Trump projects up to 240,000 coronavirus deaths in U.S., even with mitigation efforts. UPDATES.

Trump Warns of ‘Painful Two Weeks’ Ahead.
Government scientists said the virus could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans, in spite of social distancing measures.
In a news conference, President Trump struck his most somber tone on the subject to date.

The top government scientists battling the coronavirus estimated Tuesday that the deadly pathogen could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans, in spite of the social distancing measures that have drastically limited citizens’ interactions and movements.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the coronavirus response, displayed the grim projection at a White House news conference and then joined President Trump in pledging to do everything possible to reduce the numbers even further.

President Trump officially called for another month of social distancing and warned that “this is going to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks” — even as he added that Americans would soon “start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel.”

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We’re going through a very tough few weeks,” Mr. Trump said, later raising his two weeks to three.

The scientists’ conclusions generally match those from similar models by public health researchers around the globe. Mr. Trump, who spent weeks playing down the threat of the virus, congratulated himself for the projections, which he said showed that strict public health measures may have already curtailed the death toll. He suggested that as many as 2.2 million people “would have died if we did nothing, if we just carried on with our life.” By comparison, Mr. Trump said, a potential death toll of 100,000 “is a very low number.”

But on a day when the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surged above 4,000, surpassing China’s official count, the pandemic’s personal and financial toll continued to play out across the nation.

A chorus of governors from across the political spectrum publicly challenged the Trump administration’s assertion that the United States is well-stocked and well-prepared to test people for the coronavirus and care for the sickest patients. In many cases, the governors said, the country’s patchwork approach had left them bidding against one another for supplies

In other states, hundreds of thousands of Americans — biting back shame and wondering guiltily about others in more dire straits — are asking for help for the first time in their lives. A startlingly high number of people may already be infected with the coronavirus and not showing symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That realization is complicating efforts to predict the pandemic’s course and mitigate its spread, and has led the C.D.C. to consider broadening its guidelines on whether healthy people should wear masks.


N.Y.C. Death Toll Passes 1,000 as Mayor Pleads for More Help
The number of coronavirus cases in New York State topped 75,000. 

Help is arriving as the death count grows, Mayor de Blasio said.

More than 500 paramedics and emergency medical technicians, 2,000 nurses and 250 ambulances are heading to New York City from across the United States to shore up a health care system that is being buried under an avalanche of coronavirus patients, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday.

The mayor’s remarks came with the city’s death toll at 932 and more than 40,000 virus cases confirmed. Hours later, city officials reported that 1,096 people had died of the virus.

The mayor announced the arriving reinforcements while speaking at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, which is being converted to an emergency hospital amid a surge in virus patients in the borough, especially at Elmhurst Hospital.

“This coming Sunday, April 5, is a demarcation line,” he said, zeroing in again on what he has called a critical date. “This is the point at which we must be prepared for next week when we expect a huge increase in the number of cases.”

The mayor also said that the city would be closing 10 playgrounds where people had not been adhering to social-distancing rules.



The daily number of new deaths in New York State has increased 31 percent a day on average for the past week, and the death toll has tripled in four days.

The statewide number of confirmed cases increased by 9,298, to 75,795.

The number of patients hospitalized passed 10,900, up 15 percent from Monday. Of those, 2,710 were in intensive care rooms with ventilators.

Faced with a crush of patients, besieged NYC hospitals struggle with life-or-death decisions

In the chaos of New York City, where coronavirus deaths are mounting so quickly that freezer trucks have been set up as makeshift morgues, several hospitals have taken the unprecedented step of allowing doctors not to resuscitate people with covid-19 to avoid exposing health-care workers to the highly contagious virus.

The shift is part of a flurry of changes besieged hospitals are making almost daily, including canceling all but the most urgent surgeries, forgoing the use of isolation rooms, and requiring infected health workers who no longer have a fever to show up to work before the end of the previously recommended 14-day self-isolation period.

Last week, DNRs or do-not-resuscitate policies for coronavirus patients who stop breathing, or are in cardiac arrest, were being discussed as part of worst-case scenario planning — ideas dismissed late last week by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, saying, “there is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.”

Over the past few days, however, as the city’s death count topped 1,000 with 10,900 people hospitalized amid predictions the peak of the crisis is still two weeks off, some hospitals and medical centers activated those protocols.

Those decisions are a reflection of a grim reality in which thousands of health-care workers have fallen ill, ventilators are so scarce that some hospitals have put two patients on one machine, and protective equipment like masks and gowns are in such short supply that some workers are sewing their own.

Spokespeople for Montefiore, NYU Langone Health, and New York-Presbyterian’s Brooklyn Methodist said no new systemwide resuscitation protocols have been adopted. But doctors and nurses at those facilities say some doctors have been informally allowed in recent days to override a covid-19 patient’s “code status” — the part of their medical record that expresses their desire for lifesaving medical intervention.

Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn said the hospital is actively discussing the move with community and religious leaders, but has not adopted it yet.Leaders of hospitals in the New York City area have sought to emphasize to staff the danger of viral transmission posed by the standard “all-hands approach” to resuscitation, as well as the low survival chances for patients. Staff rush in to perform chest compressions and pump oxygen into the lungs. Ribs might be broken, veins punctured in the rush to insert IV lines. Nearly all patients who are resuscitated will need a ventilator, and many will die within the first 24 to 48 hours, even if health-care workers do everything they can.

Alice Thornton Bell, an advanced practice registered nurse and a senior director at Advisory Board, a hospital consulting firm, said just under 17 percent of people who are resuscitated in a hospital survive long enough to leave it —“We will see a lot of deaths,” one doctor typed in a grim text Saturday explaining the shift in protocol, “but they will happen nevertheless earlier or later.”

At Elmhurst, according to a protocol that was communicated to staff on Saturday and again on Sunday and was shared with The Washington Post, doctors would be able to unilaterally designate coronavirus patients as DNR and/or DNI — do not intubate — which means they will not be eligible for a ventilator, even if it goes against the wishes of the patient or family. Getting the agreement of a second doctor is “optimal,” the guidance states, but is not required. The language of the ethical framework states that if the order is in effect, doctors have no “no obligation to offer or initiate” the treatment, allowing them to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

At NYU Langone Health on Saturday, the head of emergency medicine emailed other doctors urging them to “think more critically” about who gets ventilators, according to The Wall Street Journal. Robert Femia emphasized that doctors have “sole discretion” to put patients on ventilators and that they will be supported if they decide to “withhold futile intubation” for covid-19 patients. NYU Langone said in a statement that those guidelines were in place before this crisis but officials felt it was important to “re-emphasize” them to assure doctors “the decisions they make at the bedside would be supported.”

A physician at New York-Presbyterian’s Brooklyn Methodist said doctors have been told not to perform CPR except in rare cases where the patient is young, otherwise healthy and is judged to have a good chance of recovery. For some patients, he said, “we are pretty much doing nothing.”

In some of the hardest hit New York area hospitals, doctors and nurses described everything — and perhaps everyone — as potentially contaminated. They said even some patients without covid-19, who have been kept on separate, cordoned off wings, are becoming infected.

Four in 10 New York tenants may not pay April rent.

The true economic toll of all but shutting down New York City to stem the spread of the coronavirus is likely to become clearer on Wednesday when April rent is due.

In just a month’s time, the lives of millions of New Yorkers have been turned upside down, with many of them losing their jobs and now worrying about paying their bills.

“It’s gotten to this point where I really cannot pay rent because doing so would jeopardize my ability to buy food or basically survive,” said Henry True, 24, a musician and freelancer who pays $600 a month for a bedroom in a shared apartment in Brooklyn.

No one knows for sure how many renters in New York City will have a hard time paying, but landlords and the real estate industry say they are bracing for perhaps as many 40 percent of tenants, if not more, skipping their April payments. There are about 5.4 million renters in the city, about two-thirds of the population. If a large share of them cannot make rent, landlords, especially smaller ones that operate on thin margins, will be unable to pay their own bills, property owners said. The largest annual bill for most property owners, real estate taxes, is due July 1. And property taxes make up about 30 percent of New York City’s revenue, which helps pay for basic city services.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has ordered a 90-day moratorium on evictions, a lifeline to people who cannot pay rent and are worried about losing their homes during the crisis. But that doesn’t wipe away that rent from having to be paid later on. While tenants will be protected, landlords have not yet been provided similar protections. Mr. Cuomo has urged banks to waive mortgage payments for three months, but he does not have the authority to order them to do so.

Other bills, such as water and sewer, have not been postponed. “The banks aren’t going to let you off the hook,” said Mr. Strasburg, adding that the federal government should require banks to provide relief on mortgage payments. Mr. Strasburg said landlords who have first-floor commercial tenants, such as restaurants, fear that those tenants too will not be paying rent in April.

Both tenant advocates and property owner representatives said renters who have lost their jobs should ask their landlords whether they could pay a smaller portion of the rent or work out a payment plan.

Nearly 1 in 30 city police officers have been infected.

The coronavirus is taking a heavy toll on the nation’s biggest police department, with close to 1,200 New York City officers, more than 3 percent of the force, testing positive, Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said on Tuesday. Commissioner Shea said that about 15 percent of officers were on sick leave, at least four times the normal rate.

Five Police Department employees have died in the past week, and some employees have lost family members. “This thing does not discriminate,” he said

The Empire State of Mind is anxious, depressed and disconnected.

If in recent days you have felt like the collective anxiety in New York has been pervasive and overwhelming, a new survey suggests that you are right.

According to the latest week of data collected and analyzed by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, almost half of New York City residents — 44 percent — reported feeling nervous, anxious or on edge at least three days a week. And 35 percent of city dwellers said they felt down, depressed or hopeless a similar amount of the time.

The researchers had not asked those questions before, so it was unclear if the figures were higher than normal.

But the percentage of respondents who said they felt “not at all socially connected” in what is normally one of the world’s most bustling cities doubled in one week to 43 percent.

The data offers a measure of the city’s psychological well-being at a time when New Yorkers find themselves under extraordinary economic, emotional and health-related duress.

The survey found that the number of people reporting that they know someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus doubled in a week. And more than a third of respondents said they or someone in their household had lost a job.

Nursing homes threatened by the virus.

New York’s nursing homes have long been chronically understaffed, leaving loved ones to fill critical gaps in care. Now those family members are locked out, and workers are getting sick, quarantined or quitting because the work has become too dangerous.

Some nursing homes say they cannot get the personal protective equipment they need because it is going to hospitals.

At ArchCare, which runs five nursing homes, workers wear rain ponchos and beauticians’ gowns. By Sunday the five homes had around 150 cases of the virus, and a number of deaths, said Scott LaRue, the president.

“Coronavirus in a nursing home,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Sunday, “can be like fire through dry grass.” In New York City, nursing homes account for one in four coronavirus deaths.

Depleted staffs means more residents per worker — and also more room for error or neglect, less time to fully scrub between residents and greater opportunities to carry the virus from one room or wing to another.


In understaffed homes, “people are not getting medication when it’s needed, are waiting a long time for diaper changes or other hands-on care,” said Susan Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, NY. “This was a problem before, but the current pandemic throws it into high relief.”

Why are journalists skipping Trump’s daily coronavirus briefing? Not enough news to risk their health.

There have been a lot more empty seats at President Trump’s daily press briefings — but no, news organizations aren’t boycotting the events in protest or attempting to silence him, despite what he suggested at a briefing earlier this week.

Instead, something else is afoot: Reporters are keeping their distance because they are concerned about the health risks at a time when many consider the president’s evening news conferences to have become increasingly less newsworthy.

The decision by such outlets as The Washington Post, New York Times and CNBC to stay away may be fundamentally changing the character of the briefings. With veteran White House reporters on the sidelines, the president has primarily engaged with TV journalists, including one from a small, far-right conservative news channel that rarely gets such a prominent stage.

914 Dead in N.Y.C., and City’s Virus Case Count Tops 38,000. UPDATES

The outbreak’s toll continued to rise amid a hopeful sign: the arrival of a Navy hospital ship to ease the strain on the city’s overwhelmed hospitals.

Here are other developments from Monday:

New York reported almost 7,000 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to nearly 66,500. Most of the cases were in New York City, where, officials reported later on Monday, 38,087 people had been infected.


The number of virus-related deaths in New York City rose to 914 Monday afternoon, up 138 from around the same time Sunday, officials said.

In New York, the number of people hospitalized was 9,517, up 12 percent from yesterday. Of those, 2,352 are in ventilator-equipped intensive care rooms.
In a hopeful note, Mr. Cuomo said that while the number of hospitalizations continues to grow, the rate which it is growing was tapering off. “We had a doubling of cases every two days, then a doubling every three days and a doubling every four days, then every five,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We now have a doubling of cases every six days. So while the overall number is going up, the rate of doubling is actually down.”

More than 4,200 people have been discharged from hospitals.

New York has tested more than 186,000 people in March, about one percent of the state’s population. But while New York’s testing capacity far outpaces that of other states, it has not reached the critical-mass level public health experts say is necessary to more precisely identify the spread of the virus.

Nurses Die, Doctors Fall Sick and Panic Rises on Virus Front Lines

A supervisor urged surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan to volunteer for the front lines because half the intensive-care staff had already been sickened by coronavirus.

“ICU is EXPLODING,” she wrote in an email.

A doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan described the unnerving experience of walking daily past an intubated, critically ill colleague in her 30s, wondering who would be next.

Another doctor at a major New York City hospital described it as “a petri dish,” where more than 200 workers had fallen sick.

Two nurses in city hospitals have died.

The coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 30,000 people in New York City, is beginning to take a toll on those who are most needed to combat it: the doctors, nurses and other workers at hospitals and clinics. In emergency rooms and intensive care units, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of colleagues get sick.

“I feel like we’re all just being sent to slaughter,” said Thomas Riley, a nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, who has contracted the virus, along with his husband.

Medical workers are still showing up day after day to face overflowing emergency rooms, earning them praise as heroes. Thousands of volunteers have signed up to join their colleagues.

But doctors and nurses said they can look overseas for a dark glimpse of the risk they are facing, especially when protective gear has been in short supply. In China, more than 3,000 doctors were infected, nearly half of them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, according to Chinese government statistics. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who first tried to raise the alarm about Covid-19, eventually died of it. In Italy, the number of infected heath care workers is now twice the Chinese total, and the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists has compiled a list of 50 who have died. Nearly 14 percent of Spain’s confirmed coronavirus cases are medical professionals.

Mr. Riley, the nurse at Jacobi, said when he looked at the emergency room recently, he realized he and his colleagues would never avoid being infected. Patients struggling to breathe with lungs that sounded like sandpaper had crowded the hospital. Masks and protective gowns were in short supply.
“I’m swimming in this,” he said he thought. “I’m pretty sure I’m getting this.” His symptoms began with a cough, then a fever, then nausea and diarrhea. Days later, his husband became ill. Mr. Riley said both he and his husband appear to be getting better, but are still experiencing symptoms.

Like generals steadying their troops before battle, hospital supervisors in New York have had to rally, cajole and sometimes threaten workers.

“Our health care systems are at war with a pandemic virus,” Craig R. Smith, the surgeon-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, wrote in an email to staff on March 16, the day after New York City shut down its school system to contain the virus. “You are expected to keep fighting with whatever weapons you’re capable of working.”

“Sick is relative,” he wrote, adding that workers would not even be tested for the virus unless they were “unequivocally exposed and symptomatic to the point of needing admission to the hospital.”
“That means you come to work,” he wrote. “Period.”

Arriving to work each day, doctors and nurses are met with confusion and chaos. At a branch of the Montefiore hospital system in the Bronx, nurses wear their winter coats in an unheated tent set up to triage patients with symptoms, while at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, patients are sometimes dying before they can be moved into beds.

When the pandemic first hit New York, medical workers changed gowns and masks each time they visited an infected patient. Then, they were told to keep their protective gear on until the end of their shift. As supplies became even more scarce, one doctor working on an intensive care unit said he was asked to turn in his mask and face shield at the end of his shift to be sterilized for future use. Others are being told to store their masks in a paper bag between shifts.

An emergency room doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center put it more bluntly: “It’s literally, wash your hands a lot, cross your fingers, pray.” Doctors and nurses fear they could be transmitting the virus to their patients, compounding the crisis by transforming hospitals into incubators for the virus.

Frontline hospital workers in New York are now required to take their temperature every 12 hours, though many doctors and nurses fear they could contract the disease and spread it to patients before they become symptomatic.

They also say it is a challenge to know when to come back to work after being sick. All medical workers who show symptoms, even if they are not tested, must quarantine for at least seven days and must be asymptomatic for three days before coming back to work.

Lillian Udell, a nurse at Lincoln Medical Center, another public hospital in the Bronx, said she was still weak and experiencing symptoms when she was pressured to return to work. She powered through a long shift that was so chaotic she could not remember how many patients she attended. By the time she returned home, the chills and the cough had returned. “I knew it was still in me,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t myself.”

There is also the fear of bringing the disease home to spouses and children. Some medical workers said they were sleeping in different rooms from their partners and even wearing surgical masks at home. Others have chosen to isolate themselves from their families completely, sending spouses and children to live outside the city, or moving into hotels. “I come home, I strip naked, put clothes in a bag and put them in the washer and take a shower,” one New York City doctor at a large public hospital said.

This week, the Health and Hospitals Corporation recommended transferring doctors and nurses at higher risk of infection — such as those who are older or with underlying medical conditions — from jobs interacting with patients to more administrative positions.

“We’re left for dead”: Fears of a catastrophe at Rikers Island are growing.

In the nearly two weeks since the coronavirus seeped into New York City’s jail system, fears have grown of the potential of a public health catastrophe in the cellblocks where thousands are being held in close quarters.

Public officials have been working to release hundreds of people in jail, but while that effort is moving forward, law enforcement officials concerned about public safety have urged caution.

“You’re on top of one another no matter what you do,” said one man who was recently released from Rikers Island. “There’s no ventilation. If anything is floating, everybody gets it.”

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that about 650 people had been released. Still, the rate of infection has continued to climb, and by Monday, 167 inmates, 114 correction staff and 20 health workers had tested positive and two correction staff members had died.

The number of homeless New Yorkers to test positive neared 100.

As of Sunday, 99 people staying in 59 shelters were infected, according to the city’s Department of Social Services. Two of them, a man in his 60s and a man in his 70s, died last week. Twenty-seven homeless people remained hospitalized on Sunday, officials said.

The city’s main shelter system for homeless people is made up of about 450 traditional shelters, hotels and private apartment buildings. There are an estimated 79,000 homeless people in the city; about 5 percent live unsheltered on the city’s streets.

Seven people living on the streets and three people who were staying in what is considered unstable housing have tested positive for the virus, officials said.

As of Sunday, there were 140 people staying in special isolation units operated by the social services agency at four locations.

They can’t afford to quarantine. So they brave the subway.

Subway ridership in New York City has plummeted in recent weeks. But in poorer areas, many people have jobs that do not allow them the luxury of working from home. So they keep riding.

In the Bronx, two stations that have had relatively low drops in ridership serve neighborhoods with some of the highest poverty rates in the city, an analysis by The New York Times found.

The 170th Street station in the University Heights neighborhood and Burnside station in Mount Eden are surrounded by large Latin American and African immigrant communities where the median household income is about $22,000, one-third the median household income in New York State, according to census data.

It is a striking change on a system that has long been the great equalizer among New Yorkers, where hourly workers crowded in with financial executives. Now the subway is more like a symbol of the city’s inequality.

Many residents say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Even worse, a reduction in service in response to plunging ridership has sometimes caused crowding and has made it impossible to maintain the social distancing public health experts recommend.

“This virus is very dangerous,” said Yolanda Encanción, a home health aide who works in Lower Manhattan. “I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want my family to get sick, but I still need to get to my job.”

Justice Dept. investigates at least one lawmaker’s stock trades before coronavirus spike in U.S.

The Justice Department is investigating stock trades made by at least one member of Congress as the United States braced for the pandemic threat of coronavirus, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The investigation is being coordinated with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is looking at the trades of at least one lawmaker, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As head of the powerful committee, Burr received frequent briefings and reports on the threat of the virus. He also sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which received briefings on the pandemic.

In mid-February, Burr sold 33 stocks held by him and his spouse, estimated to be worth between $628,033 and $1.7 million, Senate financial disclosures show. It was the largest number of stocks he had sold in one day since at least 2016, records show.

A law called the Stock Act prohibits members of Congress, their staffers and other federal officials from trading on insider information obtained from their government work. No one has been charged under the Stock Act since its passage in 2012, and some legal experts consider it a difficult statute under which to file criminal charges.

The investigation is in its early stages, according to the person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. It was not immediately clear how many stock trades, or lawmakers, would come under scrutiny in the probe.

Nancy Pelosi is still often the lone woman at the table. But she has paved the way for many others.

KAREN TUMULTY, WASHINGTON POST

A few dozen people gathered one early March evening at the National Museum of American History to celebrate the opening of a new exhibition marking the centennial of women’s suffrage.

Collected in the glass cases are the artifacts of a long, arduous road to political empowerment:
A red silk shawl worn by Susan B. Anthony as she plied the hallways of the Capitol arguing for the right to vote.
A palm-sized campaign card from the 1916 campaign of Montana’s Jeannette Rankin, who became the first woman elected to Congress.
The brown felt hat that Bella Abzug wore at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, where some 2,000 delegates declared: “We demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our national, our families and our individual lives."
Another item on display: the gavel used to call the U.S. House to order on Jan. 4, 2007.

The speaker who wielded that gavel on that day was, for the first time, a woman. Though Nancy Pelosi does not lack for self-confidence, she rarely indulges in public self-reflection. On that night at the Smithsonian, however, she gave a nod to those who had paved the way for her.

“The women who did all of this — oh my gosh — we revere them. We hold them up as icons. But what we hear people say is, ‘Yes, they were icons. You are troublemakers.’ They were considered troublemakers in their time, so maybe there is a future for all of us,” Pelosi said with a laugh. “But I can just tell you, a troublemaker with a gavel — that’s the real difference.”

Power is not influence. Power is when you have the ability to make change. ... Being speaker of the House, that’s real power.

This troublemaker with a gavel is the highest-ranking female elected official in the nation’s history and, on Thursday, Pelosi will also mark a personal milestone: her 80th birthday. Fittingly, it comes at the end of Women’s History Month. Just as appropriately, Pelosi will be marking it by attempting a huge, complicated and vitally important legislative lift — marshaling support for a massive spending bill to blunt the impact of the coronavirus.

As the day approached, Pelosi sat down with me to talk about her unlikely rise as a woman in a male-dominated institution and the lessons she has learned along the way. She spoke with an openness and introspection that are rare for her, perhaps recognizing this as a way to better mark the trail for others.

Pelosi will be tested in the coming months, as her generationally divided party looks for a way to navigate the coronavirus crisis while regrouping behind a presidential nominee. Then, in the fall, every seat in the House will be on the ballot and, with it, Pelosi’s 35-seat majority. Voters will render judgment on her decision to press forward with President Trump’s impeachment last fall. But it is likely they will be focused more on figuring out which party can be trusted going forward, and specifically, which is better equipped to manage the next phase of the government’s response to the most challenging peacetime crisis in a century or more.

When an election looms, Pelosi is never far from the conversation. The speaker is a polarizing figure whose unfavorability in the polls consistently surpasses her positive numbers by double digits. She has been the target of thousands of Republican campaign ads, though that assault failed spectacularly in 2018, when Democrats swept the midterm elections and regained control of the House. More than a few in Pelosi’s own caucus had their doubts when she announced that she wanted her old job back. There were voices, on both the left and the right of the party, who said Pelosi’s time had passed.

But her second act has been, by some measures, even more impressive than her first. Pelosi’s discipline and maturity, her refusal to be intimidated by Trump’s bluster, have energized the Democratic base and kept a volatile and impulsive president off balance.

A few days after Trump’s inauguration, his combative chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon took the measure of the then-House minority leader at a meeting in the White House dining room. Trump had begun the session by repeating his fantastical claim that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 had it not been for millions of fraudulent ballots cast on Hillary Clinton’s behalf.

“There’s no evidence to support what you just said,” Pelosi said sharply. “And if we’re going to work together, we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.”

“She’s going to get us,” Bannon whispered to colleagues. “Total assassin. She’s a total assassin.”

A woman about to enter her ninth decade has become a warrior-heroine to the social-media generation. It seems that her every gesture toward Trump conveys a message of contempt. When he gave his 2019 State of the Union address, she offered stiff-armed, mocking applause. Right after he delivered it this year, she gracelessly ripped up her copy of what she called “a manifesto of mistruths.”

At times, even Pelosi seems taken aback by the frenzy she can trigger. After she got the better of the president during a meeting in late 2018, the Internet was ignited by an image of her striding triumphantly from the White House in a fire-colored coat. It created such a sensation that fashion house Max Mara scrambled to put the design from its 2012 collection back on the market again for $2,990. “You know, it’s a funny thing because none of it was planned or intentional. I only wore that orange coat because it was clean,” Pelosi recalled. “Now, I can barely wear it because it’s a meme.”



She understands the significance that such moments convey, especially for many women. “When I was speaker before, I rarely paid attention to the accoutrements of power. I was just busy being a legislator. This time, people seem to know more about what the speaker is — well, for whatever reason — and maybe social media has made that clear to people,” she said. “But as I say to the women, nobody ever gives away power. If you want to achieve that, you go for it. But when you get it, you must use it.”

In nearly every major negotiation between the executive and the legislative branches, Pelosi remains the lone woman at the table where the biggest decisions are made. Still, the gains that she has seen women make over the course of her political career have been enormous. When Pelosi arrived in the House in 1987, a freshman at the age of 47, there were barely two dozen women among its 435 members. Now, in part thanks to her efforts, there are more than 100.

But even as these victories are celebrated, they remind us that no woman has yet to climb to the top. “My disappointment is that every time I’m introduced as the most powerful woman in American history, it breaks my heart because I think we should have a president,” she said. “We could have had a female president, and we should and we will.”

It is therefore instructive to recall that Pelosi’s own rise was not one that anyone — starting with the speaker herself — would have foreseen. Life has a way of making a joke of the plans that we devise for ourselves. Only in the rear-view mirror can we see how choices and chances pave a road we could never have imagined.

“Nancy Pelosi has wielded power more forcefully and effectively than any speaker since Joe Cannon,” says congressional authority Norman J. Ornstein, invoking the name of the iron-fisted Republican who ruled the House in the early 20th century. “Her assets include her public presence, her coolness under pressure, her remarkable negotiating skills and her ability to get to yes."

None of that was imaginable at the start. True, biographies of Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi usually begin with the fact that she was born into one of Baltimore’s most storied political families. Between them, her father and her brother — both named Thomas D’Alesandro — served four terms as mayor of the city. The elder D’Alesandro also spent eight years in the U.S. House, and before that, held seats in the Maryland legislature and on the Baltimore City Council.

But while politics were woven into her DNA, other things were expected of Nancy, the youngest of six and the only girl. Her father thought that if his daughter went to college, it should be in Baltimore, so that she would continue to live under his roof. Her mother hoped Nancy would become a nun, which the devout Annunciata D’Alesandro believed was the most spiritually fulfilling life to which a woman could aspire. “Tommy was groomed to be mayor," Pelosi explained, "and I was raised to be holy.”



As a kid, Pelosi had little interest in stepping up to become part of a political dynasty. “I just wanted to be normal,” she recalled. “I saw people whose families had weekends and things like that. We were always doing political events.”

Yet the Democratic Party was as much a part of the D’Alesandro identity as its Catholic faith and its Italian roots. Portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman hung on the walls of their house on Albemarle Street. “We saw our Democratic values as related to our religious values,” Pelosi said. “So it was almost a moral imperative that we would be community oriented. That didn’t mean you had to run for office. It meant you would participate in the manner that you did and help people run for office — for the candidates, the causes, the values of the Democratic Party.”

She learned to count votes early. The front room of the mayor’s home in Little Italy operated as a sort of ad hoc social services agency, where supplicants were constantly calling and showing up at the door. Nancy helped her mother curate what was known as the “favor file,” a record of everyone who had asked for and received a job, or a bed in City Hospital, or a spot in public housing, or a welfare check. The expectation was that repayment of these debts would arrive, precinct by precinct, at election time.

Nancy was a neighborhood princess, driven a mile each day to the Institute of Notre Dame by a chauffeur. Embarrassed, she insisted on being let out to walk the last block. In 1958, she competed in a citywide extemporaneous debate competition. One of the questions presented for argument was: “Do women think?”

It took a good deal of negotiation to persuade her father to allow her to move 37 miles south to attend Trinity, a women-only Catholic college in Washington. There, she felt the first stirrings of an ambition that would someday drive her. She majored in history because it was the only way she could study political science courses. As graduation approached, she began to consider applying for law school.



But while taking a summer class on Africa, she met and fell in love with a Georgetown University student named Paul Pelosi. They were married two years later, in 1963. Pelosi set aside her plans for law school and followed his career, first to New York City and then to his native San Francisco, where he made a fortune as a financier and real estate investor.

In the space of six years, from 1964 to 1970, Pelosi gave birth to four girls and a boy. Her days fell into a fast rhythm of diapers, naps and homework. She sometimes drove car pool with her nightgown on under her coat, and once sent her daughter Jacqueline to school with a braid on one side of her head and a pony tail on the other.

But her friends marveled at the discipline with which the young mother ran her full household. When it was time for dinner, she stood on her steps and rang a cowbell, bringing five little Pelosis scurrying from all directions. Once the evening dishes were done, the kids set the table for the next morning’s breakfast. They made their own school lunches from an assembly line of bread and sandwich meat.
“She knew how to be organized. She crammed a lot into one day,” recalls fellow California Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D), a friend from back then. “Those are transferable talents to heading up the caucus. You know, people underestimate that.”

Politics was a hobby, not a career. When Pelosi lived in New York, she passed out campaign leaflets as she took her children trick or treating. In San Francisco, her large, elegant house was ideal for fundraisers. But she still couldn’t picture herself as a candidate. “No, I never had any interest. I didn’t have the ambition to do it. And I think that women today — I’m so proud of their ambition, because you have to be ambitious to run for president of the United States,” Pelosi told me. “I didn’t actually, when I got married, give up my thought of going to law school. It just turned out that I was having all these babies, being that devout Catholic that I am. And then one thing led to another.”

The one thing that led to another — and then another and another — was her appointment to a seat on San Francisco’s Library Commission in 1975. It was the first job outside her home where she served in anything other than a volunteer capacity. The following year, when a young California governor named Jerry Brown decided to run for president, she leveraged her family connections to help him win the Democratic primary in Maryland. It was one of only three states he carried.

Brown repaid Pelosi by backing her in 1977 to be chairwoman of the Northern California Democratic Party. In 1981, she was elected statewide chair; she won high marks for both her fundraising and her efforts to modernize the party operations. From there, she launched the campaign that brought the 1984 Democratic National Convention to San Francisco.



An early profile in the New York Times, published during that convention, described Pelosi as “a slim woman 41 years old,” and noted that she was interviewed “in her spacious living room in the fashionable Presidio Terrace area of the city while her five teenagers put together press kits and her husband, Paul, hauled cartons of campaign buttons and posters out of the room.” Asked then whether voters might ever expect to see her name on a ballot, Pelosi dismissed the possibility: “I’m more into fundraising, but I like the vitality, the disagreements, the advocacy of politics.”

That convention is best remembered for the historic nomination of Geraldine A. Ferraro, a member of the House from New York, as presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s running mate. But Mondale and Ferraro suffered a landslide defeat that fall. The party that Republicans had begun referring to as the “San Francisco Democrats” was left in utter disarray, with a rising moderate and conservative faction demanding that it take a more centrist direction.

The factional divide spilled into the bitter 1985 race for a new national party chair. Pelosi decided to run for it, making the argument that the Democrats’ problems were rooted not in their principles or ideology, but rather, in their outdated approach to campaigning. In what would become a theme, she portrayed herself as an outsider from the future-facing West, tilting against an ossified establishment in Washington.

But many senior party figures could not see her as anything but a dizzy liberal from the Bay Area. To read the news stories about that race now is to be struck by the sexism with which she was treated. A top official of the AFL-CIO referred to her as an “airhead.” After Pelosi lost, journalist Joseph Kraft wrote that “she came on, in one news conference, as an overbearing player of feminist politics.”

... if I was called an overbearing feminist 35 years ago, I would consider that a compliment.
That latter description still amuses Pelosi. “Yeah, maybe. I certainly hope so,” she said. “One person’s insult, I take as a compliment. But that was new and this was a long time ago. ’85. What are we talking about? A long time ago. Thirty-five years ago. And if I was called an overbearing feminist 35 years ago, I would consider that a compliment.” But she acknowledged that she wasn’t prepared for the attacks: “There’s nothing as, shall we say, revealing as having an intra-party fight.”

Though she lost, the race taught Pelosi an invaluable lesson. Running for something, she discovered, can be a vicious undertaking, one where past favors are quickly forgotten and loyalty cannot be assumed. She also learned the hard way that a fist can seal a deal better than a handshake. “In many ways, it kind of changed the lens for her,” said Eshoo. “When she ran for the Democratic national chairmanship, I think that she romanticized the Democratic Party. When she ran for Congress, she knew the minefield. The minefield has nothing to do with the values and all of that. But there’s a darker side.”

Pelosi soldiered on, serving in 1985 and 1986 as finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, helping raise the money by which Democrats took back control of the Senate from the Republicans who had held it for six years. It was a rare win in a lost decade for Democrats.

The following year, Pelosi finally took the step that she had so long resisted. The decision was made for her, in a way, by the bequest of a friend who was dying. Rep. Sala Burton, the widow of one of California’s legendary kingmakers, had succeeded her husband Phil after he collapsed with a fatal aneurysm in 1983. Suffering from cancer herself, Burton summoned Pelosi to her hospital room and told her she did not plan to run for reelection. Burton asked Pelosi to run for the seat, which represents most of San Francisco.

By then, four of Pelosi’s children were out of the house, but her youngest, Alexandra, still had another year in high school. Pelosi asked her daughter’s opinion and noted that, if she won, she would have to spend three nights a week away from home in Washington. “Mother,” Alexandra replied, “get a life.”

Burton announced her support for Pelosi and died less than two weeks later. “Her endorsement was golden,” Pelosi said. So was the fact that Pelosi had the Burton machine behind her. But plenty of others, including three county supervisors, jumped into the race as well. In the crowded special election, Pelosi had to fight off charges that she was “a dilettante” who was trying to stage “a coronation.”

“These are people who are saying this for whom I had had events in my home, who I had advanced to positions, some of them, that they were in, and yet they were saying that,” Pelosi recalled, still bristling. “But I was ready. I was ready because I knew how difficult an intra-party competition is. It’s disappointing because it’s your friends.”

Pelosi made it past 13 other candidates in a squeaker of an election that went to a June 1987 runoff.

Arriving in Congress as a middle-aged House freshman, Pelosi wasn’t at all sure how long she wanted to stay. At 47, it seemed she might have missed her shot for rising through the seniority system. “I had absolutely no interest in running for leadership. None. But I did love my work,” she said. “The two [committees] that forged me were appropriations and intelligence, and I drank deeply from all of that.”

After Democrats lost the House in 1994, however, Pelosi grew increasingly frustrated with seeing her party fall short election cycle after election cycle. “I said, ‘I’m tired of losing. I don’t get this. I can’t wait for a pendulum to swing. We have to go take action,’” she said. The House’s Democratic leadership, which hadn’t added a new face to its top ranks in a decade, was happy to accept the money Pelosi brought in from California. But it didn’t care to hear her advice.

In 2000, the Democrats needed to flip only seven seats to win back a majority. Pelosi told the leaders that if they would allow her to run the campaign operation in California her way, she could pick up four in that state alone. “I know California like the back of my hand. I know the grass roots down to the last blade of grass. I know the districts. I know how different they are from each other, how different they are within the districts,” she said. “We will have the resources. We’ll make sure the candidates are a match for their districts.”

On election night, she delivered more than she had promised. Democrats added five, not four, seats in California. But in the rest of the country, they lost almost as many, which left them pretty much back where they started.

When the caucus, led by Missouri’s Dick Gephardt, held its annual retreat the following February, Pelosi stood up and made a presentation explaining how she had won in California. She argued that the party needed to sharpen its message, rev up its organization and stop being so dependent on cookie-cutter strategies devised by overpaid consultants. She believed that technology opened new opportunities to reach and raise money from the grass roots, rather than continuing to rely on traditional corporate interests.

The reaction she got: None.

Pelosi realized that if she wanted to change things, she had to muscle her way into leadership, something she had been quietly talking about with a close circle of colleagues for several years. “I had enormous respect for Dick Gephardt, who was our leader. I did. But there is a pecking order here, and you just wait in line 200 years or something,” she said. “I was tired of losing.”




It turned out that others in the House were, too. And in the best tradition of Albemarle Street, many of them owed some favors to Pelosi, who had been throwing campaign money their way. In 2001, she beat Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland and was elected Democratic whip. When Gephardt stepped down a year later, she became minority leader.

In the wake of 9/11, Republicans were on the rise again. Pundits were astonished that the House Democratic caucus would turn to a liberal from San Francisco as its leader. “Are the Democrats about to go insane?” David Brooks wrote in the Weekly Standard. “Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive House minority leader, may be the most caricaturable politician since Newt Gingrich.”

But two more cycles after that, Pelosi had her hands on that gavel that now sits in the Smithsonian.

As the culture and structure of the House has evolved over the past 100 years, so has the job of the speaker. Through much of the 20th century, speakers had to defer to committee chairmen, who ruled their own fiefs. Then, the reform-minded members elected in the wake of Watergate demanded that the House operate under more transparent, egalitarian rules. The environment within the institution has also become a greater challenge for its leaders. While the giants of the past, such as Sam Rayburn and “Tip” O’Neill, are appropriately revered, the chamber over which they presided was far less polarized and partisan than it is today. Observes Ornstein: “Pelosi has had the typical challenges with a Democratic Party with multiple wings and interests, but also has to cope with a GOP that is an insurgent outlier, scornful of compromise, that has become more of a cult than a traditional American political party.”

Newt Gingrich, one of her recent predecessors, helped produce the divisiveness that permeates the House today, but he also left Pelosi a gift. Gingrich elevated the visibility of the speakership, centralized decision-making power and stripped the committee chairs of their remaining autonomy.

By the time Pelosi became speaker, then, the office was more powerful than at any time in memory. During the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, she marshaled her 81-seat Democratic majority to deliver practically every single legislative item on his agenda: energy, regulatory reform, education, pay equity. Then, in Obama’s second year, after the Senate became disabled with the loss of its filibuster-proof majority, it fell to Pelosi to pull off the legislative miracle that rescued the president’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

All of that success, ironically enough, cost Pelosi her job. In the 2010 midterms, voters handed control of the House back to Republicans.

As part of the bargain for getting a second chance at speaker in 2019, Pelosi agreed to limit her tenure to four more years. If the party maintains its majority, she will be out by 2023, and she intends to make sure that the wait for a second female speaker is shorter than it was for the first.




I always say to people, ‘Being a woman — yes, you’re a woman. That’s self evident. Now show what else you have to offer.’
“I’ll tell you this — and sometimes I get criticized for saying it — but when I was running for whip, my first leadership position, the last thing that anybody who was supporting me could say to somebody to get his or her vote was, ‘You should vote for Nancy because she’s a woman,’” she said. “That was the biggest turnoff. Now we’re talking 19 years ago, 18 years ago. You had to just say she’s the best. She can get the job done. This is why she should be that person. So I always say to people, ‘Being a woman — yes, you’re a woman. That’s self evident. Now show what else you have to offer.’”

Pelosi is grooming a generation of female lawmakers to follow in the footsteps of her four-inch stilettos. “When women come here, I want them to be subcommittee chairs, and I’m talking about in their freshman year,” she said. “I want them all to have a security credential, whether it is armed services, foreign affairs, intelligence, veterans affairs, homeland security issues and within other committees that focus on defense, because that’s an important credential for a woman to have.”

“Women are asserting themselves in arenas that a long time ago might not have been considered a woman’s arena. But [they are] not only at the table. They have a seat at the head of the table, and it’s pretty exciting,” she added proudly. “So we’ve opened the door to have these people rise up, gain standing on their issues, more reputation. So they’re better known further down the road, should they seek higher office.”

Having had to cut her own path, Pelosi is making sure that it will be much easier for those who come after her to find their way. And perhaps, before too long, to go even further. Then the troublemaker with a gavel will finally get her wish — to no longer hear herself introduced as the most powerful woman in American history.

In this nightmarish moment, we’re feeling warm and fuzzy about the cold and calculating Andrew Cuomo.

MAUREEN DOWD, NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — It’s no wonder that watching Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings can make some people crave Chianti and meatballs.

Besides coolly explaining the facts in this terrifying and stultifying plague season, the governor of New York evokes the feeling of a big Italian family dinner table.

And that is the intended effect.

“Call it psychological,” Governor Cuomo, phoning from Albany, tells me. “Call it feelings. Call it emotions. But this is as much a social crisis as a health crisis.”



Often in the past, when people called Cuomo patriarchal, it was not meant as a compliment. It was a way to describe his maniacally controlling behavior, his dark zeal to muscle past people and obstacles to get his way. The Times’s Adam Nagourney dubbed him the “human bulldozer,” and a former adviser once put it this way: “The governor thinks he’s a hammer. So everyone looks like a nail.”

But now, the darker the zeal, the better, if it secures you a mask or ventilator. Given the White House’s deathly delays and the president’s childish rants, America is yearning for a trustworthy parental figure — and a hammer.

The warm, fuzzy feeling for the cold, calculating pol that developed among many Democrats in the past week was summed up by Bill Maher, who told me: “I see Cuomo as the Democratic nominee this year. If we could switch Biden out for him, that’s the winner.” He added, “He’s unlikable, which I really like.”

Progressives still have problems with Cuomo’s stances on Medicaid and the criminal justice system. And some people thought that he waited too long to totally button up New York, although the governor maintains that his systematic rolling closure was designed to prevent panic in the streets.

But even Jezebel blew him a kiss with a post by Rebecca Fishbein headlined, “Help, I Think I’m in Love With Andrew Cuomo???,” chronicling how, solo in her Brooklyn apartment, she has become addicted to Cuomo’s briefings and morphed from intense distaste for him to admiration for his “measured bullying.”

Then the governor actually called her to check in. On his own, after his 2005 divorce from Kerry Kennedy and his split last year from the TV chef and author Sandra Lee, he’d been thinking about the isolation of singles.

“You know, it was sad, the piece,” he tells me. “Being alone in your apartment for virtually 24 hours a day for days and days in this fearful situation and there’s no one to lay on the couch with and watch TV with, and no one to hold. That’s terrible.”

To the surprise of many who did not associate the name “Andrew Cuomo” with the word “empathy,” the governor has become a sort of national shrink, talking us through our fear, our loss and our growing stir-craziness.

“This is going be a long day, and it’s going to be a hard day, and it’s going to be an ugly day, and it’s going to be a sad day,” he told officers from the New York National Guard on Friday, charging them to fight this “invisible” and “insidious” beast and “kick coronavirus’s ass.”

Because New York is at the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, with 519 deaths and 44,635 confirmed cases, as of noon Friday, Americans have their eyes on the state. Cuomo knows this. “New York is the canary in the coal mine,” he said during one of his passionate televised pleas for the president to provide more ventilators.

It is more than passing strange that in this horror-movie moment, with 13 people dying on Tuesday at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and a refrigerated truck parked outside to collect the bodies, the nation’s two most prominent leaders are both Queens scions. Both men grew up in the shadows of their fathers, the hard-working sons of European immigrants.

The Trump family is a model of bad nepotism — noblesse oblige in reverse. Such is their reputation as scammers that congressional Democrats felt the need to put a provision in the coronavirus rescue bill to try to prevent Trump-and-Kushner Inc. from carving out a treat of their own.

Cuomo-style nepotism at least has better values. Donald Trump got his start with his father discriminating against black tenants in their housing complexes; Andrew Cuomo left his job as a political enforcer for his father, Mario Cuomo, also a three-term governor of New York, and created a national program to provide housing for the homeless.



Cuomo has brought two of his adult daughters onstage with him at briefings. He warned the 22-year-old Michaela to forsake parties celebrating her graduation — in absentia — from Brown. “Risk, reward,” he lectured her in front of millions.

And Cuomo gave his 25-year-old daughter Cara a dollar-a-year job on the virus task force, echoing the time his father gave him a dollar-a-year job as an adviser when he was about her age.

His brother, Chris, hosts a CNN show. The 62-year-old governor goes on it to bicker and banter with his 49-year-old baby brother about everything from the women swooning over Andrew’s machismo style on Twitter — “You know that what people are saying about how you look really can’t be accurate,” Chris teased — to their relative prowess at basketball.

In his briefings, Andrew Cuomo talks about how cabin fever is causing him to get annoyed with his dog, a Northern Inuit named Captain. He talks about stopping his sisters from bringing their kids to see his 88-year-old mother, Matilda, who is “pure sugar” but vulnerable to the virus. He says his mother was a little annoyed when he named a social distancing guideline for the most vulnerable “Matilda’s Law” in her honor.


After Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, suggested that older Americans might be willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of their grandchildren’s economy and President Trump buoyantly called for America to reopen as soon as Easter, Cuomo said flatly, “My mother’s not expendable.” He also tweeted: “You cannot put a value on human life. You do the right thing. That’s what Pop taught us.”

At Wednesday’s briefing, he displayed a picture of Mario Cuomo, who died in 2015, amid all the graphs on infections.

“He’s not here anymore for you,” he said, but “He’s still here for me.”

He offered a quote from his dad about what government should be: “The idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings — reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race or sex or geography or political affiliation.”
The quote was obviously meant to draw an odious comparison with the Republican in the White House who seems immune to feeling others’ pain.


The two men go back. According to the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, Fred Trump was a regular customer at Andrea Cuomo’s grocery store in Queens. Andrew and Donald knew each other as they rose in Gotham. They were never friends, but Donald Trump donated to Mario Cuomo’s campaigns and made a tape for Andrew’s bachelor party, warning him, “Whatever you do, Andrew, don’t ever, ever fool around.”

Both men have often had the twin designation of charming and ruthless. The president is pure id, and when the governor was his father’s consigliere, he was known as “Mario Cuomo’s id.” Over the years, both have been called manipulative, expedient, bullying, vindictive, arrogant wheeler-dealers. They have both been described as obsessed with their press, thin-skinned and quick to belittle or intimidate critics.


But, as Lis Smith, the Democratic strategist who rumbled in New York politics before becoming Mayor Pete’s Pygmalion, said, “Trump is selfishly ruthless for his own personal gain while Cuomo is more benevolently ruthless.”

She continued: “It also helps that Cuomo knows intimately how to bend the different levers of government to his will. It’s where you see having been at HUD, having been an attorney general of New York, having been a governor for 10 years — all that pays off. Ruthlessness is good, if it’s for a good purpose. F.D.R. was ruthless.”

I wrote admiringly about Cuomo’s L.B.J.-style blend of the velvet glove and the brass knuckles when he did what Barack Obama did not deign to do in 2009 and clawed back millions from the rapacious financiers scarfing up bonuses while they were taking federal bailout money; when he pushed to legalize same-sex marriage in New York in 2011; and when he rammed through a gun control bill after the Sandy Hook children were slaughtered, surpassing Obama’s efforts again.

“It took a terrible political toll on me, but it’s still the best gun law in the nation,” Cuomo says now.

He learned how to be a mechanic when he was a teenage gas station attendant in Queens and a tow-truck driver for the AAA with the call signal “Queens-15.” And he still likes to get under the hood with a wrench and fix things, from the state budget to the engines of his light blue ’75 Corvette and dark blue ’68 GTO.

It is jarring to watch officials like Governor Cuomo and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who have worked their way up through the system, gaining valuable wisdom, have to delicately deal with Donald Trump, the barbarian who crashed through the gates and who is ignorant about — and disdains — the bureaucracy he leads.

Trump is now using the ego arithmetic he once used to brag about the ratings he got on Larry King’s show or the number of TV cameras he saw at rallies to falsely claim that his administration has done more tests than anyone and that everyone who wants a test can get one. He boasts about having the best tests on earth the same way he used to brag about having the best rolls in the city in the restaurant at Trump Tower.

The governor got heated on Tuesday about the elusive ventilators Trump kept promising. But in this crisis, Cuomo has put his own enormous ego aside to tend to the president’s, lacing his briefings with whatever praise for Trump is justified, willing to do what it takes to get what New York needs.

The subtext is on vivid display, though, when Cuomo tweets: “Facts are empowering. Even when the facts are discouraging, not knowing the facts is worse. I promise that I will continue to give New Yorkers all the facts, not selective facts.”

The governor also makes a point of praising Fauci, whose honesty has irritated a president who is intent on obscuring science with spin. Cuomo said that through their constant calls, including in the middle of the night, they have become friends and that Fauci is “so personally kind.”



Itching to get his crackling economy back, recklessly urging Americans to gather for Easter Mass, the president sent a letter to the nation’s governors on Thursday saying that his administration is working on changing its social distancing guidelines, classifying counties as high risk, medium risk and low risk.

But this is asinine because we don’t have universal testing so we don’t know who is carrying the virus and because people travel with it. Unlike Trump the fabulist, Cuomo the realist doesn’t shoot from the hip.

Trump, who is always alert to great performances by people who look perfectly cast, is well aware of the potency of Cuomo’s briefings. He veers between acting like Cuomo is ungrateful and should “do more” and acting like they are working together very well, depending on how thankful the governor seems for the president’s efforts.

It was clear that Trump did not appreciate Cuomo pushing aggressively and publicly for the president to utilize the Defense Production Act so that New York could get 30,000 ventilators. On Thursday night Trump told Sean Hannity that he had “a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” But then he added, “I’m getting along very well with Governor Cuomo.”

On Friday, the governor hit back. “Well, look, I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. But I don’t operate here on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections.”

He implicitly mocked Trump’s tendency to rely on his feelings rather than data. “I hope some natural weather change happens overnight and kills the virus globally,” he said. “That’s what I hope. But that’s my hope. That’s my emotion. That’s my thought.”

Bizarrely, Trump tweeted Friday that the governor had simply misplaced the ventilators: “Thousand of Federal Government (delivered) Ventilators found in New York storage. N.Y. must distribute NOW!” To which Cuomo responded that the president was wrong and “grossly uninformed.”

The back-to-back daily press conferences of the governor and the president showcase some primal differences about how they see the role of government and the identity of the country.

Cuomo thinks what defines America is its humanity and its welcome mat for the globe. Trump’s view seems to be the economy über alles, even if we have to leave some stragglers on the field.

After risibly saying he never does anything rash, Trump insisted: “But the country wants to get back to work, our country was built to get back to work. We don’t have a country where they say, ‘Hey, let’s close it down for two years.’”

He seems to be following the George W. Bush playbook from Hurricane Katrina: Instead of going all in to save lives, he shrugs and says it’s the states’ responsibility: We’re at war with nature; the enemy is overwhelming us, but it’s really the local government that’s in charge, not the feds. “We’re not a shipping clerk,” Trump said, when that’s exactly what the federal government should be when nurses are on TV all day begging for face masks.

Unlike Trump, who tries to blame Obama when he’s the one who diluted the pandemic response force, and literally says, “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Cuomo regularly says “Blame me” if anything goes wrong.

When I covered Gov. Mario Cuomo, he expressed his disdain for a political Darwinism that was overshadowing the nation’s religious principles.



Once, in an interview in his office in 1991, he got down a copy of Teilhard de Chardin from the bookcase and gave it to me, wanting to make sure I absorbed the lessons of the Jesuit scientist and theologian who wrote: “Accept the burgeoning plant of humanity, and tend it, since without your sun, it will disperse itself wildly and die away.”

He worried that government had strayed too far away from Franklin Roosevelt, another governor of New York who felt a strong economy and compassion for the poor went hand in hand. He worried that America was spending “more money for bombs, less for babies,” as he said in the sonorous baritone that his son inherited. “More help for the rich, more poor than ever.”

With President Trump on a Darwinian tear, I ask Andrew Cuomo how this crisis will change the way people look at government and how it will affect the 2020 election.

He says that, in this era where personalities and celebrities rule politics, the pandemic “changes the lens on government and you’re going to now inquire about experience and capacity and your past performance, almost like the normal hiring process. We got to a place in government where credentials didn’t matter and performance didn’t matter.” This, he said, would never happen “if you were interviewing a lawyer or a doctor or a nanny.”


I ask him if all this has revived his dreams of a presidential run.

After a long pause, he answers: “No. I know presidential politics. I was there in the White House with Clinton. I was there with Gore. No, I’m at peace with who I am and what I’m doing.”

His friends say that he will be loyal to Joe Biden. But if Trump is re-elected, they speculate, Cuomo could jump in in 2024, following his 2022 fourth-term re-election in New York. Or if Biden is elected and steps down after one term, Cuomo might get in. But that would mean he’d be up against whichever woman Biden chooses as his veep.

“He’ll get criticized with the same B.S. about ‘ambition’ for going against ‘the woman candidate,’ much in the same way he did going against Carl McCall in New York, but so what?” said one Cuomo ally, referring to his unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2002. “It’s hardly a clean, wholesome game. And someday soon, don’t we really need to return to what leadership actually is, as opposed to symbolism?”

Cuomo has been through valleys — his divorce amid a cheating scandal; his father’s political disappointments; his own. He talks about character so much that he can sound like a televangelist at times.

“You can tell the strong from the weak, the selfish from the gracious,” he tells me. “I mean, these nurses who are willing to go take blood at these drive-through centers? What courageous, beautiful people. I have other people who won’t show up for work. I have legislators who say, ‘Well, we’re not coming to the capital.’”

Before the governor gets back to his horrific night shift and a dawn wake-up call, I ask him how this Armageddon, which we know will last for months and months, will affect our identity.

“We’ll have a different country — better or worse, I don’t know,” Cuomo says. “It will have a different personality. It will be more fearful. Less trusting. But maybe there will be a greater need for intimacy.”

Mario Cuomo was known as Hamlet on the Hudson. He analyzed his worthiness so much, he left the field to the privileged, pampered preppies who never analyzed their worthiness — George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle.

When Mario was doing a Socratic striptease about whether to challenge Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1991, one woman got so impatient with his dithering, she mailed him a needlepoint pillow with the message “Carpe Diem.”

Now Andrew Cuomo is trying to wrest the lifesaving materials he needs from another privileged, pampered guy in the White House who never worries about his worthiness.

But this Cuomo doesn’t need a pillow. Carpe diem is in his bones.

NYS Exceeds 1,000 Coronavirus Deaths as NYC Says it has Only a Weeks Worth of Med Supplies. UPDATES.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday offered a grim assessment of the coronavirus pandemic engulfing the state, as he reported that 237 people had died since the day before,  the largest one-day increase since the coronavirus outbreak began.The number of coronavirus deaths in New York City increased by 161 from Saturday night to Sunday morning, pushing the statewide total to over 1,000 fatalities, according to the latest figures from the city and state, and county-level data compiled by The New York Times.
New York City has a one-week supply of medical supplies to care for any New Yorker who is sick, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday.


“We have enough supplies to get to a week from today, with the exception of ventilators, we’re going to need at least several hundred more ventilators very quickly,” Mr. de Blasio said in an appearance Sunday morning on CNN. “We are going to need a reinforcement.’’

And the projections, he added, suggests that the crisis facing New York could grow even worse.

“I don’t think there’s any way to look at those numbers,” Mr. Cuomo said, “without seeing thousands of people pass away.”

The total number of deaths in the state stood at 965 on Sunday morning, before New York City reported its most recent count. The number of NYC cases jumped to nearly 33,500, from about 30,000 the day before.

The number of NYS confirmed cases jumped by 7,200 in one day, putting the total of confirmed cases at 59,513 cases as of Sunday. More than half of the cases, or 33,768, are in New York City, according to the latest figures from the city and state.

About 8,500 people are currently hospitalized, an increase of 16 percent from Saturday  to Sunday. Of those, 2,037 are in intensive care units, which are equipped with ventilators.

“People asked ‘when is this over?,’” Mr. Cuomo said. “When they come up with an inexpensive home test or point of care test that can be brought to volume.”

The governor extended his order for all nonessential workers to stay home until April 15.

Mr. Cuomo said he would ask Mayor Bill de Blasio to devise a plan for the city’s 11 public hospitals to coordinate how patients and resources are distributed. He also wants public and private hospitals to work together throughout the state. “There is an artificial wall between those two systems right now. That wall has to come down,” Mr. Cuomo said.

More than 76,000 health care workers, many of them retirees, have volunteered to work in hospitals should the facilities become strained.

The city will add more emergency personnel, more ambulances and more shifts in response to the record number of calls to 911, Mr. de Blastio said.
“This is unprecedented,’’ he said. “We’ve never seen our E.M.S. system get this many calls, ever.”
Mr. de Blasio said the city has also sent 169 additional health care workers to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which is reeling from the number of patients it is treating.

“This is going to an extraordinarily tough next few weeks, but we will keep sending more and more reinforcements,” Mr. de Blasio said.

The Mayor emphasized that playgrounds in New York City would stay open, but that the police would step up its enforcement of social distancing rules.

“If someone is told by an officer, disperse, keep moving, you’re not distanced, and they don’t follow the direct instruction of the officer,’’ he said, “I’m comfortable at this point that they will be fined.”

Mr. Cuomo said he supported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s travel advisory for New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, urging residents to refrain from nonessential domestic travel for 14 days. “It’s nothing we haven’t been doing,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Some good news: The Westchester County man who was New York’s second confirmed case, bringing attention to a cluster of cases in New Rochelle, has been discharged from the hospital, Mr. Cuomo said.

“Our front line health care workers,” Mr. de Blasio said, “are giving their all, they’re in harm’s way. And, you know, we need to get them relief. We need to get them support and protection, but also relief. They can’t keep up at this pace.’’

The White House official said on Sunday that an aircraft carrying gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai arrived on Sunday morning at Kennedy International Airport in New York, the first in a series of roughly 20 flights that officials say will funnel much-needed goods to the United States by early April.

The plane carried 130,000 N-95 masks, nearly 1.8 million surgical masks and gowns, more than 10 million gloves and more than 70,000 thermometers.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will provide the majority of the supplies to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with the rest going to nursing homes in the region and other high-risk areas across the country, a White House spokesman said.

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the impact the shipment would have on the availability of medical supplies in the city and state.

Trump says keeping US Covid-19 deaths to 100,000 would be a ‘very good job’

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, the US president claimed that, if his administration keeps the death toll to 100,000, it will have done “a very good job” – a startling shift from his optimistic predictions of a few days ago when he said he hoped to restart the economy by Easter.
Trump also undermined his plea for unity by uttering falsehoods, verbally abusing reporters and making incendiary allegations that implied health care workers were stealing masks, without providing evidence.
The extended deadline marked a humiliating retreat for the president who, having squandered six precious weeks at the start of the pandemic, more recently complained that the cure is worse than the problem and floated Easter Sunday as a “beautiful timeline” for reopening big swathes of the country.

A field hospital is growing in Central Park.

It was a jarring scene — a giant field hospital rising in the middle of one of New York City’s most iconic spots.
But the coronavirus virus has upended life in New York City in many ways. Now Central Park has been chosen as a location for one of several temporary hospitals being erected to help hospitals inundated with coronavirus patients.The field hospital in the park, which is being set up by the Mt. Sinai hospital system, will have 68 beds and is expected to be operational by Tuesday,


For the first time New York State lawmakers choose to vote remotely.
Facing a looming deadline to pass a budget by April 1, lawmakers began to convene in the Albany on Sunday, with the Assembly also expected to pass measures to limit the number of people in the chamber.

As coronavirus cases explode in Iran, U.S. sanctions hinder its access to drugs and medical equipment.

Sweeping U.S. sanctions are hampering Iranian efforts to import medicine and other medical supplies to confront one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the world, health workers and sanctions experts say.

The broad U.S. restrictions on Iran’s banking system and the embargo on its oil exports have limited Tehran’s ability to finance and purchase essential items from abroad, including drugs as well as the raw materials and equipment needed to manufacture medicines domestically.

The Trump administration has also reduced the number of licenses it grants to companies for certain medical exports to Iran, according to quarterly reports from a U.S. Treasury Department enforcement agency. The list of items requiring special authorization includes oxygen generators, full-face respirator masks and thermal imaging equipment, all of which are needed to treat patients and keep medical workers safe, doctors say.

The tough measures are part of a U.S. “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran, adopted by the Trump administration after it unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal Iran had signed with world powers.

Iranian medical workers and global public health experts say it is not possible to determine exactly how much U.S. sanctions have affected Iran’s capacity to fight a virus that by official counts has infected more than 35,000 Iranians and killed at least 2,500 — some estimates put the toll far higher — while spawning outbreaks in other countries. But they say it is clear that the Iranian health-care system is being deprived of equipment necessary to save lives and prevent wider infection.

“There are a lot of shortages now. . . . [Hospitals] do not have enough diagnostic kits or good quality scanners, and there is also a shortage of masks,” said Nouradin Pirmoazen, a thoracic surgeon and former lawmaker in Iran.

Trump touts TV ratings of his news conferences amid pandemic.

President Trump took to Twitter Sunday afternoon to tout the ratings of his news conferences, claiming without evidence that mainstream media are going “CRAZY” because of his popularity on television.

“Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY,” Trump tweeted. “‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.’ said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”

The president seemed to be referring to a New York Times article that noted the now-daily news briefings provided by Trump and the coronavirus task force have drawn an average audience of 8.5 million people on cable news, with viewership last Monday reaching nearly 12.2 million. Those numbers are roughly on par with audiences for “The Bachelor” season finale and “Monday Night Football,” respectively, according to the Times.

Some experts and media figures have warned against airing the briefings because of Trump’s frequent statements playing down the severity of the pandemic or giving viewers incorrect information.

Singer John Prine Hospitalized, in Critical Condition Following Coronavirus Symptoms

Americana legend John Prine has been hospitalized since Thursday after experiencing a sudden onset of COVID-19 symptoms.

A cancer survivor, the singer-songwriter’s team revealed the news Sunday afternoon with a post on social media, explaining that his “situation is critical.”

"After a sudden onset of COVID-19 symptoms, John was hospitalized on Thursday (3/26)," the post says. "He was intubated Saturday evening, and continues to receive care, but his situation is critical.
"This is hard news for us to share," the message continues. "But so many of you have loved and supported John over the years, we wanted to let you know and give you the chance to send on more of that love and support now. And know that we love you, and John loves you."

The U.S.first 1,000 coronavirus deaths took a month. The next 1,000 took two days.UPDATES.

For the first time, more than 20,000 new infections were announced in a day, pushing the nation’s total past 120,000.
It took about a month from the first confirmed death for the United States to record 1,000, but the toll has risen rapidly, and officials say the worst is yet to come. The earliest death was announced in Washington state on Feb. 29.

The sharp rise in confirmed cases and fatalities comes as the pandemic’s epicenter has shifted to the United States and as health professionals and officials countrywide sound alarms that hospitals are not prepared for an influx of coronavirus patients.

Globally, confirmed cases now exceed 650,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.

Cuomo anticipates 14 to 21 days until N.Y. outbreak peaks, as New York City alone records 222 deaths in 24 hours
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) anticipates the coronavirus outbreak in New York state will reach its apex in “14 to 21 days,” based on health and science data projections, he said during a news conference Saturday. New York is the hardest-hit state in the United States so far, with more than 52,000 confirmed cases and at least 728 deaths.


Later Saturday, New York City officials reported 222 new deaths in the past 24 hours, 155 of them since morning.

In sharing the forecast of infections yet to come, Cuomo redoubled his call for more personal protective gear, such as masks, gowns and, crucially, ventilators. President Trump has publicly questioned Cuomo’s request for the lifesaving equipment and doubted the need for 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators.

Cuomo addressed the skepticism for his large request, saying he’s only acting based on what the data from scientists say. The governor further shared his frustration that the cost of ventilators has risen in some cases by as much as $20,000 from their normal costs because of their scarcity. He has called for the federal government to nationalize the procurement of emergency equipment.

Desperate for medical equipment, states encounter a beleaguered national stockpile

States seeking masks, drugs, ventilators and other items from the stockpile are encountering a system beset by years of underfunding, changing lines of authority, confusion over the allocation of supplies and a lack of transparency from the administration, said state and federal officials and public health experts.
The stockpile holds masks, drugs, ventilators and other items in secret sites around the country. It has become a source of growing frustration for many state and hospital officials who are having trouble buying — or even locating — crucial equipment on their own to cope with the illness battering the nation.
Despite its name, it was never intended for an emergency that spans the entire nation.
The federal cache has been overwhelmed by urgent requests for masks, respirators, goggles, gloves and gowns in the two months since the first U.S. case of covid-19 was confirmed. Many state officials say they do not understand the standards that determine how much they will receive.

Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines. Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency inherited control of the stockpile barely a week ago from HHS. Lizzie Litzow, a FEMA spokeswoman, acknowledged the agency maintains a spreadsheet tracking each state’s request and shipments. Litzow declined repeated requests to release the details, saying the numbers are in flux.

Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.

President Trump repeatedly has warned states not to complain about how much they are receiving, including Friday during a White House briefing, where he advised Vice President Pence not to call governors who are critical of the administration’s response. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said.

At briefings, Trump and Pence routinely say material is being purchased for the stockpile, supplies are being shipped out and manufacturers under federal contract are ramping up supplies. But Trump and Pence also urge states to buy supplies on their own. During the March 19 briefing, Trump said governors “are supposed to be doing a lot of this work. . . . You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

The stockpile program was created at the end of the 1990s in response to terrorist events. The original goal was to be prepared for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. The reserve, for example, was stocked with nerve agent antidotes, stored and maintained at more than 1,300 locations around the country, where they could be accessed quickly.
In the decades since, its mission has widened to include responses to natural disasters and infectious disease threats.

Even with its expanded mission and supplies, the stockpile’s “original design and its current funding do not support responding to a nationwide pandemic disease of this severity,” said Greg Burel, who was the stockpile’s director for a dozen years before he retired in January.

Knicks owner James Dolan tests positive for coronavirus
The Knicks announced Dolan’s positive test in a statement Saturday, noting that the 64-year-old New York native remains on the job, and that he is in self-isolation while displaying “little to no symptoms.”

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are back home
Beloved actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, are back in their Los Angeles home, after recovering from the novel coronavirus infection in Australia. “We’re home now and, like the rest of America, we carry on with sheltering in place and social distancing,” the 63-year-old actor tweeted, thanking medical staff in Australia for his and Wilson’s return.

Shinzo Abe warns of ‘explosive spread’ of coronavirus in Japan
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday warned that an “explosive spread” of coronavirus infections was looming over the country and urged citizens to prepare for a “long-term battle."

In an evening news conference, Abe said cases of unknown origin were spiking, especially in the urban hubs of Tokyo and Osaka, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

“An uncontrollable chain of infection could lead to explosive spread somewhere,” he said.

The world’s biggest lockdown has forced migrants in India to walk hundreds of miles home.
Workers set out on foot in the wee hours of the morning for villages hundreds of miles away, walking along the roads they helped build and past apartment towers they helped raise.

Chandra Mohan, a 24-year-old plumber in a suburb of India’s capital, left at 3 a.m. on Friday. By midmorning, he had walked 28 miles, one bag on his back and another slung across his chest. He still had more than 600 miles to go to reach his home in the state of Bihar.

Mohan is one of thousands of people leaving India’s largest cities one footstep at a time, fleeing a pandemic in a historic exodus. There are no planes, no trains, no interstate buses and no taxis. So Mohan walked east with 17 other young men, all laborers like him. They were unsure of their route or where they would sleep or how they would eat, but one thing was certain: Without work, they cannot survive in the city.

“We’re doomed,” Mohan said bitterly. “If we don’t die of the disease, we’ll die of hunger.”

India has begun a 21-day nationwide lockdown — the biggest in the world — in a desperate bid to stop the coronavirus from spreading out of control in this densely populated nation of 1.3 billion people. There are more than 700 confirmed cases in India, a number that is rising rapidly. Nonessential businesses are shut, state borders are closed to regular traffic, and people have been asked to stay in their homes except to buy food or medicine.

To shepherd the Japanese economy through the pandemic, Abe pledged to put together an emergency spending package bigger than the stimulus plan Japan approved after the 2008 financial crisis, Japan Today reported. He also called for heightened vigilance from the public as Japan works to stave off a surge of infections that could devastate the country’s large elderly population.

For now, Abe said he will hold off on declaring a state of emergency.

Abe’s remarks came after Japan tallied a record increase of 123 coronavirus infections in a single day, 60 of which emerged in Tokyo. Testing has lagged in the country, which has reported about 1,500 confirmed cases and at least 49 deaths.

U.S. becomes first country to record 100,000 confirmed cases. Death toll passes 1500 UPDATES

The United States, which recorded its first confirmed case two months ago, now has more than 100,000 cases of the coronavirus, as reported by states’ health departments. The nation passed 10,000 cases on March 19 and on Thursday became the country with the most confirmed cases.

The United States surpassed China in confirmed coronavirus cases Thursday as the pandemic continued to slow in the country where it began, though Wuhan’s dwindling case counts have been called into question by independent reporting and treated with suspicion from experts.

As Chinese leaders tout their strict measures to contain the virus as effective, the coronavirus’s toll has only intensified elsewhere in the world. Earlier this week, the United States surpassed the case totals in China and Italy. The number of known cases has risen rapidly in recent days, as testing ramped up after weeks of widespread shortages and delays.Earlier this month, health officials declared Europe the crisis’s new epicenter, and coronavirus-related deaths in the United States topped 1,500 on Thursday.

House passes and Trump signs $2 trillion relief package
The House passed a massive $2.2 trillion stimulus bill on a voice vote after going to extraordinary lengths to overcome a procedural move by a single Republican that threatened to delay sending the bill to Trump for his signature.

Responding to the insistence by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that the vote take place with a quorum present — more than half of the 430 sitting members — lawmakers streamed into the chamber, with some taking places in the galleries usually reserved for the public, to conform to social distancing guidelines for the coronavirus.

The fear in the room could be seen in the minutes ahead of the vote as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others spoke toward the close of the debate. Several members wore surgical gloves. Some held their hand over their face as they passed other lawmakers or staffers.

Trump invokes Defense Production Act to require GM to manufacture ventilators
President Trump on Friday compelled General Motors to manufacture ventilators to help handle the surge of coronavirus patients, using his power under the Defense Production Act.

Trump announced that he had signed a presidential memorandum requiring the company to “accept, perform and prioritize” federal government contracts for production of the much-needed medical equipment shortly before signing a $2 trillion stimulus package to prop up the economy during this public health crisis.

Cuomo says New York has secured about half of the ventilators it needs

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said Friday night that his state has secured about half of the 30,000 ventilators it needs.

“We need ventilators and we need them now. … My possible apex is 14 days away,” Cuomo told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. “If I don’t have the ventilators in 14 days, Chris, people die.”

Cuomo said his state has received 4,000 ventilators from the federal government. New York had 4,000 in its own hospital system and bought 7,000 more ventilators, in addition to a scattered number of orders which “may or may not” come in, he said.

Cuomo estimated the price of a single ventilator at $2,500.

“We’re scrambling to buy them all across the world. … In a cruel irony, states are bidding against other states, Chris, for the same materials and they are actually bidding up the price,” Cuomo said.


Cuomo says New York preparing for virus apex in 14 days

New York officials are working to create new temporary hospitals and increase bed capacity in anticipation of an apex three weeks from now, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said Friday at a news conference.

The good news, Cuomo said, is that the rate of increase is slowing. But the number of cases are still climbing.

Some 44,000 New Yorkers had tested positive as of Friday, and 519 had died — an increase of 134 since Thursday.

Projections show that in 14 days, hospitals in the state could experience a crush of patients who need to be admitted or put on ventilators. Hospitals have been asked to expand their available beds by 50 to 100 percent as soon as possible, Cuomo said.

Officials anticipate needing about 90,000 more hospital beds and 20,000 ventilators.

People with a respiratory illness on a vent usually need it for two to four days, Cuomo said. But coronavirus patients are staying on them for up to 20 days. The longer someone spends on a ventilator, the less likely they can come off and survive.

More experts say Americans should probably start wearing masks.
As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, experts have started to question official guidance about whether ordinary, healthy people should protect themselves with a regular surgical mask, or even a scarf.

The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to state that masks don’t necessarily protect healthy individuals from getting infected as they go about their daily lives.

The official guidance continues to recommend that masks be reserved for people who are already sick, as well as for the health workers and caregivers who must interact with infected individuals on a regular basis. Everyone else, they say, should stick to frequent hand-washing and maintaining a distance of at least six feet from other people to protect themselves.

But the recent surge in infections in the United States, which has put the country at the center of the epidemic, means that more Americans are now at risk of getting sick. And healthy individuals, especially those with essential jobs who cannot avoid public transportation or close interaction with others, may need to start wearing masks more regularly.

While wearing a mask may not necessarily prevent healthy people from getting sick, and certainly doesn’t replace important measures such as hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing, said Dr. Robert Atmar, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.

But studies of influenza pandemics have shown that when high-grade N95 masks are not available, surgical masks do protect people a bit more than not wearing masks at all. And when masks are combined with hand hygiene, they help reduce the transmission of infections.

‘This is a white-collar quarantine’: Who can and can’t stay home.
In some respects, a pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

In New York, well-off city dwellers have abandoned cramped apartments for spacious second homes. In Texas, the rich are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build safe rooms and bunkers.

A kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

Boris Johnson Contracts Coronavirus, Rattling Top Ranks of U.K. Government

The British leader, who long resisted social distancing, is now isolating himself. But he said he would continue to lead the country’s response to the pandemic.

Fears of a wider contagion grew, as two other senior officials disclosed that they, too, were infected.

And with the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, saying this week that he had fallen ill with the virus, Britain faced the alarming prospect of having to confront its greatest crisis since World War II with several of its leading figures in quarantine.

Mr. Johnson, 55, insisted he would not relinquish his duties. In a remarkable two-minute video posted on Twitter, he used his own case as a sort of teachable moment for the country, appealing to people to work from home and comply with the more drastic social distancing measures he put in place Monday.

“I’ve developed mild symptoms of the coronavirus,” said Mr. Johnson, looking wan and speaking with a rasp in his voice. “Be in no doubt that I can continue, thanks to the wizardry of modern technology, to communicate with all my top team to lead the national fightback against coronavirus.”

If Mr. Johnson becomes incapacitated, his duties would be taken over by the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who has tested negative for the virus. It is a head-spinning turn of events for a government that, just two weeks ago, was brimming with confidence after a landslide election victory in December.