| US Covid-19 cases surge again; Bolivia's left-wing party wins big in Sunday's election. Tonight's Sentences was written by Benjamin Rosenberg. | | | | | | | America faces its third Covid-19 surge as winter looms | | | | | | - After an initial spike in March and April and another in the summer, Covid-19 cases in the United States are skyrocketing again as the weather cools and citizens grow weary of social distancing. The US saw more than 373,000 new cases between October 8 and 15, the biggest increase since July. [USA Today / Grace Hauck and Jayme Fraser]
- Cases are rising in 44 states, including 10 with record highs: Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. President Donald Trump said on August 31 that the US was "rounding the final turn" with its containment of the virus, but it is clear that the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. [Forbes / Tommy Beer]
- The cooling climate and people's behavior could both be driving factors in the increase in cases, as people spend more time indoors. "If we think the virus can be partly airborne, then being indoors, you sort of trap it," Rachel Baker, a Princeton researcher and co-author of a study (not yet peer-reviewed) of winter's potential impacts on coronavirus spread, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. [Philadelphia Inquirer / Jason Laughlin]
- The US is still lagging behind on contact tracing efforts, too. The country now has more than 53,000 contact tracers, about four times the total from April but still well below the 100,000 that public health experts have called for since the beginning of the pandemic. [NPR / Selena Simmons-Duffin]
- Maine is currently the only state that meets all the benchmarks experts have established to consider its outbreak contained: number of daily new cases, infection rate, and test positivity rate. Twenty-four states have not met any of the benchmarks. [Vox / German Lopez]
- As of last Friday, four states had test positivity rates of higher than 20 percent, with South Dakota's at a whopping 35.5 percent. The number of Americans hospitalized due to Covid-19 has also increased over the last few weeks. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
| | | Movement Toward Socialism party claims victory in Bolivian elections | | - One year after being ousted in a controversial election, Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism Party, the left-wing party former president Evo Morales led for 13 years, won a resounding victory in Sunday's elections, with 52.4 percent of the vote. No other party had more than 31.5 percent. [Washington Post / Monica Machicao and Anthony Faiola]
- Morales fled Bolivia after last year's election, which his supporters considered a coup. He watched the results come in from Argentina as Luis Arce, his former finance minister, claimed victory. "We have reclaimed democracy and above all we have reclaimed hope," Arce said. [Guardian / Tom Phillips and Dan Collyns]
- Some results are still being counted, but if current totals hold, the Movement Toward Socialism is on track to attain the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff. Both centrist former president Carlos Mesa and interim president Jeanine Áñez have conceded defeat. [AP / Carlos Valdez]
- Bolivia has struggled economically this year and has also had a hard time containing the Covid-19 pandemic — Áñez and nearly a dozen of her top officials contracted the virus. Morales, meanwhile, expressed his desire to return to Bolivia. [CNN / Maija Liisa Ehlinger, Juan Paz, Claudia Rebaza, and Stefano Pozzebon]
- Sunday's election was a makeup from 2019, when, after Morales emerged victorious, the police and military urged him to resign due to allegations of electoral fraud. Morales went into exile, and the rerun was delayed twice due to the pandemic before finally going forward. [BBC News]
| | | | | | | Tulsa has resumed digging for the bodies of victims of the 1921 race massacre that killed between 150 and 300 Black citizens. | | | [NPR / Brakkton Booker] -
As small, local newspapers have closed in cities and towns across the US, they have been replaced by a network of nearly 1,300 websites that are meant to look like local news sites but are actually built on conservative propaganda. [NYT / Davey Alba and Jack Nicas] -
Uganda has introduced a new taxi service, called Diva Taxi, that hires exclusively female drivers. It was created by a woman in the capital city of Kampala after she lost her job at the start of the pandemic. [AP / Rodney Muhumuza] -
A teacher in Paris, after showing students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad considered inappropriate by Muslims, was decapitated last Friday by a man who was later shot and killed by police. French President Emmanuel Macron declared it an "Islamist terrorist attack." [NBC News / Nancy Ing, Matt Bradley, and Adela Suliman] -
After a 21-year-old lemur named Maki was stolen from the San Francisco Zoo, a 5-year-old boy and his friends spotted him in nearby Daly City. Animal control was called and returned him to his home. [ABC San Francisco / Kate Larsen] | | | | | | | What's a three-letter word used to describe Vox crosswords? The answer is "fun," but don't take our word for it. See for yourself at vox.com/crosswords. | | | | | "You can't enter into the cool months of the fall and the cold months of the winter with a high community infection baseline. It's still not too late to vigorously apply good public health measures, and again I emphasize without necessarily shutting down the country." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | This email was sent to edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com. Manage your email preferences, or unsubscribe to stop receiving all emails from Vox. If you value Vox's unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036.
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