The United States crossed a grim threshold on Friday, when it officially recorded its 50,000th death attributed to the novel coronavirus. The U.S. now accounts for almost a third of the confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, and more than a quarter of the deaths, according to numbers kept by Johns Hopkins. Many experts believe the toll of the disease in the U.S. is being underreported, due to insufficient testing and excess mortalities.

California recorded its deadliest day of the pandemic yet this week, when 115 died in the state on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reports. New York City alone has seen over 15,000 deaths from COVID-19 since the outbreak began. In other regions of the country, local leadership has made moves to roll back pandemic restrictions; on Friday, Georgia began efforts to "reopen," despite strong discouragement from the White House.

America's confirmed coronavirus deaths have now outpaced predictions by experts, who estimated last week that 47,000 would be dead by May 1, a number the country instead hit on Wednesday, April 22. "[J]ust a few days from now," writes The New Yorker, "more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than the entire toll from the Vietnam War." The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., contains 58,320 names. Jeva Lange

The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use approval for Becton Dickinson's COVID-19 antigen test, the New Jersey company said Monday. The test can be used by people with little laboratory training on a portable device about the size of a smartphone that returns results within 15 minutes, Becton Dickinson said in a statement.

The tests can be run on the company's Veritor Plus System, which is already in use at about 25,000 U.S. health care facilities, at a cost of about $20 per test, not counting the $250 to $300 price for the platform itself. "People keep saying 'For that, I want to buy one for my house,'" Becton Dickinson chief executive Tom Polen told Bloomberg News. (The FDA approved the test only for specific facilities, not home use.) In comparison, an antigen test by Quidel Corp. approved by the FDA in May can cost as little as $5 to administer, while Abbott Laboratories' rapid ID NOW system costs thousands of dollars.

Antigen tests are a relatively new form of diagnostic test that scan for proteins on or inside a virus, Reuters explains. Becton Dickinson suggested its test could be used in retail pharmacies, urgent care clinic, and doctor's offices, and set a goal of producing 2 million tests a week by the end of September. The downside of antigen tests is that they "may not detect all active infections," the FDA said in May. "This means that positive results from antigen tests are highly accurate, but there is a higher chance of false negatives, so negative results do not rule out infection." Peter Weber

President Trump finally endorsed face masks last week, telling Fox Business in an interview that he's "all for masks, I think masks are good." While Trump said he thinks "we're going to be very good with the coronavirus" and repeated his hope that it's "going to sort of just disappear," he also suggested he had changed his mind on the aesthetics of masks and his willingness to wear one in public.

"I had a mask on," Trump said. "I sort of liked the way I looked, okay? I thought it was okay. It was a dark black mask, and I thought it looked okay — it looked like the Lone Ranger."

Sarah Cooper, who makes TikTok videos performing selected Trump statements, demonstrated what that might look like in a re-enactment posted Monday.

Cooper wasn't the first to point out that the Lone Ranger wears a mask over his eyes, not his mouth and nose.

But she might also have been inspired by real-life characters.

Incidentally, Trump still hasn't worn a mask in front of the cameras. Peter Weber

The faculty of Washington and Lee University voted overwhelmingly Monday to remove Robert E. Lee's name from the Virginia university. The faculty of then-Washington College voted to add Lee's name in 1870, right after the former Confederate general died. The resolution to remove Lee's name passed 188-51, while a proposed motion to remove George Washington's name failed.

Lee, who had served as the college's president after the Civil War, "was a symbol of who that faculty wanted to be, and who they were," said Alison Bell, head of the Faculty Affairs Committee. "The faculty is back 150 years later, asking the university for a name change because Lee does not represent who we are and who we want to be." Washington and Lee's student government formally asked for Lee's name to be scrapped last week, and more than 200 faculty members had signed a petition with the same goal.

The board of trustees, which would have to approve the name change, is "carefully monitoring developments regarding issues of race, monuments, and symbols of the Confederacy and their implications" for Washington and Lee, a spokeswoman said last week.

Elsewhere in Virginia, Confederate names are being stripped from public K-12 schools at a rapid clip, The Washington Post reports. Stonewall Middle School in Prince William County is getting a new name, as is Robert E. Lee High School, one of the most diverse schools in Fairfax County. Loudon County High School is getting a new mascot after the school board voted unanimously to drop the Raiders, a reference to Confederate Col. John S. Mosby's guerrilla troops.

"Historians said the wholesale rejection of Confederate iconography by Virginia schools is unprecedented," the Post reports, though James Grossman at the American Historical Association noted Black students, parents, and communities have objected since the schools were named in the 1950s and '60s, in an angry backlash to the Supreme Court's seminal ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

"It was trying to make Black students feel unwelcome, while white students and white communities were emboldened to resist desegregation," said historian Adam Domby. Peter Weber

Jimmy Kimmel took the summer off but his show still goes on. Monday's Kimmel Live was guest-hosted by actor-comedian Anthony Anderson, who said he wasn't a fan of the phrase "guest host." "When you invite a guest over for dinner, you don't make them show up to an empty house and cook their own damn food," he pointed out. Anderson was impressed with the pirate fireworks displays blanketing the Los Angeles skyline on what was "probably the worst 4th of July ever" and disgusted with a "particularly infectious" party "at Diamond Lake in Michigan on Saturday."

"President Trump also had a rager outside the White House on Saturday, and this kind of tells you everything you need to know about America right now," Anderson said. "In 2015, President Obama had Bruno Mars perform at his 4th of July party." Trump, he showed, had a Bruno Mars military cover band playing to a sparse crowd. "Wow, Major Embarrassment — that's the name of that lead singer," he said. (The singer was actually SFC Christopher Rettig of the U.S. Army Band.)

Anderson also shrugged off Kanye West's presidential publicity stunt — "laugh all you want, but this would be historic, because this country has had a Black president, we've never had a crazy Black president" — and unveiled a special offer for white viewers who want to show how not-racist they are.

Tooning Out the News also touched on Trump's July 4th weekend, but the Mount Rushmore part. Watch below. Peter Weber

In his new book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff writes that Katie Miller, former spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, told him she was sent to the southern border to see the plight of migrant families in an attempt to make her "more compassionate," but it "didn't work."

Separated explores the Trump administration's systemic separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The book is out Tuesday, and on Monday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Soboroff and revealed Miller's comments for the first time. Miller is now Vice President Mike Pence's press secretary, but while at DHS, she was an "unwavering defender of what we were doing," Maddow said, "taking these kids away from their parents."


Soboroff writes that Miller said her "family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I'll think about the separations differently. But I don't think so. ... DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself — to try to make me more compassionate — but it didn't work." Soboroff said he was astonished by Miller's remarks, and asked her: "Are you a white nationalist?" She responded, "No, but I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate. Why do we need to have 'Little Havana'?"

Katie Miller is married to Stephen Miller, one of President Trump's senior advisers. An immigration hardliner who has himself been accused of being a white nationalist, Stephen Miller was the architect of Trump's family separation policy. In May, Katie Miller announced she is pregnant with their first child. Catherine Garcia

You can, if you choose, take White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany at her word that President Trump was taking no position on the Confederate flag when he tweeted Monday morning that NASCAR's decision to ban the flag from its races helped cause NASCAR's "lowest ratings EVER!" But that "second part of Trump's tweet, about NASCAR's TV ratings, is completely false," says Daniel Roberts at Yahoo Finance.

Ratings for the first NASCAR event after the sport announced its Confederate flag ban, the June 10 race at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, jumped 113 percent from the same race last year, Fox Sports said. And overall, ratings are up 8 percent since the sport returned from COVID-19 lockdown on May 17 and 8 percent since the June 10 post-flag race. "In fact, every NASCAR race on Fox since the Confederate flag ban, except for Talladega on June 22, has rated higher than the equivalent race the year before," Roberts writes.

There is room for speculation over why Trump demanded an apology from Bubba Wallace, NASCAR's only top-tier Black driver, for a noose incident he played no real part in, and it isn't entirely clear why NASCAR's ratings are rising. "Whether the extra eyeballs are because of the controversial Confederate flag ban or despite it, or whether it's all thanks to the current dearth of live sports to watch, is up for debate," Roberts writes. "But the sport is enjoying a clear ratings bump over last year." Peter Weber