The weekly tally of state jobless claims is again expected to exceed a million.

Businesses are reopening, but the layoffs won’t quit.

The Labor Department is expected to report on Thursday that 1.2 million people applied for state unemployment benefits last week. That would make it the 13th straight week that filings topped one million. Until the coronavirus crisis, the most in a single week was 695,000, in 1982.

Claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program for self-employed workers, independent contractors and others ineligible for standard benefits, will add to the total.

“It’s a sustained hemorrhaging of jobs unlike anything we’ve seen,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

Economists said recent layoffs, though smaller than the wave in March and early April, suggested that the crisis was reaching deeper into the economy.

Hilton Worldwide, the hotel operator, said this week that it was eliminating 2,100 corporate jobs globally and would extend previous furloughs and cuts in hours and wages for 90 days. AT&T disclosed plans to shed 3,400 technician and clerical jobs nationwide and to permanently close more than 250 stores, according to one of its unions. The gym chain 24 Hour Fitness said it was filing for bankruptcy protection and would permanently close more than 100 locations.

Wall Street is set for a lower open as stocks drift.

U.S. stock futures drifted and global markets were mixed on Thursday as investors awaited jobs data from the United States and more updates on new coronavirus outbreaks.

Futures markets were predicting a modest drop on Wall Street. European stocks traded in a narrow range in the morning, after Asian stocks drifted mildly lower.

Other markets also sent mixed signals. Prices for U.S. Treasury bonds fell modestly, and oil prices rose in futures markets, indicating some positive investor sentiment.

Investors were awaiting data on weekly jobless claims in the United States, which were expected to show that at least one million more people applied for unemployment benefits. They were also waiting the latest word on coronavirus infections in the United States, which have shifted to states like Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma. The number of infections also rose in Beijing, raising questions about China’s efforts to control the outbreak, which had been considered successful.

China plans a credit injection to jump-start its economy.

China aims to speed up an infusion of credit into its economy this year as it tries to restart growth after coronavirus the outbreak.

Speaking at the annual Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai on Thursday, Yi Gang, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, said that the authorities saw total social financing — a broad measure of credit in the Chinese economy — rising to more than 30 trillion renminbi, about $4.24 trillion, this year. That would be more than $600 billion above the 2019 level.

While the Chinese economy has rebounded by some measures since the lockdowns in the first part of the year, officials have acknowledged that joblessness remains a big problem.

Yet China’s moves show caution. In the United States, the Federal Reserve said in April that it would free up more than $2 trillion. Chinese officials have been wary about a big lending splurge after their response to the 2008 global financial crisis layered the economy with debt. Mr. Yi said officials would “moderate the total amount and consider the timely withdrawal of policy tools in advance.”

In another speech, Guo Shuqing, the chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, warned that the Fed played an unofficial role as the world’s central bank and would put the U.S. dollar and financial system at risk if it unleashed too much credit.

He warned that quickly rising stock markets might be harmful and unsustainable without real economic recovery. He did not specify the market, but global stocks have risen sharply from their earlier lows in part because many governments have rolled out big plans to spend money to get the economy humming again.

All countries and regions need to examine whether stimulus policies might be going too far, Mr. Guo said, noting the problems that can be created with too much credit. When stimulus efforts begin, “everyone rejoices,” he said. “When exiting, it may be very painful.”

Government relaxes loan forgiveness requirement that businesses rehire all workers.

Small-business owners won’t have to pay back their federal pandemic relief loans even if they don’t rehire all of the workers they laid off, the Trump administration affirmed, effectively eliminating a rule that many borrowers had feared would leave them stuck with a large debt.

The Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration, the program’s manager, released new loan forgiveness forms on Wednesday with a “safe harbor” option. Borrowers can simply affirm they were unable to operate “at the same level of business activity” they had before the crisis because of government requirements or safety guidance, including social distancing rules.

Those borrowers can have their loans fully forgiven if they meet the program’s other rules, including a requirement that they spend at least 60 percent of their aid money on payroll. The change follows a new law that loosened many terms of the Paycheck Protection Program loans.

For some leery borrowers, the recent changes were a major turnaround. George Evageliou, the founder of Urban Homecraft, a custom woodworking company in Brooklyn, had left his $192,000 loan untouched because he feared he would not be able to spend it in compliance with the program’s rules.

But the changes — in particular an expansion giving borrowers 24 weeks to spend their aid money — gave him time to safely restart operations and recall his laid-off employees. His staff began returning to work last week.

“We’re feeling pretty good about our decision to sit tight and let the law change,” Mr. Evageliou said. “We’re just so grateful for the help this grant will give us.”

Chanel says the collapse in travel will hurt its earnings.

Chanel said it expected a “significant” reduction in sales and profitability for 2020, the latest luxury business to warn on the serious hit to the sector caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The storied French fashion house, owned by the secretive billionaire brothers Alain and Gerard Wertheimer, is one of the largest and most consistently successful luxury brands in the industry. On Thursday Chanel’s global chief financial officer, Philippe Blondiaux, said the company had reopened 85 percent of its global boutiques and recorded a “double or even triple digit recovery in sales” in markets like China and India.

But he noted, “That is local spending only, and simply put it will be insufficient when it comes to compensating the spending by traveling consumers.” The closure of duty free stores had also hit the company hard. “Even if airlines resume operations it will take a large proportion of 2020 and 2021 for things to get back to normal,” he added.

The disclosures came as it reported record annual results for 2019, the third time Chanel has disclosed earnings in its 110-year history. Last year, the company generated $12.3 billion in global sales, up 13 percent on a comparable basis year-over-year, with operating profit hitting nearly $4 billion, up almost 17 percent from 2019.

Despite a change at the creative helm — Virginie Viard succeeded Karl Lagerfeld, the longtime Chanel fashion director who died in February 2019 — Mr. Blondiaux said there had been double-digit growth in all regions and product lines for the fashion division last year.

A dispute over a $3.6 billion mall deal escalates.

Taubman Centers, the shopping mall owner that agreed to be acquired by Simon Property Group for $3.6 billion this year, is pushing back on Simon Property’s attempt to terminate the deal based on the pandemic.

Taubman, which owns 24 high-end malls including the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey, said in court filings on Wednesday that Simon Property was experiencing “a classic case of buyer’s remorse,” and that the companies had “contracted to allocate the risk of global pandemics to the Simon parties, knowing full well that there was a pandemic raging in the world.” Taubman said that Simon Property had already negotiated a lower purchase price for the company based on an uncertain retail environment, that was shaky in part because of the coronavirus.

Simon Property, the biggest mall operator in the United States, said last week that the pandemic “had a uniquely material and disproportionate effect on Taubman” compared to other retail real estate companies, pointing to its high proportion of indoor malls versus open-air strip centers. It also faulted Taubman for failing to mitigate the impact of the pandemic by “not making essential cuts in operating expenses and capital expenditures.”

Taubman said on Wednesday that Simon Property’s comparison was flawed, noting that its malls were “hardly in the same industry” as strip centers, and that they did not have grocery stores or anchors like Home Depot or Target. The company also said that Simon Property was kept informed about its actions in response to the pandemic.

Hertz raised eyebrows last week when it asked for, and received, a bankruptcy judge’s permission to sell stock. It was an unusual move. Shareholders usually get wiped out during bankruptcy proceedings.

On Wednesday, Hertz reversed course on its plan to sell $500 million in shares, saying it had suspended further sale of its stock “pending further understanding of the nature and timing” of a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Earlier in the day, Jay Clayton, the agency’s chairman, said on CNBC: “We have let the company know that we have comments on their disclosure,” and added: “In most cases, when you let a company know that the S.E.C. has comments on their disclosure, they do not go forward until those comments are resolved.”

It all seemed an unsurprising turn of events. In a prospectus on Monday, the company had warned that buying its stock was a risky move, and that investors who did should be prepared to end up losing money.

The S.E.C. declined to expand on Mr. Clayton’s statement, and Hertz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hertz filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors last month. The company, which started with a fleet of a dozen Ford Model T’s a century ago, had piled up $17 billion in debt and was unable to pay its lenders after the coronavirus pandemic grounded business travelers and tourists. A sharp drop in used car prices has also decreased the value of its fleet.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

• Kroger, the grocer with about 2,800 stores in 35 states, said Thursday that its sales increased to $42 billion in the quarter that ended May 23, up from $37 billion in the same period last year. Digital sales jumped 92 percent during the period marked by pandemic shutdowns. The company, which has about 500,000 employees, said it had hired 100,000 workers.

• Carnival Corporation, the giant cruise company, reported Thursday that it lost $2.4 billion in the three months that ended on May 31. Carnival, which offered refunds or credits for future cruises to passengers whose voyages were canceled by the pandemic, said that about half asked for their money back. Customer demand for 2021 was increasing, it said, with about two-thirds of bookings in a recent six-week period coming fresh and one-third from customers using credits. Carnival said it could not say when it would return to normal operations.

• Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, the casual dining chain that closed 35 restaurants and cut executive pay 20 percent in an effort to mitigate the effect of the coronavirus pandemic, said on Wednesday that it had raised $30 million through a stock offering. The company, based in Greenwood Village, Colo., said it planned to use the money for general purposes, including paying down debt. First-quarter revenue fell 25 percent to $306 million from the same period a year earlier, the company reported last week.

Reporting and research were contributed by Coral Yang, Sapna Maheshwari, Mohammed Hadi, Elizabeth Paton, Stacy Cowley, Jeff Sommer, Carlos Tejada, Ben Casselman, Tiffany Hsu and Gregory Schmidt.

Unbeknown to most patients, their race is incorporated into numerous medical decision-making tools and formulas that doctors consult to decide treatment for a range of conditions and services, including heart disease, cancer and maternity care, according to a new paper published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The unintended result, the paper concludes, has been to direct medical resources away from black patients and to deny some black patients treatment options available to white patients.

The tools are often digital calculators on websites of medical organizations or — in the case of assessing kidney function — actually built into the tools commercial labs use to calculate normal values of blood tests. They assess risk and potential outcomes based on formulas derived from population studies and modeling that looked for variables associated with different outcomes.

“These tests are woven into the fabric of medicine,” said Dr. David Jones, the paper’s senior author, a Harvard historian who also teaches ethics to medical students.

“Despite mounting evidence that race is not a reliable proxy for genetic difference, the belief that it is has become embedded, sometimes insidiously, within medical practice,” he wrote.

The paper is being published at a tense moment in American society as black communities, disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, protest unequal treatment in other areas of their lives.

Dr. Jones said he believed the developers of the tools, who often are academic researchers, are motivated by empiricism, not racism. But the results, his analysis found, have often led to black patients being steered away from treatments or procedures that white patients received.

The paper included a chart listing nine areas of medicine where there are race-based tests, and it analyzed the consequences. For example, it reported, labs routinely use a kidney function calculator that adjusts filtration rates for black patients. With the adjustment, black patients end up with slightly better rates than whites, which can be enough to make those with borderline rates ineligible to be on a kidney transplant list.

An online osteoporosis risk calculator endorsed by the National Osteoporosis Foundation, among others, calculates chances of a fracture differently for black and white women. Black women end up having a score that makes them less likely to be prescribed osteoporosis medication than white women who are similar in other respects.

An obstetric calculator based on observational data concludes that black women who had a previous cesarean birth are less likely to have a successful vaginal birth in a subsequent pregnancy.

Dr. Jones added that it is time to stop what amounts to racial profiling in medicine. “We need to get off this train,” he said.

The New England Journal paper built on a collection of recent findings and assessments, including those in a recent paper about kidney function by Dr. Nwamaka Denise Eneanya and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.

To determine how well kidneys are working, doctors use a blood test that measures a protein called creatinine to estimate kidney filtration rate. Low filtration rates indicate a kidney problem.

Dr. Eneanya’s team noted that patients with a filtration rate of less than 30 were referred to kidney specialists. They gave an example of a white patient whose level was 28, according to the calculator. A black patient with the same creatinine level would get a race correction under the formula that raises the level to 33. Consequently, the black patient would not get a referral to a specialist.

The same effect could make some black patients ineligible to be put on a list for a kidney transplant — those with filtration rates of 20 or above are ineligible.

The formula originated with data from a federal study more than two decades ago that asked if a low-protein diet reduced the risk of kidney disease (it did not, the study showed). The study included precise measures of kidney function and creatinine levels, which let researchers use creatinine to estimate kidney function. The formula fit the data best when they included an adjustment for black patients.

In a more recent paper, in 2009, the researchers combined data from a number of studies to devise an improved formula, asking which variables made the formula best fit the data. Race popped up again.

“The formula was widely adopted,” said Dr. Melanie Hoenig, a kidney specialist at Harvard Medical School.

One of its principal authors, Dr. Lesley Inker, a kidney specialist at Tufts Medical Center, said she hears the critics.

“What we say is, ‘You’re right. I understand the difficulty in assigning race,’” Dr. Inker said.

She is working on developing a more accurate formula that does not include race. She added that black patients should be told that their race alters the calculation and should be given an option to have their race excluded.

But, she says, the current formula also can be an advantage for black patients. Those with filtration rates below 30 are ineligible to be prescribed metformin, the first line drug for diabetes, and SGLT2 inhibitors, a more recent class of diabetes drugs.

One problem, is that it is not clear how race is determined. It shows up in medical records but, said Dr. Peter Reese, a kidney transplant specialist and epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “I worry that in some situations they look at you and assume.”

With the formulas, there is no accounting for people of mixed race, as the authors of the New England Journal paper and other doctors have noted.

Even if race does have a real affect on lab values for creatinine, why assume it is because of the genetics that determine skin color, some experts asked.

“It could be diet or any of a number of things,” Dr. Hoenig said, noting that a large protein-heavy meal can temporarily raise creatinine levels.

One often cited explanation is the belief that black people are more muscular than white people, and muscles can release creatinine into the blood. In a recent paper, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, a kidney specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, tried to trace the origins of that belief and found only a few decades-old studies that did not even measure muscle mass directly, including one saying black children are thinner than white children.

A group of medical students at Harvard has been trying to change the approach to assessing kidney function, with some success.

The group, including Leo Eisenstein, Danika Barry and Cameron Nutt, had heard Dr. Jones in lectures saying race was a social construct and then went into the clinic, where they were told to use a formula that corrects for race in assessing kidney function.

Instead of complaining, Dr. Hoenig told the students, why not go to the leadership and suggest a change? Labs could simply not list race when sending in blood tests for creatinine — in that case the formula’s default would be the level for whites. Or they could give results as a range and explain to patients that the numbers are an estimate.

A few years ago, Dr. Hoenig and the students made the rounds to executives at Beth Israel Medical Center.

“We went to the chief of medicine, we went to the head of clinical labs, we went to the head of the kidney division, we went to a lot of people and spun our story,” she said. “They were open to it.”

In 2017, Beth Israel dropped the race factor in calculating kidney function. But despite pleas for a change, no other hospitals have followed suit.

Recently though, San Francisco General has replaced race as a factor with a choice of values for kidney function depending on the doctor’s assessment of whether the patient was muscular or not.

Advocates of change like Dr. Hoenig say they think part of the problem is resistance to changing a system that has become part of medicine.

Dr. Darshali A. Vyas of Massachusetts General Hospital, who is first author of the New England Journal paper, said the ultimate goal is for doctors and researchers to rethink the assumption that they can use a patient’s race in making medical decisions.

“This is a challenge to the field about how we think about race and what our default assumptions are about race,” she said.