A $484 billion coronavirus aid package is headed to Trump’s desk.
The House on Thursday gave resounding approval to a $484 billion coronavirus relief package to restart a depleted loan program for distressed small businesses and provide funds for hospitals and coronavirus testing, and moved to increase oversight of the sprawling federal response to the pandemic.
President Trump said he was “grateful” for the action to refill the loan program and indicated he would sign the measure. It was the latest installment in a government aid program that is approaching $3 trillion, which passed with broad bipartisan support even as some Democrats condemned it for being too stingy. But the fight over what should be included foreshadowed a pitched partisan battle to come over the next round of federal relief, which is likely to center on aid to states and cities facing dire financial straits.
Even as they dispensed with another nearly half-trillion taxpayer dollars, Democrats were moving to scrutinize the administration’s handling of the funds. Just before the aid package passed, they pushed through a measure creating a special committee to investigate the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and the array of federal spending measures enacted to address it, defying objections from Mr. Trump and Republicans.
The committee, which will have the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, is charged with examining how the coronavirus relief packages were rolled out, and scrutinizing “preparedness for and response to the coronavirus crisis.”
The vote took place in a House chamber transformed by the pandemic. It was an impassioned debate as lawmakers, most of whom covered their faces with blue surgical masks or homemade swaths of fabric in an array of colors, patterns and glitter, reflected on the effect of the pandemic on their individual districts. Speaker Nancy Pelosi donned purple latex gloves to cast a vote.
A line of cars waiting to receive items from a food distribution drive in Hialeah, Fla., on Wednesday. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in the state have been waiting for weeks for a check.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
As another 4.4 million file for unemployment, help is slow to arrive.
Nearly a month after Washington rushed through an emergency package to aid jobless Americans, millions of laid-off workers have still not been able to apply for those benefits — let alone receive them — because of overwhelmed state unemployment systems.
Across the country, states have frantically scrambled to handle a flood of applications and apply a new set of federal rules even as more and more people line up for help. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that another 4.4 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week, bringing the five-week total to more than 26 million.
Nearly one in six American workers has lost a job in recent weeks.
According to the Labor Department, only 10 states have started making payments under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which extends coverage to freelancers, self-employed workers and part-timers. Most states have not even completed the system needed to start the process.
As Florida’s unemployment website became unusable under the weight of the traffic, the state agreed this month to accept paper applications, a tacit acknowledgment that the system was all but broken. Florida’s breakdown became a national symbol of distress, when footage of a snaking line for those applications outside the public library in Hialeah, a blue-collar city outside Miami, drew wide attention online.
The debacle has become an embarrassment for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. He called the system “cumbersome” last week and acknowledged that only 4 percent of 850,000 pending claims had been paid. He appointed an unemployment czar and signed executive orders waiving some requirements to ease the traffic on the website. The number of paid claims has slowly inched up.
One in five who were tested for antibodies in New York City had them.
About 21 percent of about 1,300 people in New York City who were screened for virus antibodies tested positive, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.
The results come from a state program that randomly tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State this week. Nearly 14 percent of those tests came back positive, he said.
If those numbers translate to the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.4 million people statewide, have already been infected. These numbers are far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus that the state has recorded.
If those numbers translate to the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.4 million people statewide, have already been infected. These numbers are far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus that the state has recorded. It would also mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent, Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Cuomo also released the state’s daily figures of deaths and hospitalizations:
Deaths are falling: 438 deaths were reported on Thursday, down from 474 on Wednesday. The number of deaths in the first four days of this week is down 33 percent compared with the first four days of last week. The state’s death toll is now 15,740.
New hospital admissions remain flat: The number of virus patients entering hospitals has stayed around 1,360 a day for the last three days. That is down from around 3,000 a day at the start of the month.
Most N.Y.C. patients hospitalized with the virus had a chronic condition, a study found.
A new study of thousands of people who were hospitalized in New York City after contracting the coronavirus found that more than nine in 10 had at least one chronic health condition and that most had at least two.
The findings were included in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that describes the characteristics of thousands of Covid-19 patients admitted from March 1 to April 4 at a dozen hospitals in New York City and Westchester County and on Long Island that are operated by Northwell Health.
The researchers found that dozens of children and teenagers were hospitalized with the virus, but survived it, and that women had a clear edge in beating the virus. Fewer of them were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive. One in five hospital stays ended in death. The mortality rate for those who were placed on ventilators and were no longer in the hospital was 88 percent.
Given that the length of hospital stays in the Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it is possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that any treatment was unlikely to help them.
Like several other reports on smaller patient groups at area hospitals, the Northwell research indicated that obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes were common risk factors for severe Covid-19 disease requiring hospitalization. One of the most striking findings: only 6 percent of hospitalized patients had no underlying health conditions at all.
Cuomo said New York nursing homes would be investigated.
Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday that nursing homes in New York would be investigated to ensure that they were following strict rules that had been put in place during the outbreak.
More than 3,500 people have died in nursing homes since the outbreak began, according to state data. That is roughly 20 percent of all virus-related deaths in New York.
Nursing homes have been required to:
Have their staffs undergo regular temperature checks and wear protective personal equipment.
Quarantine patients infected with the virus.
Assign specific staff members to residents who are infected, and to transfer any infected patients to other homes if providing appropriate care where they are is not possible.
Notify residents and family members within 24 hours if a resident tests positive or dies because of the virus.
Readmit those infected only if homes can provide the adequate level of care as dictated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state Health Department.