Joe Biden and Kamala Harris call for nationwide mask mandate – as it happened

Just hours after Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, in her home state of California fierce speculation had already begun as to who might replace her in the Senate if she wins a spot in the White House.

“It seems early,” said Aimee Allison, who heads She the People, a national network seeking to elevate women of color to political leadership. “But behind the scenes, conversations are already happening. And I don’t think it’s too soon to think about what the community wants, and what the state wants in a leader.”

If the Biden-Harris team wins on 3 November, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, will appoint someone to replace Harris in the Senate for the duration of her term, which ends in 2022. Asked on Wednesday if people have already started pitching themselves for the position, Newsom joked with a reporter: “You may be the only one who hasn’t – unless you just did.” Later, he added that his comment was only a “slight” exaggeration.

Read more about who some of the top contenders are:

Angela Davis, the political activist, prison abolitionist and professor, said that Kamala Harris’ nomination makes the Democratic presidential ticket “more palatable”.

“We can’t forget that she did not oppose the death penalty and we can’t forget some of the real problems that are associated with her career as a prosecutor,” Davis told Reuters. “But ... it’s a feminist approach to be able to work with those contradictions. And so, in that context, I can say that I’m very excited.”

Davis ran for president in 1980 and 1984, on the Communist Party ticket. Here’s a recent Guardian interview with her:

The president, who championed the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the US, has revived birtherism at today’s press conference in an attack against Kamala Harris.

“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements. I have no idea if that is right,” he said. “I would have assumed that the Democrats have checked it out.”

The promotion of this racist conspiracy theory through questions and waffling – which allows Trump to deny that he thinks a Black American wasn’t born in the US, while noting that some people think so, and maybe that’s worth looking into – is a tried-and-true tactic that he used in his baseless attacks against Obama, as well.

Harris was born in the US, and is a US citizen who is eligible to serve as president.

“Do you regret all the lying you’ve done to the American people?” a reporter asked Donald Trump. He did not respond, and called on another journalist.

Trump falsely claimed that foreign nations can easily “grab” and forge mail-in ballots. Experts say the assertion “defies common sense”.

Here’s UC Irvine political scientist Rick Hasen, explaining why:

So far, the coronavirus update has been a campaign event — with Trump delivering a prepared speech attacking Joe Biden. “We will defeat this virus but not by hiding in our basements,” Trump said. “Joe Biden needs to stop playing politics with the virus.”

Pressed on his comment that he refuses to support the US Postal Service because they will handle mail-in voting, Trump said he would not veto a bill featuring postal funding. He continued to lie about fraud in mail-in voting and falsely stated that absentee voting and mail-in voting are different. They are the same. He argued baselessly that Democrats want to keep schools —which also serve as polling places — closed so that Americans cannot vote. He argued baselessly that there was fraud in the New York primary that Democrat Carolyn Maloney won.

“Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach,” Trump said, in a peak case of projection.

As we have reported before — Trump has devalued and undermined science throughout the pandemic.

Here’s me, looking back at how Trump has contradicted science:

Here’s my colleague Oliver Milman, on how Trump’s habit of rejecting scientific fact has raised alarm among health experts:

Trump, who has lied, misled and misrepresented the reality of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, contradicting and ignoring his own public health experts, has begun by attacking Joe Biden: “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus - ignoring the scientific evidence.”

He said Biden’s immigration policies would allow “the pandemic to infiltrate every US community”. The pandemic is already widespread.

Hi there, it’s Maanvi Singh, reporting from the West Coast.

We’re expecting Trump to deliver his press conference in a few minutes — and will keep you updated with news and fact checks.

Vice-president Mike Pence is continuing to put out some jabs toward his new Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, this time criticizing remarks she made about Americans’ eating habits and the environment.

Speaking at the “Farmers and Ranchers for Trump” launch event in Iowa, Pence told the crowd that Harris said during her primary campaign that she was concerned about the impact of Americans’ diet. “She would change the dietary guidelines of this country to reduce the amount of red meat that Americans can eat,” Pence said, the crowd booing in response.

“Well, I’ve got some red meat for you: we’re not going to let Joe Biden & Kamala Harris cut America’s meat!”

That supporters of the Green New Deal are out to ban hamburgers altogether has long been a talking point of conservatives. While Green New Deal advocates have indicated they want to work with farmers and ranchers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a complete ban on red meat has not been a part of the plan.

The teaser for Michael Cohen’s book is now out after the justice department issued a gag order, which has since been dropped, to stop the book’s publication.

The book, titled Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J Trump, is slated to be released sometime in September, ahead of the presidential election in November.

The book’s foreword is now available online and details Cohen’s feelings of bewilderment at seeing Trump for who he really is after being “Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night”.

“In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man,” Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, writes.

Cohen was serving a three-year prison on federal charges of tax evasion, making false statements, lying to Congress and facilitating illegal payments to silence women about their affairs with Trump. But Cohen was released in May after fears of Covid-19 spreading in federal prisons.

After tweeting that he was nearly finished with his book in July, Cohen was sent back to prison. The ACLU ended up joining a suit on his behalf to get him out, which was ultimately successful. A gag order from the justice department to halt the book’s publication was also dropped.

The Trump administration has made very obvious efforts to stop the publication of high-profile tell-alls, all which have been ultimately unsuccessful. Former national security adviser John Bolton book The Room Where It Happened was published was published in June and Mary L Trump’s, Trump’s niece, book Too Much and Never Enough was published in July.

Two new speakers slated to make appearances at next week’s Democratic National Convention were announced today. Billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and entrepreneur Andrew Yang both announced today that they will be speaking at the virtual convention.

Yang and Bloomberg will be joining a list of former candidates including senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Pete Buttigieg is also slated to speak at the virtual convention.

After the Democratic National Committee, which runs the convention, announced the DNC’s speaker lineup, Yang tweeted that he was disappointed that he was not asked to speak. “I’ve got to be honest I kind of expected to speak,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Ted Lieu, a US representative from California, tweeted in response his disappointment that there was little Asian American representation at the convention. “Asian Americans are the fastest increasing group in America, including in multiple swing states,” Lieu tweeted. “The gross underrepresentation of Asian American speakers in the four days of the DNC Convention is tone deaf and a slap in the face.”

Georgia governor Brian Kemp has announced that he is dropping his lawsuit against the city of Atlanta for implementing a mask mandate, according to the AP.

The lawsuit against Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and the City Council was filed July 16, with Kemp claiming that it defied his executive order that said local governments cannot implement coronavirus measures that are stricter than the state’s regulations. While Kemp has strongly urged people to wear masks, he has not instituted a state-wide mandate.

Lawyers for the city argued that the city has the right to take action to protect the public. “In the absence of state leadership on this issue, local governments have stepped in to protect their citizens,” the city’s filing said.

Georgia has seen a spike of Covid-19 cases in the last month, seeing over 105,000 cases in the state in July alone.

In a press conference earlier today, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior advisor, confirmed that he met with Kanye West in the wake of the rapper announcing his presidential run.

Kushner said that West is “a friend of mine” and that he has known him for 10 years. “He has some great ideas for what he’s like to see happen in the country and that’s why he has the candidacy that he’s been doing,” Kushner said. “There’s a lot of the issues that the president has championed that he admires.”

West has been a vocal support of Trump but announced he is running for president in July. His campaign has not gained momentum since he was too late to get on the ballot in most states. Instead, the campaign raised serious concerns about the state of West’s mental health in light of volatile statements West has made since announcing his run. West has been vocal about his experience with bipolar disorder.

It appears the normalization of relations agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is not as ironed out as the Trump administration is suggesting.

According to Axios, Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address Thursday night he is “committed to annexing parts of the West Bank” but temporarily suspended those plans to reach an agreement with the UAE. The plans to annex parts of the West Bank, which is Palestinian territory, has received global condemnation.

When announcing the agreement made between the US, UAE and Israel, Trump declared on Twitter that a “historic peace agreement” had been made. A tweet from UAE crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan led on the fact that Israel agreed to “stop further annexation of Palestinian territories” and to begin creating a “roadmap” for a bilateral relationship between the two countries.

US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez struck back at Donald Trump after comments he made this morning on Fox Business about US representative being “not even a smart person”.

Trump told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Joe Biden, if president, is likely going to fund the plans of Ocasio-Cortez. He then said, seemingly out of nowhere, said that “AOC was a poor student ... this is not even a smart person.” He continued on saying that she says “good lines of stuff” and that “she yaps”.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez challenged Trump to release his college transcript.

College has recently become a sore topic for Trump with the publishing of “Too Much and Never Enough”, the book of his niece, Mary L. Trump, about the Trump family. In the book, Mary Trump divulged that her uncle paid someone to take the SATs for him to get into the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout the book, Mary Trump repeatedly remarks that her uncle was a bad student in school but cared about the credentials of a reputable college.

Democratic presidential running mates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have hit the campaign trail again today, receiving a briefing on the coronavirus crisis from the Biden team’s public health advisers in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

“It should be the public health professionals that are leading policy in our country to address this lethal pandemic,” Harris told reporters as a video briefing with the physicians began.

The pair accused Donald Trump of a catalogue of “failures of leadership” on the coronavirus crisis and the dire economic fallout during their first event together as running mates on Wednesday. Trump has sidelined public health experts in recent months, most publicly at the coronavirus White House press briefings he now usually delivers alone.

The pandemic has killed more than 166,000 people in the US - the highest death toll in the world, and left tens of millions unemployed.

The massive waves of unemployment from stay-at-home order put in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has threatened the country with a potentially devastating mental health crisis.

Over the last few months, the federal and state governments have provided some protections to Americans suffering the worst economic effects from Covid-19, bolstering unemployment insurance and implementing eviction moratoriums. But those protections have expired for many, leaving a path to what could rapidly turn into disaster for the well-being of millions of people. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports:

Covid-19 has upended almost every aspect of normal life for many people, resulting in an increase in multiple suicide risk factors while also weakening some of the protective ones.

“The pandemic has already generated a combination of factors associated with increased risk, including economic recession, access to firearms, and a generalized sense of anxiety and depression. I would not be surprised if this leads to an increase in suicide deaths,” said Jonathan Singer, president of the American Association of Suicidology and associate professor of social work at Loyola University in Chicago.

As Donald Trump is coming under fire for openly saying he refuses to support the US Postal Service since they will handle mail-in voting, a Trump campaign advisor retweeted a controversial op-ed questioning Kamala Harris’ eligibility to be vice president.

Jenna Ellis, a senior legal advisor on Trump’s campaign, retweeted an op-ed from Newsweek that argues Harris might not be eligible to be vice president since her parents were not born in the United States. Harris was born in Oakland, California, making her a citizen since birth.

Trump is, of course, remembered for feeding into the “birther” movement in 2008, furthering conspiracy theories that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, despite him being born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Such questions have never been raised so prominently for white presidential candidates, including the late John McCain, who was born in Panama.

In response to the op-ed and retweet from Ellis, Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Joe Biden’s campaign, said that it is “unsurprising” that Trump and his campaign would “resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation.”

Editors from Newsweek responded to the backlash to the op-ed, saying that the author was raising “a long-standing, somewhat arcane legal debate” about the wording of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and has no connection to the birther movement.

The Supreme Court rejected Republicans’ attempts to prevent the easing of mail-in voting restrictions in Rhode Island.

The Republican National Committee tried to reinstate a rule in Rhode Island that would require a person to get two witnesses or a notary public to sign a mail-in ballot. Republicans argued that the pandemic did not make it harder for people to find two witnesses.

Notably, three of the court’s conservative judges, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, indicated their dissent to the court’s ruling.

In an interview with Fox Business this morning, Donald Trump used language toward women that is likely a hint of what is to come in the next few months as he wages a fight with Joe Biden’s new presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

In an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump referred to Harris as “sort of a mad woman”, criticizing her questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his heated confirmation hearing in September 2018. “She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry,” he said of the Democrats.

Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted that the media has given Harris a “free pass”, saying there was “nobody meaner or more condescending” to Biden during the primaries.

Trump’s tirade on Fox Business also including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that she “is not even a smart person” and that she “goes out and yaps”. Trump also described House speaker Nancy Pelosi as “stone-cold crazy”.

Joe Biden’s campaign has responded to comments Donald Trump made this morning on Fox Business that giving more funding to the US Postal Service to carry out mail-in voting would lead to fraud:

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is getting criticism for an announcement that she plans to build a $400,000 fence around the governor’s mansion in Pierre, the state’s capital. The governor’s team has not offered any specific threats behind the building of the fence, though they did say their security team recommended it.

In the last few months, Noem has positioned herself as a standout conservative voice during the Covid-19 pandemic, angling herself beside Donald Trump and giving him a warm welcome when he visited Mount Rushmore for the Fourth of July. Noem gifted Trump a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a bust of his head.

While Covid-19 cases in South Dakota have not seen the huge spikes that other states have seen, it has seen a relatively moderate number of cases given its small population size. Noem has opted for a more lax approach of handling the virus, encouraging schools to open in-person in the fall and discouraging the use of masks and social distancing.

AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the US, just announced that it will be offering 15-cent movie tickets when more than 100 of its theaters open August 20, according to the AP. The chain calls its reopening promotion “Movies in 2020 at 1920 Prices”.

The chain has been closed in the US since March when most states began to shut down businesses to stop the spread of Covid-19. AMC had originally announced in June that it would reopen its theaters July 15, but as cases continued to increase in the US, the chain continued to push back its reopening timeline.

AMC said it hopes to have two-thirds of its cinemas open by the time that Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” thriller is out September 3. Disney’s “New Mutants”, part of the X-Men series, is slated to be released August 28 after its original release date in March was postponed.

Several states have issued orders that explicit bar movie theaters from opening. AMC said that the safety precautions it’s taking at its reopening locations include requiring guests to wear masks, increased theater cleaning and reduced theater capacity to encourage social distancing.

Sarah Palin has been on Good Morning America, with her thoughts on the pick of Kamala Harris as the VP nomination for a major party. She was the last woman to be in such a position.

She said that she believed that herself, and Geraldine Ferraro who was VP pick in 1984, had been able to “bust down some doors”.

I think we were able to show some voters, maybe you’re kind of Neanderthal-ish and not believing that women are capable of doing a whole lot at once. We were able to prove that [we could].

Palin has said that she has reached out to Harris, and questioned why, Palin said:

I had a great discussion with Geraldine Ferraro when I was chosen. I called her and we were able to kind of bond over this unique experience that she had had and that I was ready to have. I wish that more people, more women would have reached out to me at the time.

Sarah Palin also said that Harris is in a much better position than she was, what with it being 2020.

We see the big feminist list of women who’ve already come out to support her and kind of saying, you know, media, take your hands off her when it comes to some issues that maybe you’re gearing up to attack on. Nobody did that for me. Nobody did that for Geraldine.

Bhaskar Sunkara has also written for us today about USPS, saying:

Postal employment is one of America’s most powerful engines of upward mobility. As early as 1861, the Post Office Department began hiring black employees and maintained that practice throughout the century of racial apartheid that followed the end of slavery. Today, a full quarter of USPS workers are black and the vast majority of them unionized. For these workers, and millions of others, stable public sector employment is the only viable route to union protections, job stability and a decent living.

A needless austerity program of any size would directly affect every community in the country. But the indirect effects would be just as profound. Collective bargaining influences pay and benefits across sectors, benefiting even non-union workers in private companies like FedEx. USPS unions, such as the American Postal Workers Union, have intervened more widely, too, in defense of social goods enjoyed by all working people and backing Bernie Sanders and his demands for new programs like Medicare for All.

However, rather than just trying to protect the USPS as it currently exists from Trump administration attacks, we should go further. Let’s expand the USPS’s mandate.

Read it here: Bhaskar Sunkara – Conservatives are trying to destroy the US Postal Service. Instead we should expand it

More Twitter trouble for the Trumps, as the president’s son has been spotted ‘liking’ a tweet that included a sexist slur about Kamala Harris, CNN reports.

The now-deleted tweet Eric Trump liked was from an account belonging to a user named Lori Hendry, and it read: “Raise your hand if you think Harris was a whorendous pick. May have misspelled.”

Read it here: CNN – Eric Trump likes tweet calling Harris a sexist slur

This is one of the weirder things I’ve had to report on, but Herman Cain has been lambasting the pick of Kamala Harris as VP from beyond the grave – at least that’s how it appears from the late Republican’s twitter feed, anyway.

Cain died on 30 July after being hospitalised with Covid-19. The tweets are part of a plan from his family to continue his legacy. On Tuesday, Cain’s daughter Melanie Cain Gallo published a piece on the Cain website announcing that “We’ve decided here at Cain HQ that we will go on using this platform to share the information and ideas he believed in”

The post, however, didn’t make it clear that they were planning to use Cain’s Twitter account to resume tweeting, with no mention that her father was now deceased.

Criticism of the move yesterday seems to have left them undeterred, the account tweeted another attack on Biden this morning.

Vivian Ho in San Francisco has been getting the lowdown for us on what the pick of Kamala Harris for VP nominee has meant back in the Senator’s hometown of Oakland. And it’s not totally joy without reservation.

In a county with a long history of radical politics and where more than half of residents voted for the progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary – and where Sanders supporters picketed outside Joe Biden’s Oakland election day stopover – some residents’ enthusiasm was tempered by Harris’ track record as a prosecutor and attorney general, as well as some of her votes in the senate.

“I think there was a bit of cognitive dissonance for me given the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the conversation around defunding the police,” said Terry Taplin, a candidate for Berkeley city council. Even so, he said: “It is really exciting to see a Black and South Asian woman from the East Bay get the pick.”

Read it here: Oakland ‘hella proud’ as Harris joins Biden – despite progressives’ misgivings

Back in election mode, Rachael Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker have a piece in the Washington Post this morning about how senior Republicans embracing the extreme views of Marjorie Taylor Greene draws attention to the party’s tolerance of bigotry.

Yesterday the president congratulated Greene on her primary victory in a tweet, despite the fact that she is an avowed QAnon conspiracy-theory supporter with a history of posting social media videos that have been criticised as racist. Bade and Stanley-Becker write that:

The rise of Greene shines a spotlight on the GOP’s internal debate over how to handle fringe groups and candidates who support Trump and whom he often supports in return. Republicans privately acknowledge that there is no future for a party that antagonizes people of color and has members who make statements or take policy positions supported by white supremacists. But they also have done little to stand up to Trump, a president who embraces such rhetoric, and candidates who make those remarks.

More than a dozen QAnon-supporting candidates will be on ballots across the country in November, but Greene is the one most likely to get elected.

Read it here: Washington Post – Trump, House Republicans embrace candidate who has made racist statements, drawing attention to party’s tolerance of bigotry

This was also useful on the Republican quandary with dealing with QAnon, from yesterday, not least for quoting Rep. Denver Riggleman saying “QAnon is the mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories”.

Read it here: Politico – McCarthy faces QAnon squeeze

Axios have a little bit of a more optimistic take on the coronavirus numbers this morning. There’s naturally a lag between new cases being reported and then the ultimate outcome of the illness, and so the high number of deaths reported yesterday in the US reflects the illness case load from a couple of weeks back.

Sam Baker writes for Axios that the case numbers show that the coronavirus outbreak is “slowing down after a summer of explosive growth.”

New cases slowed over the past week in 21 states, including Arizona, Florida, Texas and the Southern states that experienced dramatic outbreaks in June and July.

There’s roughly a rolling 7-day average of 52,000 new cases per day, and that’s around 10% down on the week before, which is good news. But, he ruefully concludes:

Progress has to start somewhere, and these numbers are encouraging. But the US still has a very big coronavirus outbreak and a flawed, incomplete plan of attack to fight it.

Read it here: Axios – Coronavirus cases are falling, but don’t get too comfortable

Also on the election front, here’s a little bit more from my colleagues Julian Borger and Sam Levine about the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) assessing the forthcoming US elections as “the most challenging in recent decades”.

It is recommending that member states send 100 long-term and 400 short-term observers to monitor the poll.

A week-long needs assessment mission by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights beginning on 29 May found there was widespread concern that “election officials will face serious challenges prior to and on election day, due to new measures in response to Covid-19 pandemic, and expressed concerns over their ability to overcome them.”

In the view of officials and experts the assessment mission spoke to, the voting problems “may have an impact on the level of trust in election administration, which, in turn, could harm the integrity of election day proceedings, and ultimately cast doubt in the outcome of the elections”.

Read more here: International body says voting problems ‘could harm integrity’ of US election

The president has just tweeted that he’ll be interviewed on Fox Business this morning at 7:30am. He’s also…well, just have a look for yourself. He’s tweeting about numbers – but it’s not the number of coronavirus deaths.

It’s been clear for some time that the coronavirus pandemic has been affecting some groups in society disproportionately – both in terms of the illness itself and the economic impact it has caused.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation this morning are reporting on research by the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, which finds that the slight progress towards equality that Black people in the US were making is being undone by Covid-19.

The report says that Black Americans’ levels of equality with white people had risen slightly since 2018, aided by improvements in health and social justice.

On a scorecard gauged with white people at 100%, Black Americans scored 74% on economics, health, education, social justice and civic engagement, up 1.6 percentage points from 2018, the League said in its “2020 State of Black America” report.

But the calculations were made before the outbreak of Covid-19, which is wiping out Black gains in wealth and jobs, while killing about twice as many Black people as white, said the National Urban League report,

“America is in crisis. Black America is in a doubly difficult crisis,” said Marc Morial, National Urban League president.

“You’ve got the health issues related to COVID and the disproportionality of deaths and disease, and you’ve got the economic fallout, disproportionality in terms of unemployment, the impact on businesses.

“The you’ve got the racial justice crisis, which was put into plain sight by the death of George Floyd,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

Even before the coronavirus and the economic recession, the study’s findings “reflect longstanding racial and ethnic disparities across nearly every area of American life,” the report said.

Jeffrey Collins at Associated Press has been looking at the difficulties on the ground in deciding whether to reopen schools or not - described as an “impossible decision” by one school board member

He reports that the Rock Hill board of trustees in suburban South Carolina is like thousands of school boards nationwide, where members are tackling a simple question “do we return to school amid a pandemic?” with no right or even good answers, in the face of inconsistent testing and a near-constant increase in confirmed coronavirus cases.

Behind that question is pressure. Pressure from teachers and bus drivers and janitors, scared to return to work but in need of a paycheck. Pressure from parents and guardians, who need to return to their own jobs but fear for their children’s safety. Pressure from a president who declares on Twitter “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” but whose administration provides little tangible guidance for doing so.

They’ve opted to reopen by splitting students into two groups that would each spend two days a week in classrooms, with virtual learning the other school days.

Helena Miller, one of the trustees, says she has spent countless nights, eyes wide open, her mind wrestling over the safety and education of the children she swore to protect.

And everyone has an opinion. The district has more than 17,000 students, and that means about 17,000 proposals on how to go back to school, one of the trustees told Collins, only half-joking.

South Carolina has some of the country’s worst virus numbers, and state leaders can’t agree on what to do about schools. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster contradicted his own education superintendent and said schools must allow a five-days-a-week option for working parents. School boards were left to untangle the mess - Rock Hill called an emergency meeting and ultimately kept to its staggered plan.

There was no shouting, no claims of fake science, no accusations that trustees didn’t care for kids. At a time when such arguments erupt everywhere from talks shows to Facebook, from the White House to the corner store, this board prides itself on civil discourse. School boards represent democracy at its local core.

“We want what’s best for our children,” said trustee Windy Cole, who’s had her own tears and sleepless nights. “I’ve been in all the meetings, I’ve listened to everything I can, and I trust our district is doing the best possible under these horrible circumstances. We have to just keep praying,”

We’ve been publishing a new series this week – Lost on the frontline – which is documenting the death toll of the coronavirus on healthcare professionals in the US.

The latest in the series, co-published with Kaiser Health News, is from Emmarie Huetteman, on how US hospitals pressure healthcare staff to work even if they have Covid symptoms.

Guidance from public health experts has evolved as they have learned more about the coronavirus, but one message has remained consistent: if you feel sick, stay home. Yet hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities have flouted that guidance, pressuring workers who contract Covid-19 to return sooner than public health standards suggest is safe. Some employers have failed to provide adequate paid leave, if any, so employees felt they had to return to work – even while possibly infectious.

Many hospitals with an onslaught of patients have found themselves short-staffed. That need dovetailed with an entrenched culture in medicine of “presenteeism”. Frontline healthcare workers, in particular, follow a brutal ethos of being tough enough to work even when ill, reasoning that other “people are sicker”, said Andra Blomkalns, the chair of Stanford University’s emergency medicine department.

Read it in full here: US hospitals pressure healthcare staff to work even if they have Covid symptoms

The New York Times has a chart-laden interactive report this morning claiming that the true coronavirus toll in the US has already surpassed 200,000. That’s some 34,000 higher than the official death toll stands at the moment. Denise Lu writes:

As the pandemic has moved south and west from New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes. That suggests that the official death counts may be substantially underestimating the overall effects of the virus.

The piece analyses “excess deaths” – that is how many more deaths have been recorded than you would usually expect at this time. The data shows that most states have been seeing more deaths than they would normally expect to see most weeks since March.

Read it in full here: New York Times – The true coronavirus toll in the US has already surpassed 200,000

Good morning, welcome to our live coverage of US politics and the coronavirus crisis for the day. Here’s a catch-up with where we are, and a bit of what we can expect to see later on today

• There were 53,758 new coronavirus cases recorded yesterday, a number that has risen for the second day in a row. And there were 1,468 deaths – the highest single day total since mid-May. For the last two weeks, the country has now averaged more than 1,000 deaths per day
• Joe Biden and Kamala Harris excoriated ‘failure’ Trump during their first joint appearance since he announced she would be his VP pick. They’ll be campaigning together again today
  
• Trump has already called Harris ‘nasty’ – is it because of her record of grilling powerful men?
• The OSCE office for democratic institutions recommends sending 500 monitors to observe the ‘most challenging’ US election in recent decades
  
• Facebook is set to roll out new tools which it claims will fight election disinformation
• Police declared a riot in Portland, on the 77th consecutive night of Black Lives Matter protests there
• Kayleigh McEnany gives a press briefing at 1pm. There’s nothing public in Trump’s diary, though that doesn’t rule out him doing another coronavirus briefing later on

I’m Martin Belam and I’ll be with you for the next couple of hours – you can get me at martin.belam@theguardian.com