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Global cases pass 1.2 million

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases globally has passed 1.2m, according to Johns Hopkins University figures. Just over one in four of these is in the US, which has 311,544 cases. There have been 64,753 coronavirus-related deaths worldwide. The five countries with the highest numbers of confirmed cases are as follows: US (311,544), Spain (126,168), Italy (124,632), Germany (96,092), France (90,848). China, which is now at number six, reported 30 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, up from 19 a day earlier as the number of cases involving travellers from abroad as well as local transmissions increased. It also reported 47 new asymptomatic cases.

Trump repeatedly talks up unproven malaria drug
Donald Trump has directly urged Americans worried about Covid-19 to take a little-studied anti-malaria drug for the disease, despite potentially serious side effects and a lack of data on safety and efficacy in treatment of the pandemic virus. The president also warned the US that the worst was yet to come, and that Americans would see “a lot of death”. At a lengthy, rambling and combative briefing Trump sought to discredit media reports of his administration’s failures and called some outlets in the White House press corps “fake news”. Scientists around the world are looking for potential treatments but so far have not found a success. The drug repeatedly pushed by Trump, hydroxychloroquine, has only shown anecdotal promise.

Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s unpaid private attorney, has been promoting the use of an anti-malarial drug combination in phone calls with the president.

De Blasio said city’s supply of ventilators will last an additional 48 to 72 hours, after warning they could run out.

We thought as early as tonight there was a possibility of running out of crucial equipment like ventilators,” de Blasio said in an address from City Hall. “Now I can tell you, and this is certainly good news, we have bought a few more days here.”

According to the mayor, the number of patients being intubated daily has held steady at 200 to 300. City officials estimate that about 4,000 covid-19 patients are on ventilators. Given those numbers, the city’s stash will last until Tuesday or Wednesday, authorities said.

“I called for everyone else to come to our aid, and the good news is our call was heard and acted on in so many ways,” said de Blasio,

Still, officials say, only 135 ventilators remain in reserve for rapid deployment in a city of 8.6 million people. And after the 48- to 72-hour window is up, de Blasio said, the city will need 1,000 to 1,500 more ventilators from Wednesday to April 12.

Vivien Grullon sells masks, gloves and cleaning supplies in Jackson Heights, Queens.Credit...Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

New York sees slight drop in deaths — ‘blip’ or sign of nearing plateau, Cuomo cautions.

The number of new coronavirus-related deaths in New York has dipped slightly over the past several days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday. But he added that it’s still too soon to know whether the small decline is a “blip” or a sign that the state is nearing the apex of the outbreak and hitting a slight plateau.

“We won’t know for the next few days, does it go up, does it go down,” Cuomo (D) said at a news conference.

New York experienced 36 fewer deaths in the past 24 hours than in the 24-hour period before. As of Sunday, state officials had tallied more than 4,100 deaths.

The difficulty in determining exactly where New York stands on the curve is due to differing opinions on the models that project the course of the outbreak, Cuomo said. Some models identify a single point as the apex, while others identify the apex as a plateau at which the highest numbers remain consistent before they finally drop.

In other countries hit hard by the coronavirus, similar patterns emerged in which small declines were short-lived.

Boris Johnson admitted to hospital with coronavirus. Move follows rumours that prime minister’s condition had been worsening.

Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital due to coronavirus after suffering 10 days of symptoms including a high fever, bringing doubts about his capability to lead the response to the pandemic despite No 10 insisting it was purely precautionary.

Johnson was taken to an unnamed London hospital on Sunday after days of persistent symptoms, during which time he has been self-isolating. Last week No 10 had denied the prime minister was more seriously ill than claimed.

A Downing Street spokesperson said: “On the advice of his doctor, the prime minister has tonight been admitted to hospital for tests. This is a precautionary step, as the prime minister continues to have persistent symptoms of coronavirus 10 days after testing positive for the virus.” The spokesperson said Johnson would stay in hospital “as long as needed”.

Officials were keen to stress that this was not an emergency admission, and that Johnson will remain in charge of government, and will be in regular touch with colleagues and civil servants.

If his condition worsens Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and first secretary of state, is the designated minister to take charge

Why do some young people die of coronavirus?

Covid-19 hits the old hardest, but young people are dying too. Scientists say it may be down to genes or ‘viral load’
It remains one of the biggest puzzles of the Covid-19 pandemic. The disease generally causes serious problems only in older people or those with underlying health problems. But occasionally it strikes down young, apparently fit individuals, including medical staff exposed to patients with the virus.

In some cases, previously undiagnosed conditions are later revealed but in others no such explanations are available, leaving scientists struggling to find reasons for the behaviour of the coronavirus.

Several theories have been proposed. Some researchers believe the amount of virus that infects an individual may have crucial outcomes. Get a huge dose and your outcome may be worse. Others argue that genetic susceptibility may be involved: in other words, that there are individuals whose genetic makeup leaves them more vulnerable to the virus as it spreads through their bodies. An example of such susceptibility is provided by the herpes simplex virus, which causes cold sores.

The U.S. is undercounting the number of people who have died in the pandemic, experts say.

Hospital officials, public health experts and medical examiners say that official tallies of Americans said to have died in the pandemic do not capture the overall number of virus-related deaths, leaving the public with a limited understanding of the outbreak’s true toll. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection.

Limited resources and a patchwork of decision making from one state or county to the next have contributed to the undercount. With no uniform system for reporting coronavirus-related deaths in the United States, and a continuing shortage of tests, some states and counties have improvised, obfuscated and, at times, backtracked in counting the dead.

Adding to the complications, different jurisdictions are using distinct standards for attributing a death to the coronavirus and, in some cases, relying on techniques that would lower the overall count of fatalities. Doctors now believe that some deaths in February and early March were likely misidentified as influenza or only described as pneumonia.

Around the world, keeping an accurate death toll has been a challenge for governments. Availability of testing and other resources have affected the official counts in some places, and significant questions have emerged about official government tallies in places such as China and Iran.

In northern Italy, the town of Nembro recorded 31 deaths from the virus from January to March. But Mayor Claudio Cancelli recently said the total number of deceased in that time period — 158 — was four times higher than the average for that time of year.

A team that estimated global deaths from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. The World Health Organization recorded 18,631 people with laboratory-confirmed diagnoses dying of that disease. But the pandemic probably caused 15 times as many deaths, the CDC team concluded in 2012.

A 2013 study by government and academic researchers suggested that lab-confirmed H1N1 deaths in the United States represented only 1 in 7 fatalities attributable to the disease.

In the United States, federal and state public health officials for weeks refused to test people unless they met strict eligibility criteria. Testing is more broadly available today, but some experts say the tests may not detect everyone with the virus. Precisely how common false negatives are is unclear.

A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low
The pandemic has hit Germany hard, with more than 92,000 people infected. But the percentage of fatal cases has been remarkably low compared to those in many neighboring countries.

The virus and the resulting disease, Covid-19, have hit Germany with force: According to Johns Hopkins University, the country had more than 92,000 laboratory-confirmed infections as of midday Saturday, more than any other country except the United States, Italy and Spain.

But with 1,295 deaths, Germany’s fatality rate stood at 1.4 percent, compared with 12 percent in Italy, around 10 percent in Spain, France and Britain, 4 percent in China and 2.5 percent in the United States. Even South Korea, a model of flattening the curve, has a higher fatality rate, 1.7 percent.

There are several answers experts say, a mix of statistical distortions and very real differences in how the country has taken on the epidemic.

The average age of those infected is lower in Germany than in many other countries. Many of the early patients caught the virus in Austrian and Italian ski resorts and were relatively young and healthy, Professor Kräusslich said.

“It started as an epidemic of skiers,” he said.

As infections have spread, more older people have been hit and the death rate, only 0.2 percent two weeks ago, has risen, too. But the average age of contracting the disease remains relatively low, at 49. In France, it is 62.5 and in Italy 62, according to their latest national reports.

Another explanation for the low fatality rate is that Germany has been testing far more people than most nations. That means it catches more people with few or no symptoms, increasing the number of known cases, but not the number of fatalities.

But there are also significant medical factors that have kept the number of deaths in Germany relatively low, epidemiologists and virologists say, chief among them early and widespread testing and treatment, plenty of intensive care beds and a trusted government whose social distancing guidelines are widely observed.

By now, Germany is conducting around 350,000 coronavirus tests a week, far more than any other European country. “When I have an early diagnosis and can treat patients early — for example put them on a ventilator before they deteriorate — the chance of survival is much higher,” Professor Kräusslich said. Medical staff, at particular risk of contracting and spreading the virus, are regularly tested.

One key to ensuring broad-based testing is that patients pay nothing for it, said Professor Streeck. This, he said, was one notable difference with the United States in the first several weeks of the outbreak. The coronavirus relief bill passed by Congress last month does provide for free testing.“A young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people,” he said.

On a Friday in late February, Professor Streeck received news that for the first time, a patient at his hospital in Bonn had tested positive for the coronavirus: A 22-year-old man who had no symptoms but whose employer — a school — had asked him to take a test after learning that he had taken part in a carnival event where someone else had tested positive.

In most countries, including the United States, testing is largely limited to the sickest patients, so the man probably would have been refused a test.

Not in Germany. As soon as the test results were in, the school was shut, and all children and staff were ordered to stay at home with their families for two weeks. Some 235 people were tested.

Before the coronavirus pandemic swept across Germany, University Hospital in Giessen had 173 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators. In recent weeks, the hospital scrambled to create an additional 40 beds and increased the staff that was on standby to work in intensive care by as much as 50 percent.

“We have so much capacity now we are accepting patients from Italy, Spain and France,” said Prof. Susanne Herold, the head of infectiology and a lung specialist.

The time it takes for the number of infections to double has slowed to about eight days. If it slows a little more, to between 12 and 14 days, Professor Herold said, the models suggest that triage could be avoided. “The curve is beginning to flatten,” she said.

Beyond mass testing and the preparedness of the health care system, many also see Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership as one reason the fatality rate has been kept low.

Ms. Merkel has communicated clearly, calmly and regularly throughout the crisis, as she imposed ever-stricter social distancing measures on the country. The restrictions, which have been crucial to slowing the spread of the pandemic, met with little political opposition and are broadly followed.

The chancellor’s approval ratings have soared.

As many as half of those with the coronavirus could be asymptomatic, Fauci says.

The nation’s leading infectious disease specialist said Sunday night that as many as half of people infected with the virus may not have any symptoms, a much larger estimate than the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave last week.

“It’s somewhere between 25 and 50 percent,” said the specialist, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, during a briefing by President Trump and members of his coronavirus task force on Sunday. He cautioned, however, that it was only an estimate, adding that even the scientists helping lead the nation’s fight against the virus, “the friends that we are, we differ about that.”

In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., said as many as 25 percent of people with the virus exhibit no symptoms. The large number of symptom-free cases — and scientists’ changing understanding of just how common such cases are — helps explain why the C.D.C. last week changed its guidance,  recommending that all Americans wear a cloth face covering in public settings like grocery stores and pharmacies where they cannot ensure keeping a safe distance from others.

It also underscores the extraordinary challenge of controlling the virus’s spread. Dr. Fauci emphasized that for now his estimate was only a guess and that more testing was needed to figure out exactly how many Americans are carrying the virus without realizing it.

“Then we can answer the question in a scientifically sound way,” he said. “Right now, we’re just guessing.”

A tiger at the Bronx Zoo tests positive for the coronavirus, and other big cats there appear ill.

A tiger at the Bronx zoo has been confirmed to be infected with Covid-19, in what is believed to be a case of what one official called “human-to-cat transmission.”

The 4-year-old female named Nadia was among four tigers who exhibited a dry cough after being exposed to a zookeeper who was infected but asymptomatic. They have shown a loss of appetite and been placed under veterinary care at the zoo. Nadia is expected to recover.

“This is the first instance of a tiger being infected with Covid-19,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which noted that although only one tiger was tested, the virus appeared to have infected other animals as well.

“Several lions and tigers at the zoo showed symptoms of respiratory illness,” according to a statement by the Agriculture Department. “It is not known how this disease will develop in big cats since different species can react differently to novel infections, but we will continue to monitor them closely and anticipate full recoveries,” the society said.

Public health officials believe that the large cats caught the virus from a zoo employee. The tiger appeared visibly sick by March 27.

In a statement, the Agriculture Department suggested that those infected with the virus should, “out of an abundance of caution,” avoid contact with their pets and other animals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that it is “aware of a very small number of pets outside the United States reported to be infected,” but that it does not have evidence that pets can spread the coronavirus.

Democratic and Republican governors lament interstate medical supply competition

Two governors said Sunday that they would like to see an alternative to the state-by-state competition for ventilators and personal protective equipment, noting that the fight against the coronavirus is far from over.

Trump and other federal officials have said that governors should take the lead on ensuring that needed medical supplies are available in their states and that the federal government should be a “backstop” when shortfalls become apparent.

But in a Sunday interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) and Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said the current approach to the procurement of medical supplies could be improved.

“It literally is a global jungle that we’re competing in now,” Hutchinson said. “I’d like to see a better way, but that’s the reality in which we are.”

Inslee harshly criticized Trump’s insistence on a state-led response and said it is “ludicrous that we do not have a national effort” to manage the procurement of medical equipment. Commenting on Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams’s statements comparing the virus to the Pearl Harbor attack, Inslee said: “Can you imagine if Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, ‘I’ll be right behind you, Connecticut. Good luck building those battleships.'”

Inslee said the White House needs to employ the Defense Production Act to mobilize industry to make protective gear and test kits. Trump has tapped only limited authorities under that law, holding off on more aggressive actions enlisting private companies to meet the national need.

Bill Gates: Life won’t return to ‘truly normal’ until vaccine.

If people continue social distancing, coronavirus cases may level off by the end of April, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates said on “Fox News Sunday.” But he added that life still won’t return to “truly normal” until a vaccine is distributed.

It’s also critical that the country test “the right people,” which has not been happening, Gates told host Chris Wallace. In a Washington Post op-ed published last week, Gates said health-care workers and first responders, high-risk people with severe symptoms and those who are likely to have been exposed to infected people should be prioritized.

Gates also suggested in the op-ed that if the United States implements a consistent nationwide approach to shutdowns, increases testing and uses a data-based strategy to develop treatments and a vaccine, a second wave of the epidemic could be avoided.

In a prescient speech in 2015, Gates had warned that an infectious virus could spread globally and cause mass deaths and catastrophe.

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.


WASHINGTON POST

By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

“While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and this Administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. "Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.”

The president’s behavior and combative statements were merely a visible layer on top of deeper levels of dysfunction.

The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measures to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

[Inside America’s mask crunch: A slow government reaction and an industry wary of liability]
It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.


Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.



Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse concluded in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”

Trump’s message was changing as the report swept through the GOP’s senior ranks. In recent days, Trump has bristled at reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”

More than 7,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States so far, with about 240,000 cases reported. But Trump has acknowledged that new models suggest that the eventual national death toll could be between 100,000 and 240,000.

Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.

“This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”

This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.



Scanning the horizon

Public health authorities are part of a special breed of public servant — along with counterterrorism officials, military planners, aviation authorities and others — whose careers are consumed with contemplating worst-case scenarios.

The arsenal they wield against viral invaders is powerful, capable of smothering a new pathogen while scrambling for a cure, but easily overwhelmed if not mobilized in time. As a result, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and other agencies spend their days scanning the horizon for emerging dangers.

The CDC learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31 and began developing reports for HHS on Jan. 1. But the most unambiguous warning that U.S. officials received about the coronavirus came Jan. 3, when Robert Redfield, the CDC director, received a call from a counterpart in China. The official told Redfield that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, a congested commercial city of 11 million people in the communist country’s interior.

Redfield quickly relayed the disturbing news to Alex Azar, the secretary of HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and other public health entities. Azar, in turn, ensured that the White House was notified, instructing his chief of staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council.

From that moment, the administration and the virus were locked in a race against a ticking clock, a competition for the upper hand between pathogen and prevention that would dictate the scale of the outbreak when it reached American shores, and determine how many would get sick or die.



[In D.C. — a city defined by power — coronavirus has seized control]

The initial response was promising, but officials also immediately encountered obstacles.

On Jan. 6, Redfield sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine.

China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak. Beijing had a long track record of downplaying illnesses that emerged within its borders, an impulse that U.S. officials attribute to a desire by the country’s leaders to avoid embarrassment and accountability with China’s 1.3 billion people and other countries that find themselves in the pathogen’s path.

China stuck to this costly script in the case of the coronavirus, reporting Jan. 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” U.S. officials treated the claim with skepticism that intensified when the first case surfaced outside China with a reported infection in Thailand.

A week earlier, senior officials at HHS had begun convening an intra-agency task force including Redfield, Azar and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The following week, there were also scattered meetings at the White House with officials from the National Security Council and State Department, focused mainly on when and whether to bring back government employees in China.

U.S. officials began taking preliminary steps to counter a potential outbreak. By mid-January, Robert Kadlec, an Air Force officer and physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, had instructed subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act, a measure that enables the government to compel private companies to produce equipment or devices critical to the country’s security. Aides were bitterly divided over whether to implement the act, and nothing happened for many weeks.


On Jan. 14, Kadlec scribbled a single word in a notebook he carries: “Coronavirus!!!”

Despite the flurry of activity at lower levels of his administration, Trump was not substantially briefed by health officials about the coronavirus until Jan.18, when, while spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he took a call from Azar.

Even before the heath secretary could get a word in about the virus, Trump cut him off and began criticizing Azar for his handling of an aborted federal ban on vaping products, a matter that vexed the president.

At the time, Trump was in the throes of an impeachment battle over his alleged attempt to coerce political favors from the leader of Ukraine. Acquittal seemed certain by the GOP-controlled Senate, but Trump was preoccupied with the trial, calling lawmakers late at night to rant, and making lists of perceived enemies he would seek to punish when the case against him concluded.

In hindsight, officials said, Azar could have been more forceful in urging Trump to turn at least some of his attention to a threat that would soon pose an even graver test to his presidency, a crisis that would cost American lives and consume the final year of Trump’s first term.

But the secretary, who had a strained relationship with Trump and many others in the administration, assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was “alarmist” and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice.

Within days, there were new causes for alarm.On Jan. 21, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection on U.S. soil. Then, two days later, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan, turning the teeming metropolis into a ghost city of empty highways and shuttered skyscrapers, with millions of people marooned in their homes.

“That was like, whoa,” said a senior U.S. official involved in White House meetings on the crisis. “That was when the Richter scale hit 8.”

It was also when U.S. officials began to confront the failings of their own efforts to respond.


Azar, who had served in senior positions at HHS through crises including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the outbreak of bird flu in 2005, was intimately familiar with the playbook for crisis management.

He instructed subordinates to move rapidly to establish a nationwide surveillance system to track the spread of the coronavirus — a stepped-up version of what the CDC does every year to monitor new strains of the ordinary flu.

But doing so would require assets that would elude U.S. officials for months — a diagnostic test that could accurately identify those infected with the new virus and be produced on a mass scale for rapid deployment across the United States, and money to implement the system.

Azar’s team also hit another obstacle. The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.

A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Kadlec, who knew the Galveston lab director, hoped scientists could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

Deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, left, and national security adviser Robert O’Brien listen during a White House coronavirus briefing on Jan. 31. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)\]
 MAdd caption

There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene. In fact, Trump has consistently praised Chinese President Xi Jinping despite warnings from U.S. intelligence and health officials that Beijing was concealing the true scale of the outbreak and impeding cooperation on key fronts.

The CDC had issued its first public alert about the coronavirus Jan. 8, and by the 17th was monitoring major airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where large numbers of passengers arrived each day from China.

In other ways, though, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad.

Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was accompanied by a contingent of top officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took a trans-Atlantic call from an anxious Azar.

Azar told O’Brien that it was “mayhem” at the White House, with HHS officials being pressed to provide nearly identical briefings to three audiences on the same day.

Azar urged O’Brien to have the NSC assert control over a matter with potential implications for air travel, immigration authorities, the State Department and the Pentagon. O’Brien seemed to grasp the urgency, and put his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who had worked in China as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, in charge of coordinating the still-nascent U.S. response.

But the rising anxiety within the administration appeared not to register with the president. On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.”


Spreading uncontrollably

The move by the NSC to seize control of the response marked an opportunity to reorient U.S. strategy around containing the virus where possible and procuring resources that hospitals would need in any U.S. outbreak, including such basic equipment as protective masks and ventilators.

But instead of mobilizing for what was coming, U.S. officials seemed more preoccupied with logistical problems, including how to evacuate Americans from China.

In Washington, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Pottinger began convening meetings at the White House with senior officials from HHS, the CDC and the State Department.

The group, which included Azar, Pottinger and Fauci, as well as nine others across the administration, formed the core of what would become the administration’s coronavirus task force. But it primarily focused on efforts to keep infected people in China from traveling to the United States even while evacuating thousands of U.S. citizens. The meetings did not seriously focus on testing or supplies, which have since become the administration’s most challenging problems.

The task force was formally announced on Jan. 29.

“The genesis of this group was around border control and repatriation,” said a senior official involved in the meetings. “It wasn’t a comprehensive, whole-of-government group to run everything.”

The State Department agenda dominated those early discussions, according to participants. Officials began making plans to charter aircraft to evacuate 6,000 Americans stranded in Wuhan. They also debated language for travel advisories that State could issue to discourage other travel in and out of China.

On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan.

That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States.

Trump has, with some justification, pointed to the China-related restriction as evidence that he had responded aggressively and early to the outbreak. It was among the few intervention options throughout the crisis that played to the instincts of the president, who often seems fixated on erecting borders and keeping foreigners out of the country.

But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably.

Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country.

This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth.

Those backing the economy prevailed with the president. And it was more than a month before the administration issued a belated and confusing ban on flights into the United States from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval.



A wall of resistance

While fights over air travel played out in the White House, public health officials began to panic over a startling shortage of critical medical equipment including protective masks for doctors and nurses, as well as a rapidly shrinking pool of money needed to pay for such things.

By early February, the administration was quickly draining a $105 million congressional fund to respond to infectious disease outbreaks. The coronavirus threat to the United States still seemed distant if not entirely hypothetical to much of the public. But to health officials charged with stockpiling supplies for worst-case-scenarios, disaster appeared increasingly inevitable.

A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding. The prospects for replenishing that store were suddenly threatened by the unfolding crisis in China, which disrupted offshore supply chains.

Much of the manufacturing of such equipment had long since migrated to China, where factories were now shuttered because workers were on order to stay in their households. At the same time, China was buying up masks and other gear to gird for its own coronavirus outbreak, driving up costs and monopolizing supplies.

In late January and early February, leaders at HHS sent two letters to the White House Office of Management and Budget asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. Azar and his aides also began raising the need for a multibillion-dollar supplemental budget request to send to Congress.

Yet White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Joe Grogan, head of the Domestic Policy Council, clashed with health officials over preparedness. He mistrusted how the money would be used and questioned how health officials had used previous preparedness funds.

Azar then spoke to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during Trump’s State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Vought seemed amenable, and told Azar to submit a proposal.

Azar did so the next day, drafting a supplemental request for more than $4 billion, a sum that OMB officials and others at the White House greeted as an outrage. Azar arrived at the White House that day for a tense meeting in the Situation Room that erupted in a shouting match, according to three people familiar with the incident.

A deputy in the budget office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum that White House officials had no interest in granting. Azar bristled at the criticism and defended the need for an emergency infusion. But his standing with White House officials, already shaky before the coronavirus crisis began, was damaged further.



White House officials relented to a degree weeks later as the feared coronavirus surge in the United States began to materialize. The OMB team whittled Azar’s demands down to $2.5 billion, money that would be available only in the current fiscal year. Congress ignored that figure, approving an $8 billion supplemental bill that Trump signed into law March 6.

But again, delays proved costly. The disputes meant that the United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves.

In late March, the administration ordered 10,000 ventilators — far short of what public health officials and governors said was needed. And many will not arrive until the summer or fall, when models expect the pandemic to be receding.

“It’s actually kind of a joke,” said one administration official involved in deliberations about the belated purchase.



Inconclusive tests

Although viruses travel unseen, public health officials have developed elaborate ways of mapping and tracking their movements. Stemming an outbreak or slowing a pandemic in many ways comes down to the ability to quickly divide the population into those who are infected and those who are not.

Doing so, however, hinges on having an accurate test to diagnose patients and deploy it rapidly to labs across the country. The time it took to accomplish that in the United States may have been more costly to American efforts than any other failing.

“If you had the testing, you could say, ‘Oh my god, there’s circulating virus in Seattle, let’s jump on it. There’s circulating virus in Chicago, let’s jump on it,’ ” said a senior administration official involved in battling the outbreak. “We didn’t have that visibility.”

The first setback came when China refused to share samples of the virus, depriving U.S. researchers of supplies to bombard with drugs and therapies in a search for ways to defeat it. But even when samples had been procured, the U.S. effort was hampered by systemic problems and institutional hubris.

Among the costliest errors was a misplaced assessment by top health officials that the outbreak would probably be limited in scale inside the United States — as had been the case with every other infection for decades — and that the CDC could be trusted on its own to develop a coronavirus diagnostic test.



[CDC is sidelined by White House during coronavirus pandemic]

The CDC, launched in the 1940s to contain an outbreak of malaria in the southern United States, had taken the lead on the development of diagnostic tests in major outbreaks including Ebola, zika and H1N1. But the CDC was not built to mass-produce tests.

The CDC’s success had fostered an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.

Yet some were concerned that the CDC test would not be enough. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, sought authority in early February to begin calling private diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to enlist their help.

FDA leaders were split on whether it would be bad optics for Hahn to be personally calling companies he regulated. When FDA officials consulted leaders at HHS, they understood it as a direction to stand down.

At that point, Azar, the HHS secretary, seemed committed to a plan he was pursuing that would keep his agency at the center of the response effort: securing a test from the CDC and then building a national coronavirus surveillance system by relying on an existing network of labs used to track the ordinary flu.

In task force meetings, Azar and Redfield pushed for $100 million to fund the plan, but were shot down because of the cost, according to a document outlining the testing strategy obtained by The Washington Post.

Relying so heavily on the CDC would have been problematic even if it had succeeded in quickly developing an effective test that could be distributed across the country. The scale of the epidemic, and the need for mass testing far beyond the capabilities of the flu network, would have overwhelmed the plan, which didn’t envision engaging commercial lab companies for up to six months.

The effort collapsed when the CDC failed its basic assignment to create a working test and the task force rejected Azar’s plan.

On Feb. 6, when the World Health Organization reported that it was shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC began distributing 90 kits to a smattering of state-run health labs.

Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems. The results were inconclusive in trial runs at more than half the labs, meaning they couldn’t be relied upon to diagnose actual patients. The CDC issued a stopgap measure, instructing labs to send tests to its headquarters in Atlanta, a practice that would delay results for days.

The scarcity of effective tests led officials to impose constraints on when and how to use them, and delayed surveillance testing. Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population.



The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.

In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point. But even the country’s top experts had little meaningful data about the domestic dimensions of the threat. Fauci later conceded that as they learned more their views changed.

At the same time, as the president’s subordinates were growing increasingly alarmed, Trump continued to exhibit little concern. On Feb. 10, he held a political rally in New Hampshire attended by thousands where he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

The New Hampshire rally was one of eight that Trump held after he had been told by Azar about the coronavirus, a period when he also went to his golf courses six times.


A day earlier, on Feb. 9, a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with Fauci and Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

That month, federal medical and public health officials were emailing increasingly dire forecasts among themselves, with one Veterans Affairs medical adviser warning, ‘We are flying blind,’” according to emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight.

Later in February, U.S. officials discovered indications that the CDC laboratory was failing to meet basic quality-control standards. On a Feb. 27 conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashed out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, told the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”

On Feb. 29, a Washington state man became the first American to die of a coronavirus infection. That same day, the FDA released guidance, signaling that private labs were free to proceed in developing their own diagnostics.



Another four-week stretch had been squandered.

Life and death

One week later, on March 6, Trump toured the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He boasted that the CDC tests were nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test,” a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet.

He also professed to have a keen medical mind. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People here are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ ”

In reality, many of the failures to stem the coronavirus outbreak in the United States were either a result of, or exacerbated by, his leadership.

For weeks, he had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn’t downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration.

At times, he voiced far more authentic concern about the trajectory of the stock market than the spread of the virus in the United States, railing at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and others with an intensity that he never seemed to exhibit about the possible human toll of the outbreak.

In March, as state after state imposed sweeping new restrictions on their citizens’ daily lives to protect them — triggering severe shudders in the economy — Trump second-guessed the lockdowns.

The common flu kills tens of thousands each year and “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” he tweeted March 9. A day later, he pledged that the virus would “go away. Just stay calm.”

Two days later, Trump finally ordered the halt to incoming travel from Europe that his deputy national security adviser had been advocating for weeks. But Trump botched the Oval Office announcement so badly that White House officials spent days trying to correct erroneous statements that triggered a stampede by U.S. citizens overseas to get home.

“There was some coming to grips with the problem and the true nature of it — the 13th of March is when I saw him really turn the corner. It took a while to realize you’re at war,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. “That’s when he took decisive action that set in motion some real payoffs.”

Trump spent many weeks shuffling responsibility for leading his administration’s response to the crisis, putting Azar in charge of the task force at first, relying on Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, for brief periods, before finally putting Vice President Pence in the role toward the end of February.

Other officials have emerged during the crisis to help right the United States’ course, and at times, the statements of the president. But even as Fauci, Azar and others sought to assert themselves, Trump was behind the scenes turning to others with no credentials, experience or discernible insight in navigating a pandemic.



Foremost among them was his adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. A team reporting to Kushner commandeered space on the seventh floor of the HHS building to pursue a series of inchoate initiatives.

One plan involved having Google create a website to direct those with symptoms to testing facilities that were supposed to spring up in Walmart parking lots across the country, but which never materialized. Another centered on an idea advanced by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison to use software to monitor the unproven use of anti-malaria drugs against the coronavirus pathogen.

So far, the plans have failed to come close to delivering on the promises made when they were touted in White House news conferences. The Kushner initiatives have, however, often interrupted the work of those under immense pressure to manage the U.S. response.

Current and former officials said that Kadlec, Fauci, Redfield and others have repeatedly had to divert their attentions from core operations to contend with ill-conceived requests from the White House they don’t believe they can ignore. And Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including Kushner.

“Right now Fauci is trying to roll out the most ambitious clinical trial ever implemented” to hasten the development of a vaccine, said a former senior administration official in frequent touch with former colleagues. And yet, the nation’s top health officials “are getting calls from the White House or Jared’s team asking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do this with Oracle?’ ”

If the coronavirus has exposed the country’s misplaced confidence in its ability to handle a crisis, it also has cast harsh light on the limits of Trump’s approach to the presidency — his disdain for facts, science and experience.

He has survived other challenges to his presidency — including the Russia investigation and impeachment — by fiercely contesting the facts arrayed against him and trying to control the public’s understanding of events with streams of falsehoods.

The coronavirus may be the first crisis Trump has faced in office where the facts — the thousands of mounting deaths and infections — are so devastatingly evident that they defy these tactics.

After months of dismissing the severity of the coronavirus, resisting calls for austere measures to contain it, and recasting himself as a wartime president, Trump seemed finally to succumb to the coronavirus reality. In a meeting with a Republican ally in the Oval Office last month, the president said his campaign no longer mattered because his reelection would hinge on his coronavirus response.

“It’s absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days,” he said at his March 31 news conference. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Racial Breakdown Of NYC's COVID-19 Cases Tracks The Pandemic's Inequities

GOTHAMIST

Concerned that New York City's communities of color are being disproportionately exposed to the deadly COVID-19 virus, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has asked the de Blasio administration to turn over data breaking down coronavirus cases by race.

“What it appears is that, as usual, certain communities are gonna get hit hard and that doesn't have to be to the degree that it is,” Williams told Gothamist. "But we want to have data to be able to back that up and to have accountability as we're moving forward to make people acknowledge it so we can make better decisions."

In a letter sent on Friday to the Health Department Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Williams referenced a map that was recently released by the DOH showing that zip codes home to low-income neighborhoods—often homes to communities of color—have seen high rates of COVID-19 cases.

The working-class Bronx neighborhood of Wakefield, for instance, has been hit hard by the coronavirus, with 304 of 556 people testing positive for the virus. According to census figures, the neighborhood is 58 percent African American, 17 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent white.

Williams said that communities of color are “overrepresented in essential occupations, including grocery store workers, laundromat workers, healthcare workers, and emergency responders,” who cannot afford to stay at home, and must do their jobs for society to function. Given their level of exposure, Williams argued that they are more susceptible to catching the disease than affluent New Yorkers, and that their coronavirus testing should be prioritized.

"Our picture of which communities are most impacted by COVID-19 is obscured by the fact that, due to the lack of available tests, our current numbers underrepresent how many people are sick," Williams wrote in his letter.

The virus has so far infected nearly 50,000 people in the five boroughs and killed more than 1,500 people.

Last week, Williams called for a full lockdown of New York City, including restricting residents to their respective neighborhoods and shutting down parks (Governor Andrew Cuomo has since ordered playgrounds to temporarily close). "We may have to get to a point right now where the whole city should shut down for a week," said Williams.

A DOH spokesperson did not return a request for comment. The de Blasio administration was slow to release the zip code-level data.

The New York Times, using cell phone data collected by Cuebiq, reported that the residents living in affluent neighborhoods are staying put in their homes compared to high-poverty neighborhoods where residents have been moving with comparably higher frequency. The paper also showed that Manhattan, where the median income is around $80,000, saw a 75 percent decrease in subway ridership since non-essential New Yorkers have been ordered indoors, while the Bronx, which has a median income of $38,000, saw a decrease of around 55 percent.

"By the time you're down to Union Square it's somewhat reasonable, but when you're up in those higher places you're packed like sardines," a nanny from the Bronx told Gothamist earlier this week, describing her dangerously crowded commute. "The poor people are doing all the work."

Across the country, black communities have disproportionately impacted by the virus. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin—one of a handful of counties tracking racial breakdown of coronavirus cases—African Americans comprise of half of the 945 coronavirus cases and 81 percent of its deaths, according to ProPublica. And in Michigan, 35 percent of coronavirus cases and 40 percent of coronavirus-related deaths come from African Americans, despite the demographic making up 14 percent of the state’s population.

Five congressional members, including former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren, have asked U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar to release racial breakdown of coronavirus patients.

N.Y. Virus Deaths Double in Three Days to Almost 3,000: Updates

More people in New York died of the coronavirus in the last 24 hours than in the first 27 days of March.
Governor Cuomo is issuing an executive order letting the state seize and redistribute ventilators from hospitals and companies.
Asked whether he could reassure New Yorkers that the state would receive enough ventilators, the president said, “No.”. The state is seeking 15,000 ventilators before the peak of cases hits. Today, New York reported the largest single-day increase in its coronavirus death toll, with nearly 3,000 residents having already lost their lives.

In the 24 hours through 12 a.m. on Friday, 562 people — or one almost every two-and-a-half minutes — died from the virus in New York State, bringing the total death toll to nearly 3,000, double what it was only three days before. In the same period, 1,427 newly sickened patients poured into hospitals — another one-day high — although the rate of increase in hospitalizations seemed to stabilize, suggesting that the extreme social-distancing measures put in place last month may have started working.

Despite the glimmer of hope, the new statistics were a stark reminder of the gale-force strength of the crisis threatening New York, where more than 102,000 people — nearly as many as in Italy and Spain, the hardest-hit European countries with about 120,000 cases each — have now tested positive for the virus. The situation was particularly dire in New York City, where some hospitals have reported running out of body bags and others have begun to plan for the unthinkable prospect of rationing care.

The New York Times spoke to six doctors at five major city hospitals who said they worried they soon would have to decide on their own not to take the most aggressive lifesaving measures in every case. In addition to the moral anguish that may cause, some feared they would run the risk of lawsuits or even criminal charges if they went against the wishes of a patient or family.

Steven A. McDonald, an emergency room doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian, said he wrote to his supervisors on Tuesday asking for guidelines for making decisions about who should receive a ventilator and who should not.

“The feedback I got from my department is that the hospital wants to wait for the governor to come down with their own guidelines,” he said.

CDC recommends people wear cloth face coverings
The CDC issued new recommendations for people to wear masks or face coverings while in public. The president undermined the guidelines almost immediately after announcing them, insisting that he wouldn’t wear masks because “they’re not for me”. As Donald Trump was explaining that he won’t be wearing a mask, because he doesn’t want to greet “presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings queens,” with his face covered, Melania Trump tweeted an appeal for “everyone” to take the CDC guidelines seriously:

Melania Trump
✔
@FLOTUS
As the weekend approaches I ask that everyone take social distancing & wearing a mask/face covering seriously. #COVID19 is a virus that can spread to anyone - we can stop this together.

51.2K
5:45 PM - Apr 3, 2020
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18.4K people are talking about this


“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing,” the president said at the beginning of the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary.”

“Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know,” he added, though he stopped receiving foreign dignitaries weeks ago. “Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement, followed by his quick dismissal, was a remarkable public display of the intense debate that has played out inside the West Wing over the past several days as a divided administration argued about whether to request such a drastic change in Americans’ social behavior. Senior officials at the C.D.C. have been pushing the president for days to advise everyone — even people who appear to be healthy — to wear a mask or a scarf that covers their mouth and nose when shopping at the grocery store or while in other public places.

The president’s briefing was particularly contentious: He insulted reporters, jousted with his own administration and generally returned to pugilistic form.

At one point, he would not say, in response to a question, whether he was taking steps to ensure that the 2020 presidential election would take place as scheduled, should the coronavirus still be present in November. But he insisted the election would not be postponed.


U.S. reports more than 30,000 coronavirus cases in record day

Decade of Job Growth Comes to an End, Undone by a Pandemic

After an expansion that added 22 million to U.S. payrolls, March registered a loss, and worse is yet to come.

The longest stretch of job creation in American history came to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, another reflection of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill.

Compared with the astounding numbers of people recently applying for unemployment benefits — nearly 10 million in the previous two weeks — the figure announced Friday was less striking: a loss of 701,000 jobs. But the data was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay-at-home orders began to cover much of the nation. With that, what had been a drip-drip-drip of job losses turned into a deluge.

“As bad as this report is, next month will be many orders of magnitude worse,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. “This is the initial slippage of the labor market.” He said the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to 13 percent in April.

The decline in employment last month represents the biggest monthly drop since the depths of the Great Recession in 2008-9. It was paced by a net loss of 459,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector.

Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help.
A Washington Post investigation uncovered alarm and dismay among scientists at health labs about the Trump administration’s reliance on a flawed coronavirus test developed by the CDC, which was used for weeks as the virus began to spread across the United States.
Lab scientists expressed dismay at the Trump administration’s failure to move quickly and at bureaucratic demands that delayed coronavirus testing. For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.

One night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. “Oh, s---,” she replied. “What are we going to do now?”
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved.

In their private communications, scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs — one layer removed from federal agency operations — expressed dismay at the failure to move more quickly and frustration at bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.

“We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process,” Marc Couturier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah, wrote to other microbiologists on Feb. 27 after weeks of mounting frustration.

The administration embraced a new approach behind closed doors that very day, concluding that “a much broader” effort to testing was needed, according to an internal government memo spelling out the plan. Two days later, the administration announced a relaxation of the regulations that scientists said had hindered private laboratories from deploying their own tests.

By then, the virus had spread across the country. In less than a month, it would upend daily life, shuttering the world’s largest economy and killing thousands of Americans.

In a statement to The Post, the CDC said an investigation of the initial problems is ongoing. The test is now in use in every state and is “accurate and reliable,” the agency said. In an interview Thursday, Brett P. Giroir, a Public Health Service admiral who on March 12 was named the top administration official on the testing effort, acknowledged the government should have moved more decisively to detect and contain the virus.

Facing coronavirus pandemic, Trump suspends immigration laws and showcases vision for locked-down border

Trump has used emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic to implement the kind of strict enforcement regime at the U.S. southern border he has long wanted, suspending laws that protect minors and asylum seekers so that the U.S. government can immediately deport them or turn them away.

Citing the threat of “mass, uncontrolled cross-border movement,” the president has shelved safeguards intended to protect trafficking victims and persecuted groups, implementing an expulsion order that sends migrants of all ages back to Mexico in an average of 96 minutes. U.S. Border Patrol agents do not perform medical checks when they encounter people crossing into the country.

Homeland Security officials say the measures are necessary to protect U.S. agents, health-care workers and the general public from the coronavirus. Tightening controls at the border and preventing potentially infected populations from streaming into the United States minimizes the number of detainees in U.S. immigration jails and border holding cells.
One in six city police officers is out sick.
One out of every six New York City police officers is out sick or in quarantine. A veteran detective and five civilian workers have died from the disease caused by the coronavirus. And two chiefs and the deputy commissioner in charge of counterterrorism are among more than 1,500 others in the department who have been infected.

With weeks to go before the epidemic is expected to peak, the virus has already strained the Police Department at a time when its 36,000 officers have been asked to step up and help fight it by enforcing emergency rules intended to slow its spread.

The epidemic has also added a new level of risk and anxiety to police work, even as reports of most serious crimes have dropped steeply since the city imposed the new rules. Every arrest or interview now carries the potential for infection, officers say. “It’s a stressful job at the best of times,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said on Tuesday. “Right now, I don’t think you can imagine a worse point of time.”

Trump plans to nominate an inspector general to oversee the $500 billion bailout fund.

The president intends to nominate White House lawyer Brian D. Miller to serve as the inspector general overseeing the Treasury Department’s implementation of the newly enacted $2 trillion coronavirus law, the White House said Friday night.

The special inspector general is one of several oversight mechanisms created as part of the $2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed last week. The position will be closely scrutinized, as lawmakers from both parties have been calling for Mr. Trump to fill the role expeditiously to ensure that stimulus money is doled out with transparency and that fraud and favoritism are avoided.

The president raised alarms last week when, after signing the legislation, he released a statement that suggested he had the power to decide what information the new inspector general could share with Congress.

Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web
Thousands of personal Zoom videos have been left viewable on the open Web, highlighting the privacy risks to millions of Americans as they shift many of their personal interactions to video calls in an age of social distancing.

Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.

Singer Pink says she has recovered from coronavirus, will donate $1 million to relief efforts

Pink announced Friday night that she tested positive for the novel coronavirus last month but has since recovered. “Two weeks ago my three-year-old son, Jameson, and I are were showing symptoms of COVID-19. Fortunately, our primary care physician had access to tests and I tested positive,” she said, referring to the disease the virus causes. The pop star added that she tested negative a few days ago after self-quarantining for two weeks.

Pink also said she was donating $1 million combined to the Temple University Hospital Emergency Fund and the Los Angeles mayor’s emergency coronavirus fund. “It is an absolute travesty and failure of our government to not make testing more widely accessible,” Pink said. “This illness is serious and real.”

Supreme Court cancels April arguments, unclear how it will finish term.

The Supreme Court on Friday officially canceled its scheduled oral arguments for April because of health threats caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and left in doubt how the justices will finish their term.

The court already had postponed March arguments, which means about 20 cases — including the battle over President Trump’s attempts to shield his financial records from congressional committees and a Manhattan prosecutor — are left in limbo. The court’s April session usually is its last each term.“The court will consider rescheduling some cases from the March and April sessions before the end of the term, if circumstances permit in light of public health and safety guidance at that time,” public information officer Kathleen Arberg said in a news release.

Nancy Pelosi said Congress should pass another economic relief bill.

The house speaker said Congress should build upon the $2tn stimulus package passed last month. The HC ongressman Adam Schiff drafted a bill to establish a commission to probe the coronavirus response. The Democratic lawmaker said the commission would seek to gather lessons for future crises, but Trump dismissed the idea of a commission yesterday as a “witch-hunt”.

During the daily coronavirus task force briefing, Donald Trump attacked the idea of voting by mail, despite having requested an absentee ballot in 2020. The president said, citing no evidence, that mail-in voting encouraged cheating.

German and French officials accuse Americans of intercepting masks.

Local officials in Germany and France have accused American buyers of outbidding them for protective masks that had been lined up for medical workers fighting the coronavirus in Europe. The masks, they claim, were already at Asian airports, about to be shipped.

6.65m file for unemployment--the highest level ever recorded. Global Cases Exceed 1 Million

There was an increase of 3.3m initial unemployment claims from last week. This marks the highest level of initial claims ever recorded. Millions working in retail, restaurants, and travel lose jobs.

More than 6.65 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the US last week, the latest official figures to highlight the devastating economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the American economy.

The federal labor department announced that a new record number of people sought benefits after losing their jobs in the week ending 27 March as long lines formed at unemployment offices, phone lines jammed and websites collapsed under the weight of claims across the US.

The US now faces the sharpest rise in unemployment in its history, a surge that is already highlighting income inequality across the nation and comes as the global economy goes into a nosedive that is likely to exacerbate the situation in the months ahead.

With large parts of the US now on lockdown, millions of people working in retail, restaurants, travel, hotels and leisure industries have lost their jobs and the losses are spreading. Oil and gas companies are laying off workers as oil prices collapse and engineering firms including General Electric are cutting staff as the airline industry grinds to a halt.

It has been over two weeks since Brandy Banaay was let go from her housekeeping job at the Doubletree Hotel Alana in Waikiki, Hawaii, yet the single mother of three has yet to successfully file for unemployment insurance. Whenever she tries to file on Hawaii’s website, it crashes.

Some 3.3 million had filed for unemployment the previous week, bringing total claims to 9.95 million for the two weeks. More people have filed for unemployment in the last two weeks than filed in the last 10 months.

N.Y.C. officials said residents should cover their faces outside.

New York City officials on Thursday advised residents to shield their faces with a scarf, bandanna or other protective covering when leaving their homes, although they reiterated that people should continue to stay at home as much as possible during the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. de Blasio urged city residents not to use the surgical or N-95 masks that are desperately needed by emergency services workers, doctors, nurses and other hospital staff employees who are treating infected patients.

“You can create your own version,” Mr. de Blasio said. “You can be creative and put whatever decoration you want on it. It can be as homemade as you want. But that’s what we want you to do: something homemade.”

The mayor and the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, repeatedly said that the city and state’s social distancing guidelines continued to apply.

More than 1 million people have been infected and at least 51,000 have died in more than 170 countries.

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 1 million people, according to official counts, almost a quarter of them in the United States. As of Thursday afternoon, at least 51,000 people have died, and the virus has been detected in at least 171 countries, as these maps show. There is evidence on six continents of sustained transmission of the virus.

There are still a dozen states where governors have resisted issuing stay-at-home orders. An analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times found that people in the Southeast and other places that were slow enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the outbreak accelerates.

States face a shortage of lifesaving medications

For weeks, health care providers have sounded the alarm on a shortage of ventilators and protective gear, but now medicines are in short supply as well.

As the numbers of the infected and dead continue to soar, hospitals are reporting that some critical medicines are beginning to run low — including drugs that are used to keep patients’ airways open, antibiotics, antivirals and sedatives.

New York State, the center of America’s outbreak with 2,468 coronavirus deaths, estimates its stockpile of critically needed ventilators will be depleted by the end of next week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said. And President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to require 3M Company, a major manufacturer of face masks, to turn over stocks of much-needed respirator masks to the federal government.

Among American businesses seeking financial breathing room is the president’s family company, the Trump Organization, which has been exploring whether it can delay some of its financial obligations, according to a New York Times investigation.

New York’s Bronx Zoo is closed, but staff members still care for roughly 6,000 animals.

Still, the life of the zoo goes on, as the sea lions perform their routines, no doubt encouraged by the fish they swallow in a single gulp.

“The animals are blissfully unaware of what the rest of us have been going through,” said Jim Breheny, the director of the Bronx Zoo. “What I wouldn’t give for that innocence.”

Unlike Broadway theaters or museums, zoos cannot go dark. Chinchillas need checkups. Penguin chicks might require help after they hatch. Captive tigers, alligators and grizzly bears probably shouldn’t be left to their own devices.

“The animals that we care for rely on us for everything,” said Mr. Breheny, whose first job at age 14 was staffing the zoo’s camel rides.


So since it closed to the public on March 16, the Bronx Zoo has been tending to animals while keeping its human employees as socially distant as possible. Roughly 300 workers of its 700-plus staff were deemed “essential” to care for animals and maintain the zoo’s operations. They are split in half into two teams, which report on alternating weeks.

The 1,000-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients.

Such were the expectations for the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort that when it chugged into New York Harbor this week, throngs of people, momentarily forgetting the strictures of social distancing, crammed together along Manhattan’s west side to catch a glimpse.

On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.

Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.

“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”

The Comfort was sent to New York to relieve pressure on city hospitals by treating people with ailments other than Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

President Trump left a nine-day sequester in the White House last week to travel to Norfolk, Va., to personally see off the ship as it set sail for New York, saying it would play a “critical role.” The ship’s arrival on Monday was cheered as one of the few bright moments in a grim time for the city.

But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.