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Covid Live Updates: Death Toll in India Likely Beyond 3 Million

A new study of excess deaths in the country during the pandemic produced an estimate between 3.4 million and 4.7 million. That is 10
times the official government count and would make it one of the greatest human tragedies in the nation’s history.

Here’s what you need to know:

India’s true pandemic death toll is likely to be well over 3 million, a new study finds.

Canada will reopen its border with the U.S. and hopes to allow others in by early September.

South Korea airlifts a crew from a navy ship amid its military’s biggest virus outbreak.

U.S. men’s and women’s basketball teams are the latest to be disrupted by the coronavirus.

Between nursing shifts, a Singapore rower trained for the Olympics.

A Florida congressman says he tested positive for the virus after he was fully vaccinated.

‘Facebook isn’t killing people’: Biden softens his attack over vaccine misinformation.

India’s true pandemic death toll is likely to be well over 3 million, a new study finds.
The number of people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic in India so far is likely to exceed three million — nearly 10 times the
official Covid-19 death toll — making it one of the worst human tragedies in the nation’s history, according to a new study.

In a comprehensive examination of the true toll of the pandemic in the sprawling nation of 1.4 billion, the Center for Global
Development, a Washington research institute, attempted to quantify excess deaths from all causes during the pandemic based on
state data, international estimates, serological studies and household surveys.

“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,”
said its authors, one of whom is a former chief economic adviser to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The official government numbers have been called into question repeatedly. Even as funeral pyres lit up the night sky and bodies
washed up on the Ganges River, with death all around, the Indian government was widely underreporting the scale of the devastation.

A chorus of experts have said the country’s official estimates are a gross understatement.

The study released on Tuesday estimated that between 3.4 and 4.7 million more people than would normally be expected died between
January 2020 and June 2021, and includes an estimate suggesting that deaths from Covid-19 alone may have reached four million.

“Estimating Covid deaths with statistical confidence may prove elusive,” the authors wrote. “But all estimates suggest that the death
toll from the pandemic is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count of 400,000; they also suggest that the first
wave was more lethal than is believed.”

The authors said the undercount of death after the first wave of infections last year may have resulted, in part, from the fact that it was
“spread out in time,” as opposed to the sharp curve of the second wave when hundreds of thousands of people died amid shortages of
oxygen, beds and vaccines.

The study has said that the country’s inability to grasp the “scale of the tragedy in real time” during its first wave from March 2020 to
February 2021 may have caused “the collective complacency that led to the horrors of the second wave.”

At the height of the second wave, interviews by New York Times reporters at cremation grounds across three states in India revealed
an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures.

Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may also have undercounted or overlooked large numbers of dead, analysts said. And
grieving families may be hiding Covid connections as well, out of shame, adding to the confusion.

India is still reporting nearly 40,000 new cases and about 500 deaths a day, according to a New York Times database. Less than 7
percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
“The challenge of the pandemic is far from over,” said Arvind Subramanian, Mr. Modi’s former chief economic adviser and a senior
fellow at Brown University who is a co-author of the study. “Vaccination offers the best hope but its pace needs to be ramped up
considerably.”

Mr. Modi’s government has warned of an impending third wave of infections, which government scientists say could strike as early as
August.

“The spirit of this paper is not to privilege any one estimate but simply to lay them out with transparency,” the authors of the excess
deaths study, Abhishek Anand, Justin Sandefur and Dr. Subramanian, said.

“Given all the difficulties, getting at the true estimate will be difficult and only by piecing together data from different sources will we
improve our understanding of the reality of the pandemic.”

— Karan Deep Singh

Tracking the Coronavirus ›

United States 14-day change World 14-day change
Avg. on Jul. 19 Avg. on Jul. 19

New cases 35,035 +198% 517,427 +33%

New deaths 324 +75% 7,926 +2%

U.S. vaccinations ›

At least
Fully

one dose vaccinated

Total pop. 56% 49%

18 and up 68% 60%

Global hot spots › Vaccinations ›

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Canada will reopen its border with the U.S. and hopes to allow others in by early September.
Canada is poised to welcome back fully vaccinated travelers, including Americans, after over a year of strict controls at the border.

Beginning on Aug. 9, citizens and permanent residents of the United States will be allowed to enter Canada as long as they have been
fully vaccinated for at least 14 days before travel, federal government officials said on Monday.

Canada then hopes to allow visitors from other countries beginning on Sept. 7, a date that could change depending on conditions.

Pressure has been building on both sides of the border to reopen, to bolster tourism and allow separated families to reunite (though
Canada has already made some exceptions for relatives). The two countries have renewed the closure every month since the border
closed to nonessential travel on March 21, 2020. Commercial traffic was never halted.

Before the pandemic, Canada was the second most popular foreign destination for Americans, behind Mexico.

Canada is ready to lift border restrictions because it has made rapid progress vaccinating its population after months of delays. It now
has higher vaccination rates than the United States, with 50 percent of its population fully vaccinated, and 75 percent of residents
having received at least one dose, according to its federal public health agency.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had indicated that Canada would begin to open its border after it crossed the 75 percent threshold for
residents who are at least partly vaccinated.

Travelers must present Canadian border officials with proof of vaccination. Canada will accept only the Covid vaccines it has approved
for its population: those made by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca or the Serum Institute of India, and Janssen, the brand
used by Johnson & Johnson in Canada.

In a news conference on Monday, Bill Blair, the public safety minister, said he shared Canada’s border plan with his U.S. counterparts
last week, but “they’ve not yet made a decision.”

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a briefing Monday that the United States would continue travel restrictions.

“Any decisions about reopening travel will be guided by our public health and medical experts. We take this incredibly seriously, but
we look and are guided by our own medical experts,” Ms. Psaki said. “I wouldn’t look at it through a reciprocal intention.”

Several members of Congress from both parties applauded Canada’s move and called on the United States to follow suit.
Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of western New York, criticized the Biden administration for what he called a “lack of
urgency” in lifting restrictions at the border.

Representative Pete Stauber, Republican of Minnesota, said on Twitter that the news was “long overdue. Our border communities
have suffered for over a year.”

The United States must decide by July 21 to either extend its border closures with Canada and Mexico by a month or lift them
altogether.

Also as of Aug. 9, Canada is dropping its mandatory government-approved-hotel quarantine requirement for air travelers, and
removing the quarantine period for eligible, fully vaccinated visitors.

Children under 12, who are not yet eligible for the vaccines, or dependents of fully vaccinated travelers, will also be exempt from a 14-
day quarantine. They may “move around with their parents, but must avoid group settings, such as camps or daycares,” public health
officials said in briefing documents.

The highly contagious Delta virus variant remains a concern, so some fully vaccinated travelers will be randomly selected to complete
a post-arrival test for the virus.

Regardless of vaccination status, all travelers will be required to present a negative test taken within 72 hours before arrival.

Airline passengers have so far been limited to traveling through four international airports in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and
Vancouver. Now, the government is expanding international flights to Halifax, Quebec City, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

On Friday the Toronto Blue Jays, a Major League Baseball team, were granted a travel exemption allowing them to return to Canada,
after being forced to play across the border throughout the pandemic.

Canada also let National Hockey League teams cross the border for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Miriam Jordan contributed from Los Angeles.

— Vjosa Isai

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

South Korea airlifts a crew from a navy ship amid its military’s biggest virus outbreak.
South Korea is airlifting the entire crew from a navy destroyer off the coast of East Africa after hundreds of sailors tested positive for
the coronavirus in the military’s worst outbreak of the pandemic.

Two top government officials apologized on Tuesday for the outbreak, in which at least 247 out of 301 sailors have contracted the virus.
None of the crew had been vaccinated. Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum told a meeting of health officials that he was “very sorry for
failing to carefully take care of the health of our soldiers.”

In separate remarks, Defense Minister Suh Wook also apologized and said he would look into ways to improve antivirus measures for
service members overseas.

Two military planes have been dispatched to transport the sailors back to South Korea, where they will be sent to hospitals or
quarantine facilities after arriving on Tuesday.
The ship, Munmu the Great, departed for the Gulf of Aden on an eight-month antipiracy mission in early February, shortly before
South Korea began its vaccination campaign. Officials say logistical issues made it to difficult to supply the sailors with vaccines, but
opposition lawmakers say the government should have made a greater effort. They also accused the government of not taking the
outbreak seriously enough when it began earlier this month.

The military has not said what caused the outbreak, though there have been suggestions that it could be linked to a stop at an
unspecified harbor in the area in late June.

An immunized replacement crew will steer the ship back to home waters, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, while a different destroyer is on
its way to the region to continue the antipiracy mission.

The outbreak on the ship has drawn public anger in South Korea, which is already grappling with a fourth wave of infections and a
stalled vaccination campaign.

At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Moon Jae-in said that although the military had acted quickly to bring the sailors home, “it
wasn’t enough in the eyes of the Korean people, and criticism for taking the situation lightly would be unavoidable.”

In other developments across the world:

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that the United States would send over a million doses of the Johnson &
Johnson vaccine to the African nations of Gambia, Senegal, Zambia and Niger, and three million doses to Guatemala, new
allocations of hundreds of millions of doses the Biden administration has promised to send abroad.

— Yu Young Jin

U.S. men’s and women’s basketball teams are the latest to be disrupted by the coronavirus.
TOKYO — The U.S. men’s national basketball team traveled to Tokyo on Monday without guard Zach LaVine, who entered coronavirus
health and safety protocols.

In a statement, Team USA said it was hopeful LaVine could take up his place in Japan later this week. The U.S. men’s basketball team
had reshuffled its roster last week after it lost guard Bradley Beal to health and safety protocols and forward Kevin Love withdrew
from participation.

U.S. women’s basketball also suffered a blow with the news that Katie Lou Samuelson, a member of the 3x3 Olympics team, would miss
the Games following a positive test result. Samuelson said she was fully vaccinated.

“Competing in the Olympics has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl and I hope someday soon, I can come back to realize that
dream,” Samuelson, 24, wrote in an Instagram post.

Earlier Monday, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee confirmed that an alternate on the women’s gymnastics team
had tested positive for the coronavirus while in training in Chiba Prefecture outside Tokyo.

Despite being vaccinated, Kara Eaker, 18, of Grain Valley, Mo., began a 10- to 14-day quarantine, her coach, Al Fong, said in a text
message. He added that she “feels fine.”
 Zach LaVine, left, being guarded by Australia’s Matisse Thybulle during an exhibition last week in Las Vegas. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Fong said that Leanne Wong, another alternate and Eaker’s teammate at his GAGE Center gym in Blue Springs, Mo., was also under
quarantine, expected to last until about July 31, because she is considered a close contact. Wong, who is 17 and from Overland Park,
Kansas, said at the Olympic trials last month that she had not been vaccinated.

The opening ceremony is Friday and the first competitions are Wednesday. But organizers of the Tokyo Olympics are struggling to
manage public anxiety about the Games after a cluster of coronavirus cases that threaten to overshadow the festivities.

As about 20,000 athletes, coaches, referees and other officials have poured into Japan in recent days, more than two dozen of them
have tested positive for the virus, including three cases within the Olympic Village. An additional 33 staff members or contractors who
are Japanese residents working on the Games have tested positive.

Olympics organizers have said their measures — including repeated testing, social distancing and restrictions on movement — would
limit, but not eliminate, coronavirus cases. The Games, originally scheduled for 2020, were postponed a year in the hopes the
pandemic would have eased and they could herald a triumphant return to normal.

Instead, they have become a reminder of the staying power of the virus and have fed a debate over whether Japan and the
International Olympic Committee have their priorities straight.

— Jonathan Abrams, Alexandra E. Petri, Juliet Macur and Motoko Rich

Hollywood studios can mandate that everyone on a set be vaccinated.

Hollywood’s major unions agreed Monday night to a short-term plan that would allow studios to require everyone on a production set
to be vaccinated.
The agreement, which will be in effect through the end of September, will also relax some pandemic protocols on production sets, even
as the Delta variant climbs and Los Angeles County puts a mask mandate for indoor settings back in place. Studios will be able to
decrease the rate of regular coronavirus testing and loosen mask mandates in outdoor settings.

The arrangement was agreed on by the Directors Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees,
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, along with the
studios as represented by the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers.

The parties said they would continue monitoring Covid-19 developments and “will consider further modifications.”

— Nicole Sperling

Between nursing shifts, a Singapore rower trained for the Olympics.

As many of her competitors spent their days preparing for the Olympics, Joan Poh spent much of the past year working long shifts at a
Singapore hospital.

Ms. Poh, a 30-year-old rower who will represent Singapore at the Tokyo Games, had been training and competing full time. But she put
that on hold in April of last year when she returned to her job as a nurse after the government put out a call for frontline medical
reinforcements.

“In a time of pandemic, going back to work felt like a calling,” she said. “When I’m at work, I’m 100 percent a nurse. When I’m training,
I’m 100 percent a rower. It’s always about finding that balance and making it work.”

After resuming eight- to 10-hour hospital shifts in the renal unit at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Ms. Poh sought ways to continue to train.
She squeezed in workouts before and after work, sometimes skipping meals. To make up for lost time, she would spend her entire
weekend on the water.

Though Ms. Poh did not work in a Covid ward, she was one of a handful of specially trained dialysis nurses at the hospital. She often
had to treat patients suspected of having the coronavirus and feared she might contract it herself.

Ms. Poh will also have to be on guard against the virus at this year’s Games, which are unlike any other as organizers try to minimize
the risk of transmission. Spectators will be barred from most events, and athletes are discouraged from giving hugs, high-fives and
handshakes. Out of about 20,000 people traveling to Japan for the Games, dozens have tested positive for the virus, including three
people inside the athletes’ village.

Ms. Poh returned to her job as a nurse last year after the Singapore government put out a
call for frontline medical reinforcements amid the pandemic. Tan Tock Seng Hospital

But as a nurse, Ms. Poh plans to take precautions. Her manager, Koh Yu Han, said that despite attracting stares, they both make a
point of wiping down equipment and tables. They carry their backpacks at all times to avoid putting them down and becoming
contaminated. When traveling to a qualifying race in Tokyo in May, Ms. Koh said, she and Ms. Poh were the only passengers on a bus
full of athletes to sanitize their seats with alcohol.
Just 23 athletes will represent Singapore at the Olympics this year, and Ms. Poh is the only female rower. She is only the second
Singaporean rower to reach the Olympics, placing 12th in the qualifying regatta.

Her event, women’s single sculls, will take place on Friday.

Ms. Poh did not first get into a boat until she was a teenager, but quickly fell in love with being on the water. Her parents could not
afford sports leagues or professional coaching, but she still found ways to practice.

She joined a dragon boat team when she was 17, honing her paddling skills on a traditional long boat before learning how to sail and
row a scull. In 2019, she took an extended leave from her hospital job in order to train and compete full time in Australia.

The past year, splitting time between the gym and the hospital, she said, only increased her drive.

“I understood from when I was young that sport is a luxury,” she said. “To be able to pursue your dream is a luxury. And therefore, if
you can, then you must.”

— Tiffany May

A Florida congressman says he tested positive for the virus after he was fully vaccinated.
Representative Vern Buchanan, Republican of Florida, has tested positive for the coronavirus after having been fully vaccinated
earlier this year, his office announced on Monday.

Mr. Buchanan was tested after “experiencing very mild flu-like symptoms” and is now quarantining at home, the statement said.

Mr. Buchanan said in the statement that he looked forward to returning to work “as soon as possible.” He added, “In the meantime,
this should serve as a reminder that although the vaccines provide a very high degree of protection, we must remain vigilant in the
fight against Covid-19.”

A telephone message left at Mr. Buchanan’s office in Washington was not immediately returned on Monday evening.

Mr. Buchanan is the latest lawmaker to report being infected. More than 70 senators and members of the House of Representatives
have been diagnosed with the virus, according to GovTrack.

The announcement came as Florida reported a 190 percent increase in the number of people who have tested positive for the virus in
the last two weeks, according to data collected by The New York Times, though cases remain at a fraction of their peak levels.

Overall in Florida, 48 percent of people are fully vaccinated. Mr. Buchanan’s coastal district includes parts of three counties, where
vaccination rates hover near the statewide figure: Sarasota (56 percent), Manatee (46 percent) and Hillsborough (43 percent),
according to the Times data.

— Azi Paybarah

Here’s what scientists know about the Beta variant.

Nearly all of England’s pandemic restrictions were lifted on Monday, with a notable exception: Travelers to England from France must
continue to quarantine upon arrival, even if they are fully vaccinated.

The rule, announced on Friday, was spurred by concerns about the presence of the Beta variant of the coronavirus in France and is
intended as a precautionary measure, officials said.

So what is the Beta variant?

Formerly known as B.1.351, Beta was first detected in South Africa last year. It contains several mutations, in a protein called spike,
that help the virus bind more tightly to human cells.

It also contains the E484K mutation, sometimes known as the “Eek” mutation, which appears to help the virus partially evade
antibodies. This mutation has emerged independently in multiple variants, including Gamma, which surfaced in Brazil, and in some
samples of Alpha, which was first identified in Britain.

The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have both designated Beta as a “variant of
concern.”
Scientists and health officials became concerned about Beta because it spread quickly through South Africa and research indicated
that some vaccines were less powerful against it. One of them, developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca, is the vaccine Britain has depended
on most heavily.

Several authorized vaccines do provide strong protection against severe disease caused by the variant, however.

Some monoclonal antibody treatments are also less effective against Beta, although there are other authorized antibody treatments
that appear to work well against it.

Beta’s ability to bind tightly to human cells may also make it more transmissible; the C.D.C. notes that it appears to be roughly 50
percent more infectious than the original form of the virus. It does not appear to be as contagious as the Delta variant that was first
detected in India.

Beta has now been reported in 123 countries, but it remains far less prevalent than Delta, which the World Health Organization has
said is likely to become the dominant variant globally in the coming months.

Over the last four weeks, the Beta variant has appeared in 3.7 percent of virus samples sequenced in France, according to GISAID, a
repository of viral genomes. French officials have criticized the British restrictions as excessive, saying the majority of their Beta
cases are in overseas territories like Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean where Beta accounts for 31.2 percent of sequences.

Beta is not common in the United States, where it represents just 0.1 percent of infections, according to C.D.C. estimates. It has been
detected in Britain, but accounts for a negligible share of cases there.

— Emily Anthes

‘Facebook isn’t killing people’: Biden softens his attack over vaccine misinformation.
After a weekend of rancor between the White House and Facebook, President Biden has softened his forceful criticism of social
networks over the spread of misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

At a White House news conference on Monday largely focused on the economy, Mr. Biden stepped back from his comment on Friday
that platforms like Facebook were “killing people.”

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” Mr. Biden said. “These 12 people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting
hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information.”

He appeared to be referring to a study from earlier this year showing that 12 online personalities, with a combined following of 59
million people, were responsible for the vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories, and that
Facebook provided the most consequential platform.

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that I’m somehow saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do
something about the misinformation,” Mr. Biden said.

In a blog post on Saturday, Facebook called on the administration to stop “finger pointing,” laid out what it had done to encourage
users to get vaccinated, and detailed how it had clamped down on lies about the vaccines.

“The Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president
of integrity, said in the post. “The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the U.S. has increased.”

Mr. Rosen said that the company’s data showed that 85 percent of its U.S. users had been or wanted to be vaccinated against the
coronavirus. The country fell short of meeting Mr. Biden’s target of having 70 percent of American adults vaccinated by July 4, but, Mr.
Rosen said, “Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed.”

On Sunday, the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, reiterated warnings that false stories about the vaccines had become a dangerous
health hazard. “These platforms have to recognize they’ve played a major role in the increase in speed and scale with which
misinformation is spreading,” Mr. Murthy said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

On Monday, Mr. Biden called on Facebook’s officials to consider the impact the spread of misinformation about the vaccine could have
on people they cared about.

“Look in the mirror,” Mr. Biden said. “Think about that misinformation going to your son, your daughter, your relative, someone you
love. That’s all I’m asking.”

— Daniel E. Slotnik and Cecilia Kang