The one state that’s pausing its reopening

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With help from Myah Ward

‘MAYBE IT WAS UTAH’ — The last line in the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona refers to an imagined future for the protagonist couple, Ed and H.I., played by Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage: “a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.”

But in the annals of 2020 history, Utah will be remembered much differently, for its unusual role in the national dramas of impeachment, Covid and civil unrest.

On Feb 5, Utah’s Mitt Romney became the only Republican senator to vote to remove President Donald Trump from office after the House impeached him. On June 8, Trump mocked Romney for marching in protests against George Floyd’s death.

On March 11, the NBA suspended its regular season after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid, which began a cascade of shutdowns and cancellations in the world of sports. On June 4, the NBA announced it would resume a shortened season with 22 teams — the first American sports league to mount a comeback.

On March 14, Utah recorded its first case of Covid community spread. Today the state reported388 new cases and three deaths. In all, Utah, a state of 3.2 million people, has recorded about 13,000 cases and 130 deaths.

On March 18, Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah) became the second member of Congress to test positive for Covid. On Wednesday, Jon Huntsman Jr., Trump’s former Russia ambassador who is seeking the Republican nomination for Utah governor, announced he is positive, too.

In late March, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, frantically brought missionaries back to the United States in commercial and charter flights. Today the church announced that it was sending missionaries back out in the world.

On April 17, Utah introduced a color-coded system for assessing risk and guiding reopening plans. The colors — green, yellow, orange and red — indicate different restriction levels. When a county gets moved to green, restrictions are the most lax, red the most tight.

Today Republican Gov. Gary Herbert hit pause on reopening efforts by keeping most of the state in yellow territory, with the exception of Salt Lake City, which remains in orange, and Kane County, which includes parts of Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, which moves to green Friday.

Utah is now the only state in the country to halt its reopening plans, marking another turning point in the Covid crisis. It’s not entirely surprising that Utah is bucking the trend of states, mostly conservative, that are forging ahead with reopening plans even as cases started rising. Utah has been an outlier for much of the Trump era: Trump won the deeply Republican state with just 46 percent of the vote in 2016. A third-party candidate born in Utah, Evan McMullin, garnered 21 percent of the vote.

Utah’s Covid cases started spiking around Memorial Day, two weeks after Herbert moved the state from orange to yellow. The rate of positive tests jumped as high as 10 percent last week from between 4 percent and 4.5 percent, Angela Dunn, the state’s epidemiologist, said today at a news conference. There is an outbreak at a meatpacking plant in Northern Utah in Cache County, but cases are on the rise across the state, she said.

Despite the pause, Herbert didn’t seem eager to move backward. Dunn acknowledged today that even if cases and hospital capacity spiked, it would be hard to reimpose stricter guidelines. In Utah, like the rest of the country, people are eager to be freed of coronavirus restrictions. “It will take a lot of discipline to continue,” she said. The state isn’t actively enforcing coronavirus restrictions, but relying on people to make a good-faith effort to follow the guidance, said Tom Hudachko, communications director at the Utah Department of Health.

Herbert spent much of a news conference today pleading with state residents to wear masks and social distance.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Reach out with tips: [email protected] or on Twitter at@renurayasam.

First In Nightly

TRIBAL POLITICS — Federal and state health agencies are refusing to give Native American tribes and organizations representing them access to data showing how the coronavirus is spreading around their lands, potentially widening health disparities and frustrating tribal leaders already ill-equipped to contain the pandemic, eHealth reporter Darius Tahir and health care reporter Adam Cancryn write. The CDC has turned down tribal epidemiologists’ requests for data that it’s making freely available to states. Authorities in Michigan and Massachusetts since early spring have also resisted handing over information on testing and confirmed cases, citing privacy concerns, and refused to strike agreements with tribes on contact tracing or other surveillance, eight tribal leaders and health experts told POLITICO. In some instances, officials questioned tribes’ legal standing as sovereign entities. The communication gaps threaten to hinder efforts to track the virus within Native populations that are more prone to illness, disability and early death and have fragile health systems. Indigenous people have a higher Covid-19 mortality rate than whites, Asians and Latinos, according to ananalysis by APM Research Lab. And in hard-hit New Mexico, Native Americans account for nearly 60 percent of coronavirus deaths but just 8.8 percent of the population.

Palace Intrigue

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING — Health care reporter Dan Diamond emails us:

I was watching closely today as Trump, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and other officials traveled to Texas, rapidly emerging as perhaps the hottest spot in the nation’s coronavirus pandemic. Hospitalizations for the virus are hitting new highs in the state, and as Trump arrived in Dallas for a roundtable on economic recovery, Houston-area officials announced that their county wasteetering on the edge of Covid-19 disaster and could re-impose lockdowns.

What struck me at the roundtable: the surgeon general’s reminder, to a closely packed,largely maskless crowd, that Covid-19 continues to actively spread, disproportionately hit communities of color and necessitate precautions like wearing face coverings.

Those are comments that officials have scarcely uttered publicly in the president’s presence in recent weeks. Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants to put the pandemic behind him, and the White House’s coronavirus task force has largely gone silent afterhalting its daily press briefings 45 days ago. Adams was the only one wearing a mask on stage at the roundtable, where he was with Trump, HUD secretary Ben Carson and other officials.

The surgeon general also has been trying to strike a balance between the ongoing coronavirus threat and the recent protests over police brutality, which were inspired by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man.

Adams told me in a POLITICOpodcast interview released today that Floyd “could have been me” had his own police encounters gone wrong. But Adams also spoke at length about the “dual pandemics” — Covid-19 and systemic racism — that he sees as inextricably linked. The nation’s top doctor said he understands why so many Americans are angry and spilling into the streets despite the threat of infection. That’s one reason why he parried my question about which is the more urgent threat.

“I would not fault anyone for saying, ‘Right now I’m more concerned about Covid,’” Adams said. “I also wouldn’t fault anyone for saying, ‘Right now, my No. 1 concern is dealing with racism in my community.’”Listen to the interview.

QUIET ON THE WHITE HOUSE FRONT — States are lifting restrictions. The masks are coming off. But coronavirus is still here. Dan explains to POLITICO Dispatch why the White House has gone quiet on the crisis even as cases spike — and looks at how public health experts are struggling to find a unified message on protesting during the pandemic: “The infrastructure has been partially wound down. That White House task force is not meeting every day. The Covid-only daily press briefings were stopped more than a month ago. So even if the White House had more to say here, there is not the same mechanism to comment on coronavirus that there was four or five weeks ago.”

Around the Nation

NEW PEAK IN FLORIDA — The Florida Department of Health reported a record daily number of Covid-19 diagnoses today, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said was the result of outbreaks among farming communities and increased statewide testing, Arek Sarkissian writes.

The state Department of Health reported that 1,677 people were diagnosed with Covid-19 on Wednesday, the highest number of positive tests since the state reported its first case March 1. The previous record was the 1,527 cases reported on April 3, according to Johns Hopkins University.

A comparison of the seven-day average rate of positive tests by Johns Hopkins shows Florida is within a 5 percent threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. As of Thursday, the state’s average of positive results was 4.34 percent. New York was at 1.38 percent during that week. Johns Hopkins data has shown skyrocketing positive test rates in 19 states, including Arizona, which was at 13.81 percent as of Thursday.

Four Square

THE ZOOM PANEL — Eugene Daniels, Tim Alberta, Ryan Lizza and Laura Barrón-López discuss America’s nationwide protests on racial equality and how they’re affecting the political moment on the latest episode of Four Square.

Nightly Interview

MORE THAN A FEELING — The nationwide lockdown has deepened a crisis Americans faced long before Covid: loneliness. Nightly’s Myah Ward spoke to Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general from 2014 to 2017 and the author of Together: the Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, about how loneliness affects mental and physical health, and how the pandemic might create a “social revival.” This conversation has been edited.

How does loneliness affect mental health?

Loneliness is more than just a bad feeling. There are strong associations between loneliness and an increased risk for physical and mental health conditions. And those include depression and anxiety, but also cardiovascular disease, premature death, dementia, sleep disturbances.

The number of people reporting depressive symptoms has actually doubled from what it was last year. Calls to the federal helpline for people who are struggling with emotional distress and suicidal ideation, SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline, increased 891 percent, compared to the same time in March 2019. It’s happening at a time when many mental health centers are facing financial collapse.

You fear that the U.S. might slip into what you call a social recession?

With Covid-19, we have a challenge of being physically distant from one another, but also the tremendous fear that many people feel about interacting with other people. The consequences of that, I think, would be just as significant as the economic headwinds. We have a choice in this moment about whether we allow a social recession to develop, or whether we use this moment to step back and think about how we can engineer a social revival in our lives.

With what we know about this period of isolation, and the effect it has on mental health, was a lockdown the right solution for the pandemic?

We had to do it because there was no alternative. We didn’t have other arrows in our quiver.

Cases are rising, but people are anxious to get out and leave their houses. So how do we protect mental health, while also handling a potential second wave?

I, my wife and two small kids, but also my parents and my sister and brother-in-law and grandmother are in our quarantine. That has enabled us to have a much more supported experience even though it’s been really chaotic. I think people can right now start to think ahead to who their quarantine would be if they had to go back to a stay at home situation.

But do we risk walking out of this lockdown with a worse mental health crisis on our hands?

What Covid-19 is giving us is the opportunity to step back and see, with perhaps greater clarity that we’ve seen in a long time, the fact that our relationships really do matter, that they need to be a top priority — not just in our individual lives, but in how we think about building institutions and building public policy.

When I look at where I put the bulk of my time and attention and energy over the last 10 years, it often hasn’t been on the people who are priorities in my life. It’s been on work and career and achievement. I see this as an opportunity for us to reset. And to restart and to build the kind of people-centered life that we were designed to live.

(For help, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255.)

Ask The Audience

This week’s question: If there’s a second wave, which pandemic restriction do you hope doesn’t come back? Please write us and we’ll include some answers in our Friday edition.

The Global Fight

PARALLEL TRACKS — The countries doing worst on Covid-19 now have the leaders with the worst approval trajectory, according to new global tracking data from Morning Consult, Ryan Heath emails us. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador saw a 6-point drop in approval in June, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro dropped 5 points. Mexico and Brazil are currently the worst-performing developing countries when it comes to Covid-19. Brazil’s situation got so bad — its death toll routinely topping 1,000 per day in recent weeks — that last week the government stopped publishing numbers. Brazil’s Supreme Court laterordered the data published. Among developed countries, the highest death tolls are in the U.S., where President Trump is down to a record low of 39 percent approval, and the U.K. — where Boris Johnson also saw his sixth consecutive week of decreasing approval, to 44 percent, his lowest ever. Here’sthe chart.

Trouble speeds up in Africa — The WHO says the pandemic in Africa is “accelerating.” While it took 98 days for the continent to reach 100,000 coronavirus cases, it took just 18 days to get to 200,000. WHO Africa chief Matshidiso Moeti said today that community transmission has begun in more than half of Africa’s 54 countries. The virus arrived on the continent largely by travelers from Europe and is spreading beyond capital cities and commercial hubs into rural areas where many health systems are unequipped to handle cases that require intensive care. South Africa has the continent’s highest number of cases, with more than 55,000. Africa has more than 209,000 cases, still a small fraction — less than 3 percent — of the global total.

Nightly Number

Parting Words

WHY STATUES ARE FALLING — In recent weeks, demonstrators around the world have made new additions to the list of victims of what the ancient Romans called Damnatio Memoriae — the damnation of memory. Protesters from Martinique to Belgium to the U.S. have knocked over likenesses of historical figures who were involved in everything from colonization to the slave trade. Throughout human history, Jean-François Manicom, curator of transatlantic slavery & legacies at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, writes, toppling a statue has meant a break from old beliefs.

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