coronavirus

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Friday released his plan for how schools should safely reopen amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis, calling on Congress to pass a $30 billion emergency education package to support building upgrades and sanitation protocols ahead of students' return to onsite learning.

"The challenge facing our schools is unprecedented. President Trump has made it much worse. We had a window to get this right. And, Trump blew it," the Biden campaign said in a statement.

In Florida, hospitals are being stressed by the surge of coronavirus cases. Florida reported 11,466 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and 128 deaths of residents. It was the fourth day running the state saw more than 100 deaths.

The spike in cases is most acute in the Miami area. Miami-Dade County accounts for nearly a quarter of Florida's 327,241 cases.

On Friday, Miami-Dade County's daily "dashboard" report showed the number of patients admitted with COVID-19 at nearly 120% of intensive care unit capacity.

Carissa Helmer and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for five or six months by early April, when COVID-19 started to spike in the Washington, D.C., area where they live. Maybe, they mused, they should stop trying to conceive for a few months.

But then a pregnancy test came back positive.

"We were, like, 'Oh well — I guess it's too late for that!' " Helmer says, laughing.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday that the city will provide free child care to 100,000 students when schools reopen in September.

Last week the city released its plan for children to return to public school classrooms one to three days a week, depending on each school's capacity for social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic. Students will take classes remotely on the other days.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is suing the Atlanta City Council and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms following her efforts to require face masks in public places as the number of COVID-19 cases continues to skyrocket across the nation.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, asserts that Kemp alone "leads the State of Georgia in its fight against the worldwide novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic" and adds he has the power "to suspend municipal orders that are contradictory to any state law or to his executive orders."

The Republican Party announced Thursday morning that it is scaling back its upcoming nominating convention and will hold what party chair Ronna McDaniel is calling a "convention celebration" next month in Jacksonville, Fla.

Bowing to the realities of holding a mass gathering in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida, which has seen a spike in new cases, attendance at the convention during its first few days, Aug. 24-26, will be limited to delegates only, which is a little more than 2,500 people.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is overruling local government mandates requiring people to wear masks in public to stop the spread of COVID-19, insisting that the state's less-stringent guidelines take precedence.

Kemp on Wednesday extended the state's COVID-19 restrictions, which strongly encourage the wearing of masks, but stopped short of requiring them in public, calling such a measure "a bridge too far."