discounted enrollment in day-care centers, free breast milk shipping for mothers when they’re traveling. But until now, the company’s benefits for workers with school-age children have been limited.

Yet as a new school year looms and working parents again find themselves juggling work and virtual learning, the firm told its 56,000 U.S. employees it was partnering with Bright Horizons, the large corporate child-care operator, to offer small-group, part-time “school-day supervision” at a heavily subsidized cost.

The program will operate through a network of centers that include Mathnasium, Sylvan Learning and Code Ninjas.

“Employees had been through two and a half months of Zoom classrooms, and it was a nightmare, even for the most tech-savvy parents,” said Ellyn Shook, who leads human resources at Accenture. “Parents said they needed educational support, not just babysitting.”

Accenture is one of a fast-growing number of employers rolling out new educational benefits, human resources consultants say.

Bank of America announced a similar program for its employees last week, along with “virtual field trips” and educational webinars for parents. The dairy co-op Tillamook has started offering employees a block of 10 hours of online tutoring per child from an online platform called Varsity Tutors.

“As we’re staring down the barrel of many schools starting virtually, employers recognize that what employees have been doing for the last five months is absolutely not sustainable,” said Stephen Kramer, CEO of Bright Horizons.

From tutoring discounts to funding searches for virtual school facilitators to help with forming learning pods or micro-schools, the new benefits will be helpful for many exasperated working parents — if yet another way the pandemic is exposing deep inequities between America’s workers.

Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed

As schools reopen in parts of the United States, a paper published Thursday found that some children have significantly higher levels of virus in their airways than the most severely ill adults — suggesting their role in community spread may be larger than previously believed.

The study in The Journal of Pediatrics comes on the heels of two others that offer insights about children and COVID-19 transmission. On July 30, researchers reported in JAMA that children younger than 5 with mild or moderate illness have much higher levels of virus in the nose compared to older children and adults. Shortly before that, investigators in South Korea found in a household study that older children passed on the virus as readily as adults, while younger children did not.

All three studies were small and contradicted each other in some details so researchers said they could not draw any definitive conclusions based on any one of them alone. But taken together, they paint a worrisome new picture of children’s role in the pandemic.

Alessio Fasano, a physician at MassGeneral Hospital for Children and one of the new study’s authors, said that because children tend to exhibit mild symptoms or none at all, they were largely ignored in the early part of the outbreak and not tested. But they may have been acting as silent spreaders all along.

“Some people thought that children might be protected,” Fasano said. “This is incorrect. They may be as susceptible as adults — but just not visible.”

Read the full story.

Chinese state media defends Wuhan pool party

They partied in the pool shoulder to shoulder, sharing inflatables, playing games and dancing close to each other. Photos of the gathering, taken at a water park in Wuhan, China, during the weekend, went viral this week, as the world reacted with surprise to the return of crowds in the coronavirus pandemic’s original epicenter, without a face mask in sight.

Scenes from the electronic musical festival stood in stark contrast to the realities of people around the world whose governments are still struggling to control the spread of the virus, which has claimed at least 787,686 lives worldwide, forced countries into lockdown and shattered economies.

In Wuhan, crowds return as coronavirus fears fade

But on Wednesday, Chinese state media dismissed the backlash.

“Online attacks on Wuhan music festival partying show foreign sour grapes,” read a headline published in the state-backed Global Times on Wednesday. The story added that the mass congregation had forced many to question the handling of the health crisis in their own countries.

Wuhan has not reported any new coronavirus cases since May. The city emerged from a strict 76-day lockdown in April. The water park reopened in June, Agence France-Presse reported.

WHO seeks more information about Russia vaccine

LONDON — The World Health Organization’s Europe office says it has begun discussions with Russia to try to get more information about the coronavirus vaccine that Russia approved last week before the shot had passed the advanced trials normally required to prove it works.

Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergency official at WHO Europe, said “this concern that we have around safety and efficacy is not specifically for the Russia vaccine, it’s for all of the vaccines under development.”

She acknowledged WHO was taking an “accelerated approach” to try to speed development of coronavirus vaccines but said “it’s essential we don’t cut corners in safety or efficacy.”

Smallwood said WHO has begun “direct discussions” with Russia and that WHO officials have been sharing “the various steps and information that’s going to be required for WHO to take assessments.”

WHO says Europe is in a good position to stamp out virus as it flares in localized settings 

LONDON — The head of the World Health Organization’s Europe office said the region is “on a trajectory of its own” and noted that coronavirus cases have been steadily increasing every week in the last two months even as the epicenter of the pandemic has shifted to the Americas.

At a press briefing on Thursday, Dr. Hans Kluge said that while European countries had made “phenomenal efforts” to contain the virus after being hit hard earlier in the year, there were now about 26,000 cases every day across Europe.

Kluge said new clusters of the virus are mainly occurring in localized settings, like long-term care homes, in food production facilities or being sparked by travelers.

Kluge noted the region was in a “much better position to stamp out these localized virus flare-ups” and ”can manage the virus differently now than we did when COVID-19 first emerged.”

Kluge also called for schools to be reopened where possible and said WHO Europe would be convening a virtual meeting of its 53 member countries on August 31 to discuss how schools across the region might be reopened safely.

Police called when German lawmaker refused to wear mask on train

BERLIN — The conductor of a high-speed train in Germany called police after a far-right lawmaker refused to wear a mask, then locked himself in the bathroom.

Wearing simple mouth and nose coverings is mandatory on public transport, but rail firm Deutsche Bahn has struggled to enforce the rule with a minority of travelers who object to wearing masks.

Stephan Brandner, a member of the Alternative for Germany party, confirmed the incident took place on Aug. 12 but mocked reports that he tried to hide on the toilet.

German news agency dpa quoted a police spokesman Wednesday confirming that officers responded to a request for help from the conductor after two travelers on a train from Berlin to the Baltic town of Binz refused to put on masks.

Brandner wrote on Twitter that he had been enjoying a pastry when the conductor asked him to put on a mask, whereupon he responded: “Can’t, I’m eating right now, I’ll think about it afterward.”

As outbreak eases in Egypt worshippers will be able to attend mosque

CAIRO — The Egyptian government has announced that worshipers will soon be able to attend mosque for Friday prayers now that the daily tally of confirmed new virus cases is plateauing at below 200.

Egypt’s Minister of Religious Endowment Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa said that weekly congregational prayers may be held starting Aug. 28. The gatherings have been suspended for nearly five months.

Worshipers are expected to observe social distancing and wear face masks to prevent another viral outbreak, Gomaa said in a statement Wednesday.

He said the Friday sermon, which usually lasts for nearly an hour, will be reduced to 10 minutes.

Starting in August, the number of new cases in Egypt has dropped significantly to less than 200 new cases a day.

Overall, Egypt has reported nearly 97,000 confirmed cases, including 5,197 deaths.

On Wednesday, Egypt reported 161 confirmed cases and 13 fatalities.

Norway advises against travel to Britain, Ireland and several EU countries

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The Norwegian government is advising against traveling to Britain, Ireland, Greece, Austria and parts of Sweden and Denmark, the latest European nations where the government does not recommend non-essential travel.

Norwegian health officials said these countries have now passed the threshold of 20 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants in recent days.

As of Saturday, people from the countries on Norway’s red list will have to self-isolate for 10 days.

The other nations on the list where Norway advises against unnecessary travel are the Netherlands, Poland, Cyprus, Iceland, Malta, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Bulgaria.

Norway has reported 10,162 coronavirus cases and 262 deaths.

Australian lawmakers may attend Parliament remotely

CANBERRA, Australia — Australian lawmakers will for the first time be able to attend Parliament remotely due to new rules introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Attorney-General Christian Porter on Thursday announced the new rules ahead of Parliament resuming for two weeks from Monday.

Lawmakers will be able to participate in debates and ask ministers questions by video if they can persuade House of Representatives Speaker Tony Smith that they can’t come to Canberra because the pandemic had made it “essentially impossible, unreasonably impracticable, or would give rise to an unreasonable risk” for the lawmaker to attend.

But they will not be able to vote on legislation, second motions or move amendments to legislation.

Most states and territories have closed their borders to non-essential interstate travelers to slow the spread of coronavirus which is concentrated in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney.

Seoul continues to fight virus outbreak

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has reported 288 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus — its third straight day of over 200 as health authorities scramble to slow an outbreak in the region around the capital.

The figures announced Thursday by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought the national caseload to 16,346, including 307 deaths.

The agency says 230 of the new cases are in the densely populated Seoul metropolitan region, home to half of the country’s 51 million people.

Health workers there have struggled to track transmissions tied to various places and groups, including churches, restaurants, schools and workers. Officials have banned large gatherings and shut down nightspots and churches in the capital area amid fears that the outbreak could spread nationwide.

Cases in Mexico decline

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s point man on the coronavirus epidemic says three weeks of continuing decline in the number of new coronavirus cases means the country is seeing a reduction in the pandemic.

Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López said Wednesday that “we now see a sustained tendency.”

Still, he warned that “the risk is not over” as his office reported still-high levels of confirmed infections and deaths. Confirmed cases rose by 5,792 to 537,031, and 707 more deaths were confirmed, bringing Mexico’s total to 58,481.

López Gatell cautions Mexicans that the health emergency will probably last until October, when the regular flu season begins.

Government backs down on barring residents from taking a short drive to an exercise place

MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia’s coronavirus hot spot of Victoria state has backed down in the face of a public backlash against a decree that barred residents of Melbourne from taking a short drive to get to an exercise place.

The Victoria government said late Wednesday that residents of Australia’s second-largest city can now drive up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) from their homes to exercise. Those who have been fined for doing that since lockdown restrictions were increased this month can apply to police to have their cases reviewed.

The government’s retreat followed a public argument between a Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews and Melbourne resident angry that she was restricted to walking in her own neighborhood.

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