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New Jersey’s largest city is starting to wind back the clock on its economic reopening, the clearest indication yet the Garden State’s recovery from the pandemic’s first wave is at risk of regressing. “We have to do whatever we need to do to drop those numbers now,” Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said during a press conference Monday afternoon. “It seems desperate but it’s a desperate moment. We got through this before, so we'll get through it again.” (Sutton, 10/26)

Health officials said they temporarily shut down a North Carolina church after it was connected to massive coronavirus outbreak that resulted in at least three deaths and more than 100 infections. The Mecklenburg County Health Department ordered United House of Prayer for All People in Charlotte to close for two weeks, halting in-person gatherings. The church's week-long convocation led to an estimated 121 COVID-19 infections across three counties, according to a department statement. (Allen, 10/26)

About 5% of Dallas-Fort Worth residents have been exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to early results from an ongoing study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Health Resources. (Kuchment, 10/26)

Southwest Houstonians have a greater burden of chronic disease than residents of other parts of the county and state, according to a new survey. The survey, conducted by the Texas Health Institute, identified neighborhood conditions as a major reason why southwest Houston’s diabetes rate is 72 percent higher than Harris County’s overall rate and why its hypertension rate is 60 percent higher than Memorial Park’s and 33 percent higher than Hunter’s Creek’s. (Ackerman, 10/26)

It could be January before Kansas City Public Schools children are back in classrooms, Superintendent Mark Bedell told his district’s board during a special meeting on Monday. Based on the COVID-19 infection numbers within the district’s boundaries, Bedell said, students will not begin returning to in-person classes by Nov. 9, the target date KCPS officials had set last month. (Williams, 10/26)

The superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute resigned Monday morning, after Black cadets described relentless racism at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college and Gov. Ralph Northam ordered an independent probe of the school’s culture. Retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, 80, had been superintendent of the 181-year-old school since 2003. During Peay’s tenure, multiple accounts of racist incidents have surfaced at VMI. ... This month, The Washington Post documented how one Black student filed a complaint against a White adjunct professor who reminisced about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership last year in the middle of class. In 2018, a White sophomore who told a Black freshman during Hell Week he would “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” was suspended, not expelled. (Shapira, 10/26)

Over nearly 15 years, M.C., as she was identified in court, had annual checkups with Javaid Perwaiz, the obstetrician/gynecologist on federal trial on fraud charges. Again and again, she left with a date for surgery. She first came under his care in 2006 when she was 42, an immigrant from South Korea with a seventh-grade education and a limited understanding of English. (Morrison, 10/26)

Snow and wintry weather in Colorado have aided firefighters battling the two biggest wildfires in Colorado history. The Cameron Peak fire, burning in Larimer County and the biggest fire in state history, has burned 208,663 acres, about 326 square miles, and is 64% contained. The East Troublesome fire, the second-largest fire in state history burning just north of Granby and into Rocky Mountain National Park, has burned 192,560 acres, almost 301 square miles, and is 15% contained. (Nicholson, 10/26)

Two firefighters were gravely injured and tens of thousands of Californians were forced to flee their homes on Monday as two new fires ripped through Orange County. About 90,800 residents in Irvine were put under mandatory evacuation orders because of the Silverado Fire and the smaller Blue Ridge Fire, said Shane Sherwood, a division chief for the Orange County Fire Authority. High winds and low humidity fueled the fires’ rapid growth. (Facio-Krajcer, Wright and Diaz, 10/26)

After state judges’ ruling last week that California acted with “deliberate indifference” in creating a COVID-19 “disaster” at San Quentin State Prison, Gov. Gavin Newsom has a big decision to make: Does he fight the ruling, or does he own up to his administration’s mistakes and take the medicine? According to the landmark court order — the first of its kind in the pandemic era — the state must reduce the population of San Quentin to 50% of what it was in June, to create proper space for social distancing and limit transmission of the coronavirus. (Fagone and Cassidy, 10/26)