Governor Cuomo is issuing an executive order letting the state seize and redistribute ventilators from hospitals and companies.
Asked whether he could reassure New Yorkers that the state would receive enough ventilators, the president said, “No.”. The state is seeking 15,000 ventilators before the peak of cases hits. Today, New York reported the largest single-day increase in its coronavirus death toll, with nearly 3,000 residents having already lost their lives.
In the 24 hours through 12 a.m. on Friday, 562 people — or one almost every two-and-a-half minutes — died from the virus in New York State, bringing the total death toll to nearly 3,000, double what it was only three days before. In the same period, 1,427 newly sickened patients poured into hospitals — another one-day high — although the rate of increase in hospitalizations seemed to stabilize, suggesting that the extreme social-distancing measures put in place last month may have started working.
Despite the glimmer of hope, the new statistics were a stark reminder of the gale-force strength of the crisis threatening New York, where more than 102,000 people — nearly as many as in Italy and Spain, the hardest-hit European countries with about 120,000 cases each — have now tested positive for the virus. The situation was particularly dire in New York City, where some hospitals have reported running out of body bags and others have begun to plan for the unthinkable prospect of rationing care.
The New York Times spoke to six doctors at five major city hospitals who said they worried they soon would have to decide on their own not to take the most aggressive lifesaving measures in every case. In addition to the moral anguish that may cause, some feared they would run the risk of lawsuits or even criminal charges if they went against the wishes of a patient or family.
Steven A. McDonald, an emergency room doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian, said he wrote to his supervisors on Tuesday asking for guidelines for making decisions about who should receive a ventilator and who should not.
“The feedback I got from my department is that the hospital wants to wait for the governor to come down with their own guidelines,” he said.
CDC recommends people wear cloth face coverings
The CDC issued new recommendations for people to wear masks or face coverings while in public. The president undermined the guidelines almost immediately after announcing them, insisting that he wouldn’t wear masks because “they’re not for me”. As Donald Trump was explaining that he won’t be wearing a mask, because he doesn’t want to greet “presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings queens,” with his face covered, Melania Trump tweeted an appeal for “everyone” to take the CDC guidelines seriously:
Melania Trump
✔
@FLOTUS
As the weekend approaches I ask that everyone take social distancing & wearing a mask/face covering seriously. #COVID19 is a virus that can spread to anyone - we can stop this together.
51.2K
5:45 PM - Apr 3, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
18.4K people are talking about this
“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing,” the president said at the beginning of the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary.”
“Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know,” he added, though he stopped receiving foreign dignitaries weeks ago. “Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”
Mr. Trump’s announcement, followed by his quick dismissal, was a remarkable public display of the intense debate that has played out inside the West Wing over the past several days as a divided administration argued about whether to request such a drastic change in Americans’ social behavior. Senior officials at the C.D.C. have been pushing the president for days to advise everyone — even people who appear to be healthy — to wear a mask or a scarf that covers their mouth and nose when shopping at the grocery store or while in other public places.
The president’s briefing was particularly contentious: He insulted reporters, jousted with his own administration and generally returned to pugilistic form.
At one point, he would not say, in response to a question, whether he was taking steps to ensure that the 2020 presidential election would take place as scheduled, should the coronavirus still be present in November. But he insisted the election would not be postponed.
U.S. reports more than 30,000 coronavirus cases in record day
Decade of Job Growth Comes to an End, Undone by a Pandemic
After an expansion that added 22 million to U.S. payrolls, March registered a loss, and worse is yet to come.
The longest stretch of job creation in American history came to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, another reflection of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill.
Compared with the astounding numbers of people recently applying for unemployment benefits — nearly 10 million in the previous two weeks — the figure announced Friday was less striking: a loss of 701,000 jobs. But the data was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay-at-home orders began to cover much of the nation. With that, what had been a drip-drip-drip of job losses turned into a deluge.
“As bad as this report is, next month will be many orders of magnitude worse,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. “This is the initial slippage of the labor market.” He said the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to 13 percent in April.
The decline in employment last month represents the biggest monthly drop since the depths of the Great Recession in 2008-9. It was paced by a net loss of 459,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector.
Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help.
A Washington Post investigation uncovered alarm and dismay among scientists at health labs about the Trump administration’s reliance on a flawed coronavirus test developed by the CDC, which was used for weeks as the virus began to spread across the United States.
Lab scientists expressed dismay at the Trump administration’s failure to move quickly and at bureaucratic demands that delayed coronavirus testing. For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.
One night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. “Oh, s---,” she replied. “What are we going to do now?”
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved.
In their private communications, scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs — one layer removed from federal agency operations — expressed dismay at the failure to move more quickly and frustration at bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.
“We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process,” Marc Couturier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah, wrote to other microbiologists on Feb. 27 after weeks of mounting frustration.
The administration embraced a new approach behind closed doors that very day, concluding that “a much broader” effort to testing was needed, according to an internal government memo spelling out the plan. Two days later, the administration announced a relaxation of the regulations that scientists said had hindered private laboratories from deploying their own tests.
By then, the virus had spread across the country. In less than a month, it would upend daily life, shuttering the world’s largest economy and killing thousands of Americans.
In a statement to The Post, the CDC said an investigation of the initial problems is ongoing. The test is now in use in every state and is “accurate and reliable,” the agency said. In an interview Thursday, Brett P. Giroir, a Public Health Service admiral who on March 12 was named the top administration official on the testing effort, acknowledged the government should have moved more decisively to detect and contain the virus.
After an expansion that added 22 million to U.S. payrolls, March registered a loss, and worse is yet to come.
The longest stretch of job creation in American history came to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, another reflection of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill.
Compared with the astounding numbers of people recently applying for unemployment benefits — nearly 10 million in the previous two weeks — the figure announced Friday was less striking: a loss of 701,000 jobs. But the data was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay-at-home orders began to cover much of the nation. With that, what had been a drip-drip-drip of job losses turned into a deluge.
“As bad as this report is, next month will be many orders of magnitude worse,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. “This is the initial slippage of the labor market.” He said the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to 13 percent in April.
The decline in employment last month represents the biggest monthly drop since the depths of the Great Recession in 2008-9. It was paced by a net loss of 459,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector.
Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help.
A Washington Post investigation uncovered alarm and dismay among scientists at health labs about the Trump administration’s reliance on a flawed coronavirus test developed by the CDC, which was used for weeks as the virus began to spread across the United States.
Lab scientists expressed dismay at the Trump administration’s failure to move quickly and at bureaucratic demands that delayed coronavirus testing. For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.
One night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. “Oh, s---,” she replied. “What are we going to do now?”
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved.
In their private communications, scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs — one layer removed from federal agency operations — expressed dismay at the failure to move more quickly and frustration at bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.
“We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process,” Marc Couturier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah, wrote to other microbiologists on Feb. 27 after weeks of mounting frustration.
The administration embraced a new approach behind closed doors that very day, concluding that “a much broader” effort to testing was needed, according to an internal government memo spelling out the plan. Two days later, the administration announced a relaxation of the regulations that scientists said had hindered private laboratories from deploying their own tests.
By then, the virus had spread across the country. In less than a month, it would upend daily life, shuttering the world’s largest economy and killing thousands of Americans.
In a statement to The Post, the CDC said an investigation of the initial problems is ongoing. The test is now in use in every state and is “accurate and reliable,” the agency said. In an interview Thursday, Brett P. Giroir, a Public Health Service admiral who on March 12 was named the top administration official on the testing effort, acknowledged the government should have moved more decisively to detect and contain the virus.
Facing coronavirus pandemic, Trump suspends immigration laws and showcases vision for locked-down border
Trump has used emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic to implement the kind of strict enforcement regime at the U.S. southern border he has long wanted, suspending laws that protect minors and asylum seekers so that the U.S. government can immediately deport them or turn them away.
Citing the threat of “mass, uncontrolled cross-border movement,” the president has shelved safeguards intended to protect trafficking victims and persecuted groups, implementing an expulsion order that sends migrants of all ages back to Mexico in an average of 96 minutes. U.S. Border Patrol agents do not perform medical checks when they encounter people crossing into the country.
Homeland Security officials say the measures are necessary to protect U.S. agents, health-care workers and the general public from the coronavirus. Tightening controls at the border and preventing potentially infected populations from streaming into the United States minimizes the number of detainees in U.S. immigration jails and border holding cells.
One in six city police officers is out sick.
One out of every six New York City police officers is out sick or in quarantine. A veteran detective and five civilian workers have died from the disease caused by the coronavirus. And two chiefs and the deputy commissioner in charge of counterterrorism are among more than 1,500 others in the department who have been infected.
With weeks to go before the epidemic is expected to peak, the virus has already strained the Police Department at a time when its 36,000 officers have been asked to step up and help fight it by enforcing emergency rules intended to slow its spread.
The epidemic has also added a new level of risk and anxiety to police work, even as reports of most serious crimes have dropped steeply since the city imposed the new rules. Every arrest or interview now carries the potential for infection, officers say. “It’s a stressful job at the best of times,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said on Tuesday. “Right now, I don’t think you can imagine a worse point of time.”
Trump plans to nominate an inspector general to oversee the $500 billion bailout fund.
Citing the threat of “mass, uncontrolled cross-border movement,” the president has shelved safeguards intended to protect trafficking victims and persecuted groups, implementing an expulsion order that sends migrants of all ages back to Mexico in an average of 96 minutes. U.S. Border Patrol agents do not perform medical checks when they encounter people crossing into the country.
Homeland Security officials say the measures are necessary to protect U.S. agents, health-care workers and the general public from the coronavirus. Tightening controls at the border and preventing potentially infected populations from streaming into the United States minimizes the number of detainees in U.S. immigration jails and border holding cells.
One in six city police officers is out sick.
One out of every six New York City police officers is out sick or in quarantine. A veteran detective and five civilian workers have died from the disease caused by the coronavirus. And two chiefs and the deputy commissioner in charge of counterterrorism are among more than 1,500 others in the department who have been infected.
With weeks to go before the epidemic is expected to peak, the virus has already strained the Police Department at a time when its 36,000 officers have been asked to step up and help fight it by enforcing emergency rules intended to slow its spread.
The epidemic has also added a new level of risk and anxiety to police work, even as reports of most serious crimes have dropped steeply since the city imposed the new rules. Every arrest or interview now carries the potential for infection, officers say. “It’s a stressful job at the best of times,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said on Tuesday. “Right now, I don’t think you can imagine a worse point of time.”
Trump plans to nominate an inspector general to oversee the $500 billion bailout fund.
The president intends to nominate White House lawyer Brian D. Miller to serve as the inspector general overseeing the Treasury Department’s implementation of the newly enacted $2 trillion coronavirus law, the White House said Friday night.
The special inspector general is one of several oversight mechanisms created as part of the $2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed last week. The position will be closely scrutinized, as lawmakers from both parties have been calling for Mr. Trump to fill the role expeditiously to ensure that stimulus money is doled out with transparency and that fraud and favoritism are avoided.
The president raised alarms last week when, after signing the legislation, he released a statement that suggested he had the power to decide what information the new inspector general could share with Congress.
The special inspector general is one of several oversight mechanisms created as part of the $2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed last week. The position will be closely scrutinized, as lawmakers from both parties have been calling for Mr. Trump to fill the role expeditiously to ensure that stimulus money is doled out with transparency and that fraud and favoritism are avoided.
The president raised alarms last week when, after signing the legislation, he released a statement that suggested he had the power to decide what information the new inspector general could share with Congress.
Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web
Thousands of personal Zoom videos have been left viewable on the open Web, highlighting the privacy risks to millions of Americans as they shift many of their personal interactions to video calls in an age of social distancing.
Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.
Thousands of personal Zoom videos have been left viewable on the open Web, highlighting the privacy risks to millions of Americans as they shift many of their personal interactions to video calls in an age of social distancing.
Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.
Singer Pink says she has recovered from coronavirus, will donate $1 million to relief efforts
Pink announced Friday night that she tested positive for the novel coronavirus last month but has since recovered. “Two weeks ago my three-year-old son, Jameson, and I are were showing symptoms of COVID-19. Fortunately, our primary care physician had access to tests and I tested positive,” she said, referring to the disease the virus causes. The pop star added that she tested negative a few days ago after self-quarantining for two weeks.
Pink announced Friday night that she tested positive for the novel coronavirus last month but has since recovered. “Two weeks ago my three-year-old son, Jameson, and I are were showing symptoms of COVID-19. Fortunately, our primary care physician had access to tests and I tested positive,” she said, referring to the disease the virus causes. The pop star added that she tested negative a few days ago after self-quarantining for two weeks.
Pink also said she was donating $1 million combined to the Temple University Hospital Emergency Fund and the Los Angeles mayor’s emergency coronavirus fund. “It is an absolute travesty and failure of our government to not make testing more widely accessible,” Pink said. “This illness is serious and real.”
Supreme Court cancels April arguments, unclear how it will finish term.
The Supreme Court on Friday officially canceled its scheduled oral arguments for April because of health threats caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and left in doubt how the justices will finish their term.
The court already had postponed March arguments, which means about 20 cases — including the battle over President Trump’s attempts to shield his financial records from congressional committees and a Manhattan prosecutor — are left in limbo. The court’s April session usually is its last each term.“The court will consider rescheduling some cases from the March and April sessions before the end of the term, if circumstances permit in light of public health and safety guidance at that time,” public information officer Kathleen Arberg said in a news release.
Nancy Pelosi said Congress should pass another economic relief bill.
The house speaker said Congress should build upon the $2tn stimulus package passed last month. The HC ongressman Adam Schiff drafted a bill to establish a commission to probe the coronavirus response. The Democratic lawmaker said the commission would seek to gather lessons for future crises, but Trump dismissed the idea of a commission yesterday as a “witch-hunt”.
During the daily coronavirus task force briefing, Donald Trump attacked the idea of voting by mail, despite having requested an absentee ballot in 2020. The president said, citing no evidence, that mail-in voting encouraged cheating.
The Supreme Court on Friday officially canceled its scheduled oral arguments for April because of health threats caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and left in doubt how the justices will finish their term.
The court already had postponed March arguments, which means about 20 cases — including the battle over President Trump’s attempts to shield his financial records from congressional committees and a Manhattan prosecutor — are left in limbo. The court’s April session usually is its last each term.“The court will consider rescheduling some cases from the March and April sessions before the end of the term, if circumstances permit in light of public health and safety guidance at that time,” public information officer Kathleen Arberg said in a news release.
Nancy Pelosi said Congress should pass another economic relief bill.
The house speaker said Congress should build upon the $2tn stimulus package passed last month. The HC ongressman Adam Schiff drafted a bill to establish a commission to probe the coronavirus response. The Democratic lawmaker said the commission would seek to gather lessons for future crises, but Trump dismissed the idea of a commission yesterday as a “witch-hunt”.
During the daily coronavirus task force briefing, Donald Trump attacked the idea of voting by mail, despite having requested an absentee ballot in 2020. The president said, citing no evidence, that mail-in voting encouraged cheating.
German and French officials accuse Americans of intercepting masks.
Local officials in Germany and France have accused American buyers of outbidding them for protective masks that had been lined up for medical workers fighting the coronavirus in Europe. The masks, they claim, were already at Asian airports, about to be shipped.
Local officials in Germany and France have accused American buyers of outbidding them for protective masks that had been lined up for medical workers fighting the coronavirus in Europe. The masks, they claim, were already at Asian airports, about to be shipped.