Coronavirus updates: California outlines strict guidelines to reopen schools; testing remains a challenge

New York City has been cleared to enter the next phase of reopening on Monday, allowing for more outdoor activities such as zoos, outdoor films and gardens to resume, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced.

Indoor operations, like dining in, bars, gyms and shopping at malls, will remain closed, he said. While New York City will be entering phase four of the state's reopening plan, Cuomo warned that there is still a risk of a second wave, urging residents to be vigilant as new coronavirus cases spike in the West and South. 

"There will be a second wave, I would wager on it," he said during a press briefing. "You can't have this spread across the country and think that you're immune." —Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

Major League Soccer announced it would delay the start of three of its four expansion franchises in St. Louis, Sacramento and Charlotte.

Expected to start in 2021, the Charlotte franchise will now debut in 2022, while clubs in St. Louis and the Sacramento Republic FC will start to play in the 2023 season, a year after the clubs were scheduled to enter. The MLS's Austin FC franchise will still commence in 2021, the league said. 

MLS Commissioner Don Garber said the delays will allow the teams more time to plan their debuts and for long-term success.

"It's important for each club to take the necessary time to launch their inaugural MLS seasons the way their fans and communities deserve," Garber said in a statement.

The MLS returned from its Covid-19 shutdown on July 8 after suspended games on March 12. —Jabari Young

New York City won't be reopening its movie theaters anytime soon, but it's allowing production crews to get back to work.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the city would enter phase four of reopening starting July 20, which allows media production, including film, television, music and streaming, to resume.

New York City is home to a number of big productions including "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," "Blindspot," "New Amsterdam," "FBI" and "Prodigal Son."

Although production likely won't restart immediately, the phase four plan includes mandatory guidelines and a list of best practices for companies looking to begin shooting again. These include capping maximum occupancy at 50%, maintaining 6 feet of physical distance between all cast and crew members and face coverings worn by all. Face coverings can be removed by actors while performing or during rehearsals. —Sarah Whitten

San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the city will pause its reopening plan "indefinitely" and will close indoor malls and non-essential offices next week as the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the state. San Francisco County has been added to California's "monitoring list," which may add additional state-mandated restrictions and closures if the county stays on the list for three consecutive days, she said. 

"If the state adds more restrictions, we will of course follow them. And if conditions in our city don't improve, we can also choose to close additional businesses and activities as well," Breed said. 

On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered counties on the list, representing 80% of the state's population, to close indoor operations for fitness centers, worship services, personal care services, malls, offices, hair salons and barbershops. —Noah Higgins-Dunn

The National Football League Players Association is seeking to bypass preseason games, with Covid-19 cases increasing across the nation. Though some NFL training camps are scheduled to start on Monday, the Players Association could disrupt camp starts if matters of health and safety remain unsettled. 

The preseason is just one of several points being debated between NFL owners and players. 

The NFLPA is seeking to lock in a $500,000 payment per player should the league start its regular season and then be forced to cancel games due to Covid-19. Club owners, for their part, want 35% of each player's regular salary held in escrow, given the likelihood that games will take place without spectators. 

If the two sides can't agree to a protocol, NFL players can file a grievance, which could delay the start of camps. The NFL's 2020 regular-season is scheduled to start on Sept. 10. —Jabari Young

California Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out strict guidelines for state schools to reopen in the fall, which make reopening unlikely for most of them as coronavirus cases continue to rise.

Newsom announced mask requirements and physical distancing, as well as regular testing and contact testing, during a press conference Friday. According to the guidance, school staff and all students in grades 3 to 12 will be required to wear face coverings.

Schools can physically open when their county has been off the monitoring list for 14 consecutive days, according to Newsom. Schools that don't meet this requirement must begin the year with distance learning. –Alex Harring

CORRECTION: This blog post has been updated to show that California schools can physically open when their county has been off the monitoring list for 14 consecutive days.

The CEO of Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey, told CNBC that acquiring the supplies for coronavirus tests remains a challenge, even though the hospital is no longer facing major numbers of Covid-19 cases. 

"If we were to have another surge, the issues with ventilators, the issues with PPE are all fine. Testing still seems to be the biggest constrained resource," Michael Maron said on "Power Lunch." 

Maron, who was infected with the coronavirus in March, said the hospital has four instruments to run tests for Covid-19. But getting the chemical reagents that are necessary to run tests "is still a challenge," he said. 

The U.S.'s testing supply chain has been plagued by short supplies from the earliest days of its epidemic. And recently, two of the nation's largest private labs have said they're struggling to keep up with an increase in testing demand as cases surge in some parts of the nation. 

Located in Northern New Jersey near New York City, Holy Name Medical Center has seen the number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 come down dramatically, according to Maron. Last week, there were no patients in the hospital who were sickened by the coronavirus.   —Kevin Stankiewicz 

All of the nation's governors are urging the Trump administration to delay its decision to shift control of U.S. coronavirus hospital data away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The governors are calling for a 30-day delay, even though the policy has already been implemented and the CDC has stopped updating some data on its site as a result. The governors said in a statement that hospitals need time to adapt to the new reporting system.

They also urged the Department of Health and Human Services to make the data public. An HHS spokeswoman told CNBC the agency is working to make the data public, potentially "in a few days." —Will Feuer

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation in an interview that the coronavirus has hit the U.S. "very severely" and the country "needs to get better control over things" to reopen the economy and head toward normalcy. 

"The United States of America has been hit very severely by this. You just need to look at the numbers and see the number of infections in the millions and the number of deaths ... keeps going up each day. We're still seeing an increase in hospitalizations." Fauci said. "We need to get better control over things. We need to open up the country because staying shut down has economic, employment, health and other negative consequences that are significant." 

Fauci reiterated there's been an "unfortunate mindset" that public health guidelines have become obstacles to reopening the country. He said the "default position" for the nation's schools should be to do the best they can to return students to school while placing the safety and health of students and teachers first. — Noah Higgins-Dunn 

College town small business owners are expecting difficult months ahead, despite reopening plans from the schools they call neighbors.

Universities can bring in millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to their home cities. But with the coronavirus pandemic leaving the fall semester in limbo, events like move-in weekend and football games are no longer foregone conclusions. That leaves businesses wondering how they'll survive in the months ahead. —Alex Harring

When the coronavirus disrupted supply chains in March and April, many local farmers had to pivot their business models and find new customers.

Closed-loop food systems like Double Brook Farm of New Jersey, which had already expanded from a farm into other ventures such as a market and restaurant, were more resilient to outside disruptions. Though the pandemic forced Double Brook to close their dining areas and shift to online ordering, pick-up and delivery, they did not fear running out of food to sell.

Local businesses also partnered with each other to get their products out. Blue Moon Acres, a farm that struggled after the March shutdowns because 90% of its customers were restaurants, started working with Zone 7, a New Jersey-based local farm food distributor, to find new types of customers such as retailers.

During the pandemic, the appeal of buying local is "not only about where your food comes from or the practices that the farmer's using, but it's also about the idea of security of a community," said Jon McConaughy of Double Brook.

To follow more of these businesses' stories, watch "Supermarket Shock: Crisis in America's Food Supply."—Michelle Gao

Mark Lowcock, a top official from the United Nations, warned of "decades worth of tragic and exportable problems" if wealthy nations don't help poorer nations fight the virus.

"Unless we act now, we should be prepared for a series of human tragedies, more brutal and more destructive than any of the direct impacts of the virus itself," he told reporters on a call hosted by the World Health Organization. All of that is preventable, he added in a plea to wealthy nations to contribute to a $10.3 billion U.N. program to help poor nations fight the pandemic.  

Last week, health authorities in Idlib, Syria reported their first case of Covid-19, sparking fears an outbreak in crowded refugee camps holding displaced people.

The U.N. program, called the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan, is aiming to respond to the humanitarian impacts of the coronavirus in low- and middle-income countries and support their efforts to fight it, Lowcock said. The plan has generated $1.7 billion from donors since it was first launched in March. —Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency is sending 14 refrigerated trucks that can serve as temporary mortuaries to Texas next week as local officials and funeral homes brace for a surge in deaths from Covid-19, which has already killed 3,657 people in the state. The state doesn't yet need the additional mortuary trucks, said Seth Christensen, a spokesman for the Texas Division of Emergency Management. The trucks, along with eight that were previously sent, are on standby in case local municipalities get overrun with Covid-19 deaths. 

Deaths and hospitalizations haven't risen as quickly in recent weeks, but epidemiologists say that's because it can take a while after someone is diagnosed before they are hospitalized and die. Texas was averaging 93 deaths per day on Thursday, based on a seven-day average, up from around 20 deaths per day a month ago, according to Hopkins. 

"The directors I've talked to in the last week are at capacity or over capacity, thus the reason they had to bring in the trailers," said Gene Allen, president of the Texas Funeral Directors Association. The Texas Funeral Directors group has sent three of its four refrigerated trucks, typically used during hurricane season, to South Texas already, he said. —Noah Higgins-Dunn

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told CNBC that he hopes the state's new mask mandate, in addition to social distancing, is "enough" to avoid further economic devastation and surge in coronavirus cases.

"We're all in this together as a country economically and from a health perspective," he said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "No state lives in a bubble. ...We live and die together."

On Thursday, Colorado joined a growing list of states that issued an executive order requiring people to wear masks in public spaces.

"This is a responsible, bipartisan, common-sense step to take," Polis said during a news conference at the Boettcher Mansion in Jefferson County, Colorado, on Thursday. 

"We have a choice in Colorado, either more mask-wearing and more attention to social distancing or more damage to our economy and loss of life," he added. —Jasmine Kim

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called on residents to wear face coverings when in public and when social distancing isn't possible, two days after barring local cities and counties through an executive order from implementing their own orders to prevent the spread of Covid-19. 

"It's the community that defeats this virus, not the government," Kemp said at a press conference. On Thursday, Kemp sued Atlanta officials for adopting their own mask mandate. 

"I know that many well-intentioned and well-informed Georgians want a mask mandate and while we all agree that wearing a mask is effective, I'm confident that Georgians don't need a mandate to do the right thing," Kemp said. —Noah Higgins-Dunn

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink urged American residents to wear face masks during the coronavirus pandemic, saying it was needed to help aid the U.S. economic recovery. 

"If the disease continues to grow, if mortality rates grow from where they are today, then we're going to have to see another shutdown of parts of our economy, and then the small and medium businesses … are going to have a harder time," Fink said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

Fink, whose firm is the largest asset manager in the world, said he wishes there was more compassion for other people during the health crisis. "If we all wore masks, if we all cared about our fellow citizens a little more, we will be resolving this crisis much sooner," said Fink, shortly after BlackRock reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings. —Kevin Stankiewicz 

Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, said most transmission of the virus is coming from people who are asymptomatic. 

"Just feeling like you want to go get a test is really not the best strategy, but we know that most of the spread are from asymptomatic people, particularly young adults, so you have to cast a wide net and I think we're able to do that," he told CNBC.

An asymptomatic person is someone with Covid-19 who doesn't have symptoms and never develops them. State and federal health officials say more young people, who may otherwise appear healthy, are ignoring social distancing measures and contracting the virus at a higher rate. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, has said that asymptomatic people carry as much virus as people who are symptomatic. —Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

The ride-sharing service Lyft will give 60,000 vehicle partitions to its most-active drivers and sell them to other drivers beginning later this summer in response to the pandemic, Reuters reported.

The partitions will cost $50 – at production value – and act as a shield to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in April encouraged drivers to use a partition.

Lyft trip requests in June rose approximately 26% from the low point in April, but were still down 70% compared to 2019, according to Reuters. —Alex Harring

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson pointed Friday to other countries around the world in which coronavirus outbreaks continue to grow as a warning of what can go wrong in a country's recovery efforts, Reuters reported.

"Look at other countries around the world, we can see all too clearly what could go wrong if we don't continue to follow the guidance, if we don't continue to keep this thing under control," he said at a Downing Street media briefing, according to Reuters. "There are parts of the world where it's continuing to spike, we don't want to see that in this country," he said, though he did not name any countries.

The U.K. has reported more than 294,100 cases of the coronavirus and over 45,200 Covid-19 deaths. That pales in comparison to the U.S. outbreak, which continues to grow rapidly, of more than 3.5 million cases and over 138,300 deaths. —Will Feuer

The United States reported 77,255 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday, shattering its previous record single-day spike in new cases by nearly 10,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. has reported more than 65,400 new cases on average over the past seven days, up nearly 22% compared with a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of the data from Hopkins. 

Forty-four states and the District of Columbia all reported that their seven-day averages of daily new cases rose by more than 5% on Thursday compared with a week ago. 

California, Florida and Texas accounted for more than half of all new cases in the country on Thursday, reporting more than 38,700 new cases collectively. —Will Feuer

Read CNBC's previous coronavirus live coverage here: India becomes third country to pass 1 million cases