 Welcome to the coronavirus weekly brief where your hosts, I'm David Sturman and I'm Melissa Sallick-Virk with New America. Here are the headlines you need to know. The German government started on Monday to allow unmarried romantic partners of German residents to travel to the country from otherwise blacklisted countries. The move allows people from countries deemed high risk such as the United States, Turkey and Brazil to enter Germany provided the undergo mandatory testing and self-isolation. To demonstrate a bona fide relationship couples are asked to produce documentation showing a previous joint residence abroad or an in-person meeting in Germany. The couple must also sign a joint declaration affirming the relationship with the partner already in Germany providing a formal invitation. The decision issued on Friday follows a campaign called Love Not Tourism that implores European countries to create channels for non-married couples separated by travel restrictions to safely enter the EU. The idea has been recently embraced by the European Commission with Denmark and the Netherlands among the first to adopt such policies. Only eight out of the EU's 27 member states however have created non-married relationship exemptions thus far. More than 5 million Americans have contracted the novel coronavirus making the rate of infection one out of every 75 Americans. Over 160,000 have died from COVID-19. Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci spoke on CNN's new day and said that the number of new coronavirus tests coming back positive is a very negative sign. Fauci said, quote, it's a clear indication that you are getting an uptick in cases which inevitably as we've seen in the southern states leads to surges and then you get hospitalizations and then you get deaths. This comes as the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Coronavirus Mortality Model updated its figures to up to 300,000 COVID-19 related deaths by December 2020. The projection would make COVID-19 the third leading cause of death in the United States for 2020. Behind only heart disease and cancer and a bigger killer than accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke and Alzheimer's disease reports NPR. Africa's total number of coronavirus infections reached 1 million last week as medical experts warned that the true number of cases was likely far higher. Half the cases are in South Africa with Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana and Algeria holding most of the rest. There's a widespread lack of testing across much of Africa with some countries conducting less than 500 tests per 1 million people. A total of 8.8 million tests have been conducted on the continent since the pandemic's beginning. A fraction of the Africa's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's goal of 13 million per month. A study published on Friday by the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that the U.S. government has systematically short-changed communities with large black populations in the distribution of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief aid meant to help hospitals, reports Statt. According to Statt's analysis, the Federal Care's Act distributed its $175 billion in a way that benefited hospitals that already had significant resources. So smaller hospitals received less funding but had to manage higher numbers of COVID-19 cases. The choice to look at hospitals that had in the recent past received Medicare revenue theoretically made sense based on previous need. But during the pandemic, the communities directly impacted at a higher rate were not located near those hospitals and therefore did not have access to those resources. According to a spokesperson at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, quote, in choosing to act quickly, HHS adopted revenue as a measure of how to distribute funds across healthcare facilities and providers of different sizes and types, unquote, adding, quote, while other approaches were considered, these would have taken much longer to implement, unquote. As the Statt analysis explains, quote, overall, the study found disproportionately black counties received $126 per resident more funding than other counties, but that differential was generally not enough to offset the higher level of need in those places. Among counties that received the same funding disproportionately black counties had a higher level of COVID-19 disease burden, higher rates of chronic illness, and worse hospital finances, unquote. In an earlier episode, a New York Times analysis looked at racial disparities as a result of the coronavirus and found that black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in a widespread manner that spans the country throughout hundreds of counties in urban, suburban and rural areas and across all age groups. According to the analysis of data by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black and Latinx Americans are almost twice as likely to die as a result of COVID-19 as white Americans. Russia recorded more than 25,000 more deaths in June than in the same month last year, an 18.6 percent increase far exceeding the nation's official COVID-19 fatality rate. Russia's state statistics agency, Frosted, reported that 5,448 deaths were primarily attributable to coronavirus, while a total of 11,917 deaths included people with either confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infection. The statistics were published as institutions worldwide increasingly look at total excess mortality rates to gauge the severity of the pandemic. Russia's official COVID-19 tally has previously come under fire. Tatyana Nikolova, a senior researcher at Russia's state-funded Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, told The New York Times in May that the death toll in Moscow alone was probably almost three times higher than the official toll. A Financial Times investigation, also in May, suggested a possible death count 70 percent higher than the official toll. To see our daily brief, go to the address in our show notes and follow us on Twitter at New America ISP. And tune in September 9th for our next episode.