The country’s largest county begins a new shutdown

Mike Mulhern, a commissioner with the South County Youth Association Bulldogs in Maryland, got the dreaded phone call last month, a week before football season ended. One of his young players had tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

“My first reaction? It was fear,” he said. “Obviously I’m thinking about whether it was widespread. Do we all have it?”

The team and its coaches were told to quarantine. When the quarantine was over, Mulhern breathed a sigh of relief. No one else on the team had contracted the virus.

The young player, who was asymptomatic, was one of 39 people connected to youth sports in Anne Arundel County who tested positive for the virus this fall, infections that triggered quarantine orders for 804 athletes and coaches.

With the number of cases spiking across the region, county officials decided earlier this month to suspend youth sports, a step that is being taken more frequently as a second wave of the coronavirus sweeps across the country.

A month-long surge of coronavirus cases at the Cook County Jail in Illinois appears to have tapered off.

According to a recent report by Chicago’s WBEZ, coronavirus cases at the jail reached a peak of 267 this past Friday. By Sunday evening, the figure was 227.

But other concerns, including the recent infection of the head of the jail, remain unsolved.

Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart remains under quarantine after testing positive for the coronavirus sometime last week. (Media reports offer conflicting versions of the timeline.) Dart, who has continually asked for the public’s cooperation to help minimize spread at the jail he runs, last worked on Nov. 19 and began feeling symptoms the next day.

“Now we’re asking the public to please, please, please help us,” Dart said on Nov. 12, about a week before his likely infection, according to the Chicago Tribune. “If the community is not under control, if the community is not being serious about masks and social distancing, it will impact us negatively.”

Earlier this month, The Washington Post detailed how the situation at prisons and jails developed into a public health crisis of its own during the pandemic. The inability to control the spread of covid-19 is largely considered a moral failure among human rights advocates, with the Cook County Jail serving as a prime example of the compounded indignities that incarcerated people have to face during the pandemic. Advocacy groups have stressed the need for states to let more people out and urged public support for programs designed to bail out the poor and elderly.

It might seem too soon to think about preparing pets for the time humans will return to offices and schools. After all, a coronavirus vaccine isn’t expected to be widely available until spring at the earliest, which means that most Americans who were sent home to work or study remotely will remain there for at least several more months.

But according to animal expert Zazie Todd, author of “Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy,” the eventual separation will be easier for pets “if you make changes gradually, starting potentially a long time beforehand.” So, in the spirit of doing what’s best for four-legged family members, we asked several experts how to prepare our pets and, let’s face it, ourselves to spend weekdays without one another’s company.

In addition to Todd, we spoke with Clive Wynne, psychology professor and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University and the author of “Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You,” and Monique Udell, an associate professor in the Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences at Oregon State University who has done research on cats and dogs. We also emailed with Alexandra Horowitz, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College and whose most recent book is “Our Dogs, Ourselves.” Here are their answers to some common questions.

Scott Atlas, President Trump’s pandemic adviser who embraced a controversial strategy of urging Americans to return to work and school with little restriction and spent months feuding with the White House coronavirus task force’s other doctors, resigned Monday, according to a letter he posted to his Twitter account.

Atlas had become widely disliked in the White House — even among aides who shared his view that the country should reopen without restrictions and that officials should not worry about young, healthy people contracting the virus, according to two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

Atlas’s resignation was first reported by Fox News on Monday evening. The White House declined to comment.

Although Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious-disease or public health background, fell out of favor with senior White House advisers in recent weeks, he was for several months the only medical adviser the president met with regularly, according to several senior administration officials. Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner brought in Atlas, who informally advised the president for several weeks before he was officially made a special government employee this summer with a 130-day detail, which expires this week. Aides noted the president could have extended Atlas’s tenure if he had desired to do so.

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — As the coronavirus pandemic swelled around the 160-bed Mayo Clinic hospital, the day was dawning auspiciously. Two precious beds for new patients had opened overnight. At the morning “bed meeting,” prospects for a third looked promising.

Everyone knew better than to trust this good fortune. They were right.

By 12:05 p.m., Mayo had put itself on “bypass,” sending all ambulances to the two other hospitals in town, a last-resort move rarely employed. By late afternoon, the emergency room was stashing patients in four beds erected in the ambulance garage — the first time it had adopted that tactic — and holding others for hours as they waited for places in the overflowing hospital.

With more than 91,000 covid-19 patients in their beds, U.S. hospitals are in danger of buckling beneath the weight of the pandemic and the ongoing needs of other sick people. In small- and medium-size facilities like this hit hardest by the outbreak’s third wave, that means finding spots in ones and twos, rather than adding hundreds at a time as New York hospitals did when the coronavirus swept the Northeast in the spring.

Los Angeles County, the most populous in the United States, entered a new shutdown Monday, hoping to slow its worst-ever surge of the coronavirus.

The stay-at-home order bans nearly all public gatherings and prohibits people in different households from getting together, even in private. While it’s less severe than the statewide shutdown in March, Los Angeles’s order is the strictest in California. It’s the latest in a series of increasingly restrictive measures officials have implemented as the county has battled a record number of new infections.

And the measures there probably won’t be the state’s last.

Also on Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) warned that intensive care units in the state are two-thirds full and could fill up by mid-December. If the trends continue, Newsom said, California would need to take “dramatic — arguably drastic — action,” including wider stay-at-home orders for the hardest-hit regions.

“The red flags are flying in terms of the trajectory in our projections of growth,” Newsom said at a news conference.

California is averaging more than 14,000 new cases every day — more than any other state in the country, according to data tracked and analyzed by The Washington Post. More than 8,500 people are hospitalized with covid-19, and California’s virus death rate — while still lower than other large states — has seen a slight uptick in the past month.

Newsom said new stay-at-home orders could affect counties where the risk level is highest, or “purple” in the lexicon of the state health department. Currently, 51 of California’s 58 counties are at risk level purple.

TORONTO — Warning of “dark months ahead,” the Canadian government on Monday said that it plans to roll out a roughly $77 billion stimulus program over three years once the pandemic is “beat” to boost the economy’s recovery from the public health crisis.

The country is also forecasting a budget deficit for this fiscal year, ending March 31, 2021, of at least $293.5 billion. That figure — roughly 17.5 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product — is about 11 percent higher than an earlier projection of $264 billion.

Officials said the deficit could grow even more depending on the progression of the second wave of the coronavirus, which is hitting the country hard and prompting the reinstatement of restrictions, including business closures, in much of the country.

The figures were contained in a long-awaited fall economic statement, the most detailed accounting of how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intends to steer the country and its economy through the pandemic and its price tag.

His government has not released a budget since March 2019, several months before it was reduced to a minority in federal elections and long before the coronavirus arrived, upending daily life and the government’s priorities.

Trudeau and his relatively new finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, have defended the deficit, saying the government is borrowing at a time of historically low interest rates. But some business leaders have in recent months called on them to outline a plan for managing the debt.

The statement said that the stimulus will be withdrawn once the economy has recovered. Canada would then “resume a prudent and responsible fiscal path, based on a long-term fiscal anchor we will outline once the economy is more stable.”

It also said the government will bolster a wage subsidy program to cover up to 75 percent of business payroll costs and extend a commercial rent subsidy program until March 2021.

Canada also plans to impose a tax on international digital giants, such as Netflix, beginning in 2022; to take steps toward a national child-care system; and to aid the hard-hit tourism sector.

LONDON — Britain could become the first Western country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, with the highest hopes resting on Pfizer’s candidate and the homegrown offering from the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.

Those hopes persist, accompanied by much flag-waving, despite questions about the Oxford vaccine’s trials and effectiveness.

Britain, like countries around the world, urgently wants to save lives and stop outbreaks. But it also wouldn’t mind credit for being first to launch a huge immunization campaign after a rigorous review.

Russia and China are already widely distributing their own vaccines, though they have been less transparent about their processes.

Britain’s drug regulators are known to be tough but nimble. They have declined to confirm the ambitious timelines floated by some officials that a vaccine could be distributed for use in the first weeks of December. In all of their communiques, they promise, “the safety of the public will always come first.”