The latest on the coronavirus pandemic

The Covid-19 infection rate across New York City has to be below 3% for schools to reopen, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during the city’s daily Covid-19 news conference Friday.

New York City has been below that threshold for weeks, de Blasio said.

When schools reopen, face masks will be required along with social distancing, free Covid-19 testing will be offered, and all staff and students must have the necessary personal protective equipment to work in the classroom, de Blasio said.

Teachers will be required to get tested for Covid-19 in the days leading up to schools reopening and test results will be given to teachers within 24-hours of being tested, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said during the same press conference.

If someone gets sick in the classroom that information will be communicated fast, Carranza said.

The goal is to keep kids in the same group as much as possible and limit movement for students and who they come in contact with throughout the day, de Blasio said.

“Everything we do is going to be focused on health and safety,” the mayor said.

If a student or teacher gets sick, that entire classroom will be required to quarantine for 14-days, Dr. Ted Long said.

Long, who runs the NYC Test and Trace Corps, said the corps will investigate each case of Covid-19 at a school and schools could close for a limited time during the investigation, or they could switch to remote learning, he said.

As students and teachers prepare for the upcoming school year, CNN's "Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction" podcast is dedicating a week of episodes to how kids and teachers may return to school safely.

In today's episode, one listener asked, "How can I get my kids to wear a mask?"

Here's how CNN's education experts, Laura Jarrett responded:

You can listen to the full episode here.

The President appears to be watching this morning’s coronavirus hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci and top health experts. 

Here's what he tweeted moments ago:

Trump has repeatedly argued that more testing is leading to more cases in the US. That is comprehensively inaccurate. 

Fact's first: Trump's own officials and his Republican allies have acknowledged it's not true that a rising number of tests is the reason the number of cases has skyrocketed over the last month. One telling piece of evidence that the spike is genuine: the percentage of people testing positive, a key measure of the true spread of the virus, has also spiked. As for his assertion regarding other countries — Countries like Germany have needed to do less testing over time because they were more successful at containing their outbreaks in the first place — by employing a strategy that involved aggressive early testing.

You can read more from CNN's Fact Check team here.

Vietnam confirmed its first novel coronavirus death on Friday, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

The patient, a 70-year-old man, died on Friday morning in the Hue Central Hospital, state media said. He was a resident of Hoi An town and was admitted to Da Nang Hospital after developing symptoms on July 9, according to VNA. He tested positive for the virus on July 26. 

Vietnam also confirmed 37 new coronavirus cases on Friday evening, raising Vietnam’s total number of infections to 546, according to Chinhphu, the official state-run newspaper of the Vietnamese government.

A funeral home in Texas is so overwhelmed with bodies that it is using a refrigerated tractor-trailer to temporarily handle the volume of victims.

McAllen, Texas, funeral home director Ron Rivera said he encourages virtual funeral viewings, but some families cannot do them, and he tries to educate them on the dangers of in-person ceremonies. 

Rivera said he meets with grieving families whose loved ones died in the hospital and are told they must be cremated. 

“I’m trying my best…allowing them to have visitation with their loved one so they can have some sort of closure. It's important for them to be able to see them one final time and have some closure. So yes, it's very difficult every day,” Rivera said. 

He said he is meeting today with a woman who delayed the funeral of her mother who died of coronavirus because her father wasn’t feeling well. She called Rivera yesterday to inform him that her father passed away. Her parents were married for nearly 50 years, Rivera said. 

“We’re seeing these situations…more and more,” he said. 

“It's an invisible enemy we have, is what I tell the families, and everybody we speak to, we have to assume they're infected. That's the point we're at,” he added. 

Watch:

The unemployment benefit that has kept millions afloat during the worst economic crisis in decades officially expires tonight at midnight. Weekly jobless claims continue to rise. Economic forecasters are warning of another slowdown. The coronavirus has resurged across the country. 

And the US Senate has adjourned for the weekend. 

There's no deal in sight right now: The dire economic news, the potential for significant long-term damage, the very real deadline – nothing has jarred loose the talks over the next coronavirus relief package. Lawmakers and the Trump administration, people involved in the talks say, are nowhere near a broad deal than they were at the start of the week.

What happens next: The top White House negotiators — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — and the top Democratic negotiators — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — are expected to speak by phone today and through the weekend, but at this point no in-person meetings are planned. 

England will “squeeze the brake pedal” on the next phase of re-opening in a bid to slow down the rising rates of coronavirus infection, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Friday.

“You’ll know that at every point I have said out plan to re-open society and the economy is conditional, that it relies on continued progress against the virus and we would not hesitate to put the brakes on if required. With those numbers creeping up, our assessment is that we should now squeeze that brake pedal in order to keep the virus under control,” Johnson said at a Downing Street press conference.

Certain venues that were scheduled to reopen in England on Saturday – including casinos, bowling allies, skating rinks and close-contact services – will now remain shuttered until at least August 15.

Johnson said the government is also empowering local authorities to close down premises and cancel events which are not following Covid-19 guidance, and called for "a greater police presence to ensure face coverings are being worn where this is required by law.”

The requirement to wear face coverings will be extended to indoor venues in England including museums, galleries, movie theaters and places of worship as of August 8.

Johnson also said he asked the Home Secretary to work with the police and others to ensure the rules which are already in place are properly enforced.

“Most people in this country are following the rules and doing their best to control the virus,” Johnson said, adding “we must keep our discipline and our focus and we cannot become complacent.”

Drug giants GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur said Friday they had won a commitment from the US federal government to pay up to $2.1 billion to help the two companies move forward with their proposed joint coronavirus vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed.

The companies had said in April they would work together to make a vaccine against Covid-19, using Sanofi’s flu vaccine technology and Glaxo’s adjuvant -- a compound that boosts the power of a vaccine.

Now they have a deal with the US government to produce up to 100 million doses of vaccine next year, with an option for 500 million more doses. It’s the largest funding announcement for an Operation Warp Speed vaccine so far.

The companies said they plan to start a combined Phase 1/2 safety study in September, with an advanced Phase 3 efficacy trial to start, if all goes well, by the end of the year. 

“The portfolio of vaccines being assembled for Operation Warp Speed increases the odds that we will have at least one safe, effective vaccine as soon as the end of this year,” US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement distributed by Glaxo.

Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, told CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen on Thursday that the program was going to fund eight different coronavirus vaccines.

These include vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer, which started advanced trials in volunteers on Monday; a vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford that is in Phase 3 trials in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa, and which is expected to start US trials in August; and vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and Novavax scheduled to begin Phase 3 trials in September. The Sanofi-Glaxo joint effort would be the sixth to be named as part of the program.

Pfizer and its vaccine partner BioNTech have a $1.95 billion deal with Operation Warp Speed; Novavax has a $1.6 billion deal; AstraZeneca’s contract is for $1.2 billion; Moderna’s awards total $900 million; and Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen has a $450 million contract, according to HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority website.

More than 17.3 million coronavirus cases have been recorded worldwide, including at least 673,800 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

The US is seeing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections after states began reopening their economies, with the case count now at more than 4.4 million and the death toll at 152,075, according to JHU data.

Without a national effort to adhere to preventative measures, the nation's top infectious disease doctor has said it will be impossible to predict how much longer the pandemic will last in the US.

"The thing we need to do is we need to pull out all the stops to get it down to baseline and to keep it there by doing the things that we've been talking about -- that I've been talking about -- consistently," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday during CNN's coronavirus town hall.

Here's the latest on the pandemic:

Hong Kong postpones elections: Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced that the city's Legislative Council elections slated for September 6 have been postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak in the city.

Europe suffers record GDP slump: Europe's economy shrank by 11.9% in the second quarter as the coronavirus pandemic plunged the region into a deep recession.

The quarter-on-quarter fall in EU GDP -- the worst on record -- comes as European countries took a battering. France, Italy and Spain, recorded second quarter falls of 13.8%, 12.4%, and 18.5%, respectively. Germany, Europe's biggest economy, suffered less, reporting a 10.1% hit to GDP.

German disease prevention center lists Spanish regions as “high-risk": Germany's Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has designated the Spanish regions of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre as “high-risk areas,” according to its most recent update to its list of places believed to be hotbeds of the novel coronavirus.

Bolsonaro says he has "mold" in lungs as his wife tests positive: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday he felt weak and might have "mold in the lung" having spent weeks in isolation after catching Covid-19. His wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, has also tested positive for coronavirus, according to the President's press office.

England will slow re-opening: England will “squeeze the brake pedal” on the next phase of re-opening in a bid to slow down the rising rates of coronavirus infection, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Friday. New restrictions in northwest England were announced Thursday in response to an increase in cases in the area. 

Belgium records weekly rise in infections: Belgium’s weekly average of new infections rose by 62% compared to the previous week -- with 566 cases recorded this past Monday, health authorities announced Friday. Several countries has imposed travel restrictions on travelers arriving from the country.