U.S. death toll surpasses 110,000

As people took to the streets Saturday to decry the death of George Floyd the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 110,000, according to NBC News' accounting of virus data.

The nation has seen 1,916,237 cases and 110,041 deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the data. One month ago President Donald Trump, who has revised his estimation of the pandemic's death toll upward multiple times, said he believed it could reach 100,000 when all was said and done.

Johns Hopkins University of Medicine counts 6,804,044 cases worldwide and 362,678 deaths, with the United States leading in raw numbers for both categories.

On Saturday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has been hardest hit by the virus, said Friday's COVID-19 death toll of 35 marked a "record low" since the pandemic struck.

North Carolina reported 1,370 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday — the third straight day the state has set a record for new cases. 

State officials reported 1,189 new cases on Thursday and 1,289 on Friday.

The numbers bring the state's total coronavirus cases to 34,625, with 992 deaths, including 26 new deaths reported Saturday.

The spike comes more than two weeks after North Carolina lifted its stay-at-home rules, allowing for limited social gatherings and letting restaurants reopen to customers with reduced capacity.

Iraq recorded 1,252 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, its highest daily total yet, the Ministry of Health said. 

The total number of cases in the conflict-torn country now stands at 11,098, with 318 deaths, according to the ministry.

Health officials fear the deadly virus may be sweeping through the Middle East as part of a broader second wave, with neighboring Iran and Gulf countries also experiencing a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases. 

Beijing's municipal government on Saturday is lowering its emergency response level to the second-lowest as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. 

The change will lift most restrictions on people traveling from Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei — where the virus first appeared late last year. Beijing residential compounds will not be required to conduct temperature checks and masks no longer must be worn for outdoor activities. Kindergartens will reopen and other grades still suspended will restart classes.

Beijing has reported no new cases of local transmission in at least 50 days, and as many as 90 days in some districts.

China recorded three new confirmed cases of the virus as of Saturday — down from five the day before — and no new deaths, the National Health Commission reported. All three of the cases were imported, the commission said, bringing its national total to 83,030.

Greta Thunberg helped to launch a crowdfunding campaign to buy medical supplies and provide telemedicine services to residents in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, she tweeted on Saturday, where a lack of robust health services has made the coronavirus outbreak particularly devastating.

The campaign “aims to help traditional communities of the Amazonian territory battle COVID-19 - who are disproportionately hit by the pandemic,” the tweet said.

This comes one day after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro threatened to pull Brazil out of the World Health Organization after the agency warned Latin American governments about the risk of lifting lockdowns before slowing the spread of the outbreak.

Bolsonaro has faced continued criticism for his response to the outbreak, as Brazil now has the second-highest number of infections globally — behind only the U.S. As of Saturday, the country has reported more than 646,000 cases and 35,000 deaths.

A wedding party contributed to a new surge in coronavirus infections in Iran, President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday, but insisted the country had no option but to keep its economy open despite warnings of a second wave of the epidemic.

Iran, which has been gradually relaxing its lockdown since mid-April, has reported a sharp rise of new daily infections in recent days. Thursday's toll of 3,574 new cases was the highest since February — when the outbreak was first reported.

"At one location, we witnessed a peak in this epidemic, the source of which was a wedding that caused problems for the people, health workers and losses to the economy and the country's health system," Rouhani said on state TV. He did not say when or where the wedding took place.

New cases dipped to 2,886 on Friday, bringing Iran's total cases to more than 167,000, with over 8,000 deaths. Health officials have been warning of a second wave of the outbreak, but say a reason for the surge in new cases could be wider testing.

Coronavirus is shaping up to be a watershed for the American intelligence community.

In the two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA and other spy agencies made terrorism their top priority, with the goal of preventing another 9/11. For the most part, they succeeded.

Now a pandemic has killed more Americans in four months than died in all the wars in the last half-century — 35 9/11's and counting — while inflicting trillions of dollars in economic damage.

It's a disaster that is already changing how the intelligence community views health threats — and how it defines national security.

Read more here.

China is ordering its highest level of protection for the armadillo-like pangolin as part of its crackdown on the wildlife trade following the global pandemic.

While the virus is believed to have originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, most scientists say it was most likely transmitted from bats to humans via an intermediary animal such as the pangolin.

The order on Friday from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration does not explicitly mention the virus outbreak as a reason for the measure, but the timing appears to indicate that was a consideration. 

Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy by some Chinese and its scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Other animals protected at China’s top level include giant pandas, Tibetan antelopes and red-crowned cranes.

HONG KONG - Organizers of a black lives matter solidarity protest in Hong Kong, planned for Sunday, cancelled the event amid fears that other groups may use it to "push their own agenda" and worries over breaching social distancing rules in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the event organizers Max Percy told NBC News that there was large interest in the event meant to honor George Floyd. 

"It has come to our attention that due to the number of people trying to use this event to push their own agenda, there are concerns that the event will no longer abide by the terms set by the Hong Kong Police and we have been forced to cancel," Percy wrote on a now deleted Facebook page.

"This is an enormous shame that people have lost sight of the reason why we were doing this event in the first place ... We are saddened by the state of Hong Kong."

Protesters have taken to the streets of Hong Kong multiple times this year to challenge Beijing-led security laws and to mark the recent anniversary of the 1989 quashing of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

India surpassed Italy as the sixth worst-hit country by the pandemic after another record-breaking daily spike in confirmed infections. The Indian Health Ministry reported 9,887 new cases on Saturday, bringing the total to 236,657.

Most of the new cases are in rural areas following the return of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who left cities and towns after the lockdown in late March.

The lockdown is now largely being enforced in high-risk areas, while authorities have partially restored train services and domestic flights and allowed shops and manufacturing to reopen. Shopping malls and religious places are due to open on Monday with restrictions to avoid large gatherings.

French police banned a handful of protests against racism and police brutality in Paris on Saturday, citing fears of coronavirus spread.

They had been due to take place outside the U.S. embassy and underneath the city's iconic Eiffel tower, until the Prefecture de Police banned them. 

Many protesters were nonetheless expected to defy the order and risk clashing with police. Organizers have called for peaceful demonstrations that respect social distancing measures, in place to stem the spread of coronavirus. 

A demonstration last week against police violence and racism was banned by authorities, but 20,000 people still showed up to protest near the Palais de Justice.

A new cluster of cases in South Korea have been linked to were linked to door-to-door sellers, according to the country's Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip.  

He said they had been hired by Richway, a Seoul-based health product provider, and added that was particularly alarming as most of them are in their 60s and 70s. He called for officials to strengthen their efforts to find and examine workplaces vulnerable to infections, according to the Associated Press.

South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 51 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, as authorities worked to stem transmissions among low-income workers who can’t afford to stay home.

It brought the national total to 11,719 cases and the death toll remained at 273 for the fourth consecutive day. As of Saturday, more than one million people in the country have been tested for the virus.

Soccer was back and so were the spectators in Vietnam on Friday when the top domestic league resumed after the coronavirus shutdown.

Fans were allowed into Ho Chi Minh City’s scoreless draw with Hai Phong among three matches. But unlike Germany’s Bundesliga and South Korea’s K-League — which returned to action in May with empty arenas — more than 1,000 fans attended the V-League game at Hai Phong.

Allowing spectators to the matches was the result of Vietnam’s successful efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus. Despite sharing a long land border with China ⁠— where the virus originated ⁠— Vietnam, with a population of almost 100 million has recorded just 328 cases and not a single recorded death.

China advised the public to avoid traveling to Australia on  Friday, citing racial discrimination and violence in connection with the coronavirus pandemic.

"There has been an alarming increase recently in acts of racial discrimination and violence against Chinese and Asians in Australia, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic," the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said in a statement. It did not give any specific examples of such discrimination or violence.

Australia rejected the accusations saying they had no basis in fact. "Our rejection of these claims, which have been falsely made by Chinese officials previously, is well known to them," Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said in a statement.

Asians have faced harassment in various countries since the outbreak began late last year. China earlier issued a warning to tourists traveling to the U.S. after some said they were mistreated in connection with coronavirus.

Before George Floyd was killed in police custody and protests wracked the country, he had been laid off from his security job at a Minneapolis restaurant. He was just one of the millions of workers of color most likely to lose their job in the pandemic, recent labor market data shows.

As the nationwide shutdowns gradually lift and economic activity returns, the latest employment figures show that while the virus is colorblind, its effects are anything but indiscriminate.

Black unemployment rose to 16.8 percent in the monthly employment snapshot released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While that number is slightly up from 16.7 last month, white unemployment came in at 12.4 percent, down from 14.9 percent.

Read the whole story here.

Around the country, thousands of protesters are shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting for change. Some wear masks.  Few wear eye coverings. And social distancing is near impossible.

“The question that's been posed to me is do mass protests have the risk of spreading covid-19?  The answer is: yes,” Dr. Jay Varkey, an infectious disease physician at Emory said.

Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield also advised demonstrators to “highly consider” a coronavirus test. That doesn’t mean go to a testing site a day after protesting. 

“The virus enters your body immediately.  But it does take some time for enough of the virus to build up in your system for a diagnostic test to detect it,” NBC medical correspondent Dr. John Torres said.

“In three, five, seven days, go get tested,” Redfield said.

Getting a test too early could result in a false negative.  So waiting between 3-7 days will give a more accurate read.