Just over four months after the government confirmed the first known case, more than 100,000 people who had the coronavirus have died in the United States, according to a New York Times tally.
The toll exceeds the number of U.S. military combat fatalities in every conflict since the Korean War. It matches the toll in the United States of the 1968 flu pandemic, and it is approaching the 116,000 killed in another flu outbreak a decade before that.
The pandemic is on track to be the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the 1918 flu pandemic, in which about 675,000 Americans died.
As the nation neared the milestone, President Trump flew to Florida on Wednesday in the hopes of watching the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. But threatening weather led the launch to be postponed until Saturday at the earliest.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, released a video on Wednesday in which he expressed grief and charged that “this is a fateful milestone we should have never reached.” He faulted the administration for not enacting social-distancing measures sooner, which researchers said would have saved thousands of lives.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had taken aim on Twitter at those who would question his response. “The Radical Left Lamestream Media, together with their partner, the Do Nothing Democrats, are trying to spread a new narrative that President Trump was slow in reacting to Covid 19,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person. “Wrong, I was very fast, even doing the Ban on China long before anybody thought necessary!”
Though the numbers of new cases and deaths have begun trending downward, health experts warn of a possible resurgence as lockdowns are lifted.
The daily death toll in New York, the hardest-hit state, fell this week to levels not seen since March.
Most statisticians and public health experts, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, say the death toll is probably far higher than official counts. People who haven’t been tested are dying at home and at nursing homes, and early this year some coronavirus deaths were probably misidentified.
Most statisticians and public health experts, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, say the death toll is probably far higher than official counts. People who haven’t been tested are dying at home and at nursing homes, and early this year some coronavirus deaths were probably misidentified.
Riot police officers clashed with protesters in Hong Kong on Wednesday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesChina Approves Plan to Rein In Hong Kong, Defying Worldwide Outcry
Beijing ordered that a new law be written to extend many of mainland China’s security practices to Hong Kong, creating broad powers to quash unrest.
NY TIMESChina officially has the broad power to quash unrest in Hong Kong, as the country’s legislature on Thursday nearly unanimously approved a plan to suppress subversion, secession, terrorism and seemingly any acts that might threaten national security in the semiautonomous city.
As Beijing hashes out the specifics of the national security legislation in the coming weeks, the final rules will help determine the fate of Hong Kong, including how much of the city’s autonomy will be preserved or how much Beijing will tighten its grip.
Early signals from the Chinese authorities point to a crackdown once the law takes effect, which is expected by September.
Activist groups could be banned. Courts could impose long jail sentences for national security violations. China’s feared security agencies could operate openly in the city.
Even Hong Kong’s chief executive appeared to hint this week that certain civil liberties might not be an enduring feature of Hong Kong life. “We are a very free society, so for the time being, people have the freedom to say whatever they want to say,” said the chief executive, Carrie Lam, noting, “Rights and freedoms are not absolute.”
The prospect of a national security law has prompted an immediate pushback in Hong Kong, where protesters are once again taking to the streets. The international community, too, has warned against infringing on the city’s civil liberties.
The Trump administration signaled Wednesday that it was likely to end some or all of the U.S. government’s special trade and economic relations with Hong Kong because of China’s move. The State Department no longer considers Hong Kong to have significant autonomy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, a condition for maintaining the trade status.
Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84
He sought to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency and foresaw that it could kill millions regardless of sexual orientation.
Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic campaign for an all-out response to the AIDS crisis helped shift national health policy in the 1980s and ’90s, died on Wednesday morning in Manhattan. He was 84.
His husband, David Webster, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr. Kramer had weathered illness for much of his adult life. Among other things he had been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, contracted liver disease and underwent a successful liver transplant.
An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart” — Mr. Kramer had feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere. In 1981 he was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, though his fellow directors effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach. (He returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization of sissies.”)
He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose street actions demanding a speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Even some of the officials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency. “One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag called him.
Voters are unimpressed with Cuomo’s oversight of nursing homes.
Governor Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus crisis appears to be damaging his standing among New York voters.
In a Siena College poll released Wednesday morning, a plurality of registered voters (48 percent) said he did only a “fair” or “poor” job addressing the needs of nursing homes. 44 percent of voters rated his nursing home management “good” or “excellent.”
Mr. Cuomo’s administration had come under withering criticism for sending more than 4,500 convalescing coronavirus patients into nursing homes filled with vulnerable people, according to a tally by The Associated Press. At the time, the administration thought it prudent to free up as many hospital beds as possible for an anticipated tsunami of acute coronavirus cases.
Covid-19 has killed more than 6,000 residents in nursing home and adult care facilities, including deaths presumed to be linked to the virus. On May 10, Mr. Cuomo reversed the administration’s policy.
The governor has blamed nursing homes for failing to raise their concerns.
Mr. Cuomo’s overall favorability ratings also fell this month, from a high of 77 in April to 66. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percent.
“Cuomo’s stratospheric ratings from New Yorkers in April have fallen from their record highs but remain very strong as two-thirds of voters still view him favorably, nearly two-thirds give him a positive job performance rating and more than three-quarters still approve of the job he’s doing to address the pandemic,” said Steven Greenberg, a Siena College pollster.
Pollsters interviewed 796 registered voters in New York State between May 17 and May 21. They found that 37 percent of voters — and nearly half of downstate voters — know someone who was killed by Covid-19.
‘Ugly Even for Him’: Trump’s Usual Allies Recoil at His Smear of MSNBC Host
The Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner chastised the president as a top House Republican, Liz Cheney, urged him to “stop” his attacks on Joe Scarborough.
Some of President Trump’s most stalwart media defenders broke ranks with him on Wednesday, aghast at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Mr. Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.
The backlash even spread to the senior levels of Mr. Trump’s party on Capitol Hill, where the No. 3 House Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said the president should drop the matter and focus on leading the country through the coronavirus pandemic. “I would urge him to stop it,” she told reporters, referring to the false allegations.
The vast majority of Republican officials have kept silent about the president’s Twitter barrage against Mr. Scarborough, and the most prominent conservative voices on Fox News, like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.let the subject go unmentioned on recent broadcasts.
But Ms. Cheney’s criticism was a sign of stepped-up pressure on Mr. Trump from the right, reflected in this week’s unusual chorus of reproach from the conservative media platforms the president often turns to for comfort.
The New York Post, Mr. Trump’s first read in the morning, lamented in Wednesday’s paper that the president “decided to suggest that a TV morning-show host committed murder. That is a depressing sentence to type.” In a staff editorial, The Post addressed its most powerful reader directly: “Trust us, you did not look like the bigger man.”
And the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, a bellwether of establishment conservatism, called Mr. Trump’s unfounded accusation against Mr. Scarborough “ugly even for him.”
“We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop,” The Journal wrote in its editorial. “Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”
If the blowback affected Mr. Trump, the president has not shown it. He taunted Mr. Scarborough — a former Republican congressman and one-time social acquaintance of Mr. Trump who is now one of his harshest TV critics — again on Wednesday in a tweet that referred to a “Cold Case.”
The president’s attacks have caused anguish to the family of Lori Klausutis, the staff member in Mr. Scarborough’s former congressional office who died in 2001 when a heart condition caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk. Mr. Scarborough was not present and the police ruled her death an accident. Ms. Klausutis’s relatives have said that the president’s evocation of her death and his unfounded insinuation that she had an affair with Mr. Scarborough have caused them deep distress.
Senator Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and a frequent Trump critic, tweeted on Wednesday in support of her widower, T.J. Klausutis. “His heart is breaking,” Mr. Romney wrote. “Enough already.” Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, told reporters on Wednesday that the president’s claims were “out of bounds,” adding, “there’s no evidence.”
“Trump opening up this front with Joe Scarborough is another thing in the news cycle, another thing for people to talk about,” Mr. Polskin said. “It occupies time on the talk shows. It gets people away from that 100,000 figure,” referring to the estimated number of Americans who have died from coronavirus. “Trump’s a master at that,” he added. “Throwing out these bright, shiny diversions.”