Coronavirus

American football is famous for being a full-contact sport. That presents a challenge for trying to keep the coronavirus at bay.

But the NFL is going for it, with some changes.

With Mississippi on track to become the number-one state for new coronavirus infections per capita, Gov. Tate Reeves is implementing a temporary mask mandate and delaying the reopening of schools in certain counties.

Reeves announced the new measures at a press conference on Tuesday.

Six states led by a bipartisan group of governors are joining together in an effort to speed up coronavirus testing. As the nation's death count continues to rise above 150,000, the states said they will jointly purchase 3 million rapid antigen tests that can quickly detect the virus.

Rafael Nadal will skip this year's U.S. Open, the defending champion announced in a series of tweets on Tuesday, citing concerns over the coronavirus and his desire not to travel amid the pandemic.

Rezan al-Ibrahim understands separation. A Web developer who fled the war in Syria and now has asylum in the Netherlands, he's in a long-distance marriage with his wife, Aysha Shedbalkar, an Indian American math teacher, because of the Trump administration's ban on Syrians.

"She had taken this year off work to stay with me in Amsterdam," he says. "Then the pandemic hit."

Get set for 2020's mega-campaign against the flu amid the COVID-19 pandemic: immunization drives in the parking lots of churches and supermarkets, curbside inoculations outside doctors' offices, socially distanced vaccine appointments held indoors, with breaks in between for disinfecting.

These are just some of the ways heath providers say they will give tens of millions of flu shots this fall — arguably the most important U.S. effort to prevent influenza's spread among Americans in a century.

In some nursing homes, 100% of the residents are positive for the coronavirus. That's by design. These facilities have volunteered to devote part or all of their buildings exclusively to treating COVID-19 patients, who bring in more government money. But to make room for them, the original residents can be forced out of the places they've called home.

When Marquita Burnett heard Philadelphia was moving to the "green" phase of reopening, she was confused. First of all, she was pretty sure the city had already earned the green label from Pennsylvania's governor (it had). The next thing she knew, the city was scaling back on plans it had made to allow some businesses to reopen (namely, indoor dining and gyms). But it was still calling that phase "restricted green."

With the national death toll from COVID-19 passing the grim 150,000 mark, an NPR/Ipsos poll finds broad support for a single, national strategy to address the pandemic and more aggressive measures to contain it.

Two-thirds of respondents said they believe the U.S. is handling the pandemic worse than other countries, and most want the federal government to take extensive action to slow the spread of the coronavirus, favoring a top-down approach to reopening schools and businesses.

For most public officials, battling the coronavirus and keeping their constituents safe is an incredible professional challenge.

For Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia, it's also personal: His mother died of COVID-19 complications last month at age 61.

His mother, Gaby O'Donnell, was a medical assistant for more than 25 years in Southern California. She immigrated from her native Peru with 5-year-old Garcia and other family members in 1982.

Kathleen de Leon is frustrated with the U.S. handling of the coronavirus.

"Well just look at the news," she says. "It's a disaster."

De Leon is German, and she and her husband, an American, and have been living in the United States for more than a decade. She says their daughter Zoe is happy here, and the family wasn't planning a move to Germany. But now they're talking about it.

Mississippi is heading for a title that no state would want: It is on track to overtake Florida to become the No. 1 state for new coronavirus infections per capita, according to researchers at Harvard.

The state already faces high levels of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and obesity.