Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic has shown how close to the edge many Americans were living, with pay and benefits eroding even as corporate profits surged.



NY TIMES

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.”

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

In an economy that has been hailed for its record-shattering successes, the most basic necessities — food, shelter and medical care — are all suddenly at risk.The latest crisis has played out in sobering economic data and bleak headlines — most recently on Thursday, when the Labor Department said 5.2 million workers filed last week for unemployment benefits.

That brought the four-week total to 22 million, roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that ended with the pandemic’s arrival. Certainly, the outbreak and attempts to curb it have created new hardships. But perhaps more significantly, the crisis has revealed profound, longstanding vulnerabilities in the economic system.

“We built an economy with no shock absorbers,” said Joseph Stiglitz, [above] a Nobel-winning economist. “We made a system that looked like it was maximizing profits but had higher risks and lower resiliency.” Well before the coronavirus established a foothold, the American economy had been playing out on a split screen.

On one were impressive achievements: the lowest jobless rate in half a century, a soaring stock market and the longest expansion on record. On the other, a very different story of stinging economic weaknesses unfolded. Years of limp wage growth left workers struggling to afford essentials. Irregular work schedules caused weekly paychecks to surge and dip unpredictably. Job-based benefits were threadbare or nonexistent. In this economy, four of 10 adults don’t have the resources on hand to cover an unplanned $400 expense.

Even middle-class Americans, once snugly secure, have become increasingly anxious in recent decades about their own fragile finances and their children’s prospects.

Since the recession’s end, the economy has pumped out enormous wealth. Workers, though, have gotten a smaller slice of those rewards. Companies prioritized short-term gains and stockholder returns at the same time that employee bargaining power was eroding.

People waited in cars for food distribution in San Antonio last week. “It does underscore the fact that so many people in our country live on a precipice,” a national food bank executive said.Credit...William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News, via Associated Press

In less than two decades, the share of income paid out in wages and benefits in the private sector shrank by 5.4 percentage points, a McKinsey Global Institute study found last year, reducing compensation on average by $3,000 a year, adjusted for inflation.

The result is that a job — once the guarantor of income security — no longer reliably plays that role.
“For many working families, wage growth has not been strong enough to allow them to meet their basic needs on their own,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston concluded in a report last year.

Work is available — but it is often unsteady and poorly paid.

Roughly seven of 10 people enrolled in public health care in New England were employed, the bank study found. So were nearly half of those who qualified for temporary cash assistance from the government. Employers who pay low wages and don’t offer benefits have in effect been subsidized through programs providing publicly funded medical insurance, rent money and food stamps to their workers.

Now individual employees with few resources — rather than companies or partners — are compelled to absorb some of the routine risks and uncertainties of running a business. Scheduling software that constantly changes a worker’s daily shifts to match an unexpected slowdown or rush improves a business’s bottom line but can ruin a household’s by causing wages to fluctuate widely from one week to the next. Such shifting not only scrambles family life, but also makes it more difficult to schedule other paid work.

At large companies, employees have seen their spending on health care — because of higher deductibles, premiums and co-payments — increase twice as fast as their wages over the past decade, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker.

At the same time, the cost of other necessities like housing has shot up. Millions of renters spend more than half their incomes on housing. Middle-income households, too, have been hit by escalating housing costs. Since 2000, a steadily growing share of this group has spent more than a third of earnings on rent.

For years, households have strained to navigate this cut-to-the bone economy with varying success. The coronavirus shock has made the economic precariousness — usually seen in scattershot fashion — evident everywhere at once.

“A lot of the people in the economy are living at the edge, and you have an event like this that pushes them over,” Mr. Stiglitz said. “And we are unique in the advanced world in having people at the edge without a safety net below them.”

Powerful forces like advancing technology and globalization are partly to blame for workers’ economic instability. But Mr. Stiglitz also criticized the short-term mind-set prevalent in corporate America. Airlines — now being propped up with emergency government aid — used billions of dollars in profits to buy back their stock, he said, instead of investing in employees and productive capacity or building up reserves to withstand a downturn.

In 2018 alone, companies in the S&P 500 — flush from windfalls resulting from steep cuts in corporate taxes — spent $806 billion repurchasing their own shares at boom-time prices in search of quick profits.

When the outbreak began to shutter the economy, many of these companies laid off millions of workers, ending their health insurance.


“Employer-based health insurance is a wrecking ball,” the Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote this week in The New York Times. The couple, the authors of “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” argue that over time this system has “destroyed the labor market for less educated workers.”

The patched social service network that runs through individual states is now struggling to handle the millions of unemployment claims that have poured in as well as a flood of new applicants trying to tap existing programs. But assistance doesn’t necessarily arrive quickly. In Louisiana, for example, the backlog of applications for food stamps filed since businesses were closed in mid-March already exceeds 87,000.



In the meantime, nongovernmental organizations are trying to meet the demand. Fulfill, a food bank that operates in Monmouth and Ocean Counties in New Jersey, has served an additional 364,000 meals in the last three weeks, a 40 percent spike.

“We went from 0 to 60 in five seconds,” said Kim Guadagno, Fulfill’s chief executive and president. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was devastating, she said, but this is worse because “the need is widespread, with no end in sight.”

Last year, before the pandemic, Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks, fed 40 million individuals, many of them children, said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, the chief executive. “It does underscore the fact that so many people in our country live on a precipice,” she said.

Housing also feels less secure. A recent survey by SurveyMonkey and Apartment List, an online rental marketplace based in San Francisco, showed that a quarter of renters paid only part or none of their rent this month.

“These numbers are extremely worrying,” said Igor Popov, the chief economist at Apartment List. “In a typical economic downturn, when incomes take a hit, many families can downsize or move in together to minimize their rent payments. At a time when we’re sheltering in place, even moves to downgrade housing are difficult.”

Those who have been squeezed the most can expect to be squeezed even more.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, Destination: Home, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that works to prevent homelessness, was on track to give $7 million in financial assistance to about 1,000 families. In March, the organization raised an additional $11 million for coronavirus relief, but was overwhelmed with demand — 4,500 requests in three days — and stopped accepting applications. The waiting list has close to 10,000 people and is growing each day.

“I thought there was nothing that I haven’t been involved in when it comes to homelessness, said Jennifer Loving, chief executive of Destination: Home, “but this is incomprehensibly catastrophic.”

In a report on the economic impact of the coronavirus, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond warns that the largest burdens will fall on people who are already the most vulnerable — people in low-paying, insecure jobs.

That is also a group with an outsize share of minorities and immigrants.

As a McKinsey report released this week noted, the “unfolding public-health and economic disaster” resulting from the pandemic “will disproportionately impact black Americans.”

It is another echo of Bourke-White’s “American Way” photo, where the contented family in the car is white and the grim faces waiting for aid are black and brown.

Conor Dougherty and Nelson D. Schwartz contributed reporting.

Patricia Cohen covers the national economy. Since joining The Times in 1997, she has also written about theater, books and ideas. She is the author of “In Our Prime: The Fascinating History and Promising Future of Middle Age.” @PatcohenNYT

New U.S. Jobless Claims Push 4-Week Total to 22 Million. UPDATES

Jobs Figures Show the Breadth of the Economic Ruin

The data underscore the impact on every corner of the economy: hotels and restaurants, retailers, manufacturers and white-collar strongholds.

Even as political leaders wrangle over how and when to restart the American economy, the coronavirus pandemic’s devastation became more evident Thursday with more than 5.2 million workers added to the tally of the unemployed.

In the last four weeks, the number of unemployment claims has reached 22 million — roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that began after the last recession and ended with the pandemic’s arrival.

The latest figure from the Labor Department, reflecting last week’s initial claims, underscores how the downdraft has spread to every corner of the economy. The mounting unemployment numbers seem certain to add to pressure to lift some restrictions on business activity. President Trump on Thursday announced new guidelines for states eager to reopen, but many governors and health experts are more cautious.

If quarterly unemployment hits 30 percent — as the president of one Federal Reserve Bank predicted — 15.4 percent of Americans will fall into poverty for the year, researchers found, even in the unlikely event that the economy immediately recovers. That level of poverty would exceed the peak of the Great Recession and add nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor.

Trump says governors can reopen sooner than May 1.

Trump told the nation’s governors on Thursday that they could begin reopening businesses, restaurants and other elements of daily life by May 1 or earlier if they wanted, abandoning his threat to use what he had claimed was his absolute authority to impose his will on them.

On a day when the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus increased by more than 2,000 for a total over 30,000, the president released a set of nonbinding guidelines that envisioned a slow return to work and school over weeks or months. Based on each state’s conditions, the guidelines in effect guarantee that any restoration of American society will take place on a patchwork basis rather than on a one-size-fits-all prescription from Washington that some of the governors had feared in recent days.


Protesters in MAGA hats and flying Confederate flags swarm Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming and Virginia to demonstrate 'tyrannical' and 'unconstitutional' lockdown orders that are 'worse than the virus'



Protesters have continued to gather across the United States, ignoring social distancing rules to demonstrate against lockdown orders they call 'tyrannical' and 'worse than the virus'. Thousands of protesters drove to Michigan's State Capitol to protest Democratic Gov Whitmer Wednesday. In Utah protesters held signs that read 'Resist like it's 1776' and 'America will never be a socialist country'. And in Kentucky protesters shouted out as Democratic Governor Andy Beshear spoke to the state. A Reopen North Carolina Facebook page has 42,000 members; a protester was arrested there Wednesday. And a startling image from Ohio shows a baying crowd at the window of the Statehouse Atrium on Monday. In Virginia a protest against Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's lockdown is scheduled for Thursday. In Wyoming protesters led calls to 'defend liberty' and urged Gov. Mark Gordon to not 'flatten the economy'.



Early research suggests that obesity is a big risk factor, but not asthma.


Early research on underlying health conditions associated with the virus has highlighted that obesity appears to be one of the most important predictors of severe cases of the coronavirus illness, but asthma does not.

New studies point to obesity as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for patients being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. Some 42 percent of American adults — nearly 80 million people — live with obesity. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.

The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.

For people with asthma, the outbreak of a disease that can lead to respiratory failure was particularly worrisome. Many health organizations have cautioned that asthmatics are most likely at higher risk for severe illness if they get the virus.

But data released this month by New York State shows that only about 5 percent of Covid-19 deaths in New York were of people who were known to also have asthma, a relatively modest amount. Nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population — close to 25 million people — has asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.



Death tolls are growing at nursing homes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

The virus has been sweeping through nursing homes across the country and claiming the lives of thousands of residents who are particularly vulnerable — older people, many with underlying health issues, who are living in close quarters, as well as the people who care for them.

In New York and New Jersey, funeral directors have been unable to keep up with the death toll at one nursing home after another. In New York City, the administrator for a home in Queens said that 29 residents have died, but other workers said the toll was considerably higher. In a small New Jersey township, the police on Monday found 17 dead bodies inside a nursing home morgue designed to hold four people. This brought the death toll at the long-term care facility to 68, including 26 people who tested positive.
The $349 billion lending program for small businesses has run out of funds.
A federal loan program intended to help small businesses keep workers on their payrolls has proved woefully insufficient, with a staggering 22 million Americans filing for unemployment in the last four weeks.

The program, called the Paycheck Protection Program, was in limbo as the Small Business Administration said on Thursday that it had run out of money. Millions of businesses were unable to apply for the loans while Congress struggled to reach a deal to replenish the funds.

Congress initially allocated $349 billion for the program, which was intended to provide loans to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The money went quickly, with more than 1.4 million loans approved as of Wednesday evening.





China’s economy shrinks, ending nearly half a century of continuous growth.

Chinese officials on Friday said the world’s second-largest economy had shrunk in the first three months of the year, ending a streak of untrammeled growth that survived the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the SARS epidemic and even the global financial crisis.

The data reflects China’s dramatic efforts to stamp out the coronavirus, which included shutting down most factories and offices in January and February as the outbreak sickened tens of thousands of people.

The stark numbers make clear how monumental the challenge of getting the global economy back on its feet will be, and may help to explain why world leaders — including President Trump — are so eager to restart their own economies. Since it emerged from abject poverty and isolation more than 40 years ago, China has become perhaps the world’s most important growth engine.

Now China is trying to restart its $14 trillion economy, an effort that could give the rest of the world a much-needed shot in the arm. The coronavirus’s spread to the United States and Europe, which froze the economies there, has led to forecasts that the world’s output could shrink far more this year than it did even during the financial crisis.

Testing Is Biggest Obstacle to Reopening States, Experts Say. UPDATES

Worldwide Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Top 2 Million

As bleak a milestone in the pandemic as the new figures are, unconfirmed cases are believed to be far higher. More than 130,000 people have died from Covid-19.

Health, business and political leaders warn against a rush to lift restrictions. New Yorkers will have to wear face coverings in public, and California will extend aid to undocumented workers.

As President Trump pushes to reopen the economy, most of the country is not conducting nearly enough testing to track the path and penetration of the coronavirus in a way that would allow Americans to safely return to work, public health officials and political leaders say.

Although capacity has improved in recent weeks, supply shortages remain crippling, and many regions are still restricting tests to people who meet specific criteria. Antibody tests, which reveal whether someone has ever been infected with the coronavirus, are just starting to be rolled out, and most have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration.

Concerns intensified on Wednesday as Senate Democrats released a $30 billion plan for building up what they called “fast, free testing in every community,” saying they would push to include it in the next pandemic relief package. Business leaders, who participated in the first conference call of Mr. Trump’s advisory council on restarting the economy, warned that it would not rebound until people felt safe to re-emerge, which would require more screening.

In his daily briefing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reiterated his call for federal assistance to ramp up testing, both for the virus and for antibodies. Hours later, Mr. Trump boasted at his own briefing of having “the most expansive testing system anywhere in the world” and said that some states could even reopen before May 1, the date his task force had tentatively set.


From the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, lapses by the federal government have compromised efforts to detect the pathogen in patients and communities. A diagnostic test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proved to be flawed. The F.D.A. failed to speed approval for commercial labs to make tests widely available. All of that meant that the United States has been far behind in combating the virus.



Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count
A detailed county map shows the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, with tables of the number of cases by county.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, offered a road map on Wednesday on which states could be the first to ease stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses — a target date that President Trump said could be before May 1.

“We do have nine states that have less than 1,000 cases and less than 30 new cases per day,” Dr. Birx said during the daily news briefing in the Rose Garden.

She did not list the states, but data compiled by The New York Times suggested that they were Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Governors and mayors would make the call on lifting restrictions after receiving guidance from the federal government, which would be announced Thursday, Dr. Birx said.


Moments earlier, Mr. Trump said that governors, whom he did not name, were “chomping at the bit to get going.” But Dr. Birx warned that it was no time for Americans to become complacent about social distancing.


A retail report shows the biggest decline in sales in three decades.

Retail sales plunged in March as businesses shuttered from coast to coast and wary shoppers restricted their spending, a drop that was by far the largest in the nearly three decades the government has tracked the data.

Total sales, which include retail purchases in stores and online as well as auto and gasoline sales and money spent at bars and restaurants, fell 8.7 percent from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.


The situation has almost certainly worsened since then. Most states didn’t shut down nonessential businesses until late March or early April.
What happens to retail matters to the broader economy. The sector accounts for more than one in 10 U.S. jobs; only health care employs more. Its stores generate billions of dollars in rent for commercial landlords, ad sales for local media outlets, and sales-tax receipts for state and local governments.

If retailers survive and can quickly reopen and rehire workers, then the eventual economic recovery could be relatively swift. But the failure of a large share of businesses would lead to prolonged unemployment and a much slower rebound.



Trump’s name will be printed on stimulus checks.

Some of the relief payments authorized as part of a $2 trillion stimulus package have started showing up in Americans’ bank accounts. Here’s a page where you can check on the status of your payment.

Most adults will get $1,200, although some will get less, depending on their income. For every qualifying child age 16 or under, the payment will be an additional $500.

At the president’s suggestion, his name will appear on the checks that will be mailed to millions of Americans beginning next month, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday. Adding Mr. Trump’s name is a break from protocol, and it will appear on the “memo” section of the check because Mr. Trump is not legally authorized to sign such disbursements.



Cuomo will require New Yorkers to wear facial coverings in public.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Wednesday that he would order people statewide to don facial coverings while in public if they were unable to stay six feet away from others. The measure will take effect on Saturday.

“If you’re going to be in public and you cannot maintain social distancing, then have a mask and put the mask on,” said Mr. Cuomo, who held out the possibility of civil penalties for violations.

“You’re walking down the street alone? Great,” he said. “You’re now at an intersection and there are people at the intersection and you’re going to be in proximity to other people? Put the mask on.”

He added: “You don’t have the right to infect me.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said in a statement on Wednesday that all subway riders in New York City would be required to wear face coverings when using public transit beginning Friday.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement came soon after he said that the virus had killed at least 752 people in New York on Tuesday, swelling the state’s official death toll to at least 11,586. The tally does not include the more than 3,700 people in New York City who died without being tested and are now presumed to have died of the virus.

The three-day average of the number of virus patients in hospitals, considered one of the most reliable measures of the virus’s impact, fell for the first time since the outbreak began, down 0.7 percent since Tuesday.

The 752 new deaths made Tuesday the eighth day of the last nine with a death toll over 700, suggesting that the death rate has stabilized, after weeks of increasing.

Health officials have urged people to combine face coverings with adhering to social-distancing rules, suggesting that one tactic did not replace the need for the other. Further complicating the matter is that while scientists agree six feet is a sensible and useful minimum distance for people to separate when possible, some say that farther away would be better.


Stay 6 Feet Apart, We’re Told. But How Far Can Air Carry Coronavirus?
Most of the big droplets travel a mere six feet. The role of tiny aerosols is the “trillion-dollar question.”

Six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within six feet.

But some scientists, having looked at studies of air flow and being concerned about smaller particles called aerosols, suggest that people consider a number of factors, including their own vulnerability and whether they are outdoors or in an enclosed room, when deciding whether six feet is enough distance.

Sneezes, for instance, can launch droplets a lot farther than six feet according to a recent study.

Even without the launching power of a sneeze, air currents could carry a flow of aerosol sized virus particles exhaled by an infected person 20 feet or more away.

One complicating factor is that aerosols, smaller droplets that can be emitted when people are breathing and talking, play some role in spreading the new coronavirus. Studies have shown that aerosols can be created during certain hospital or laboratory procedures like when using nebulizers to help patients inhale medication, which makes such procedures risky for doctors who do them.

If the aerosols that people exhale in other settings are significant in spreading the disease, the six-foot distance would not be completely protective because those are carried more easily by air currents.It is also unclear how many virus particles it takes to start an infection, how long the viral particles remain viable.

“Maybe all it takes is an aerosol. You don’t need any droplets at all.” If that’s the case, he said, then someone who is at high risk would not want to be in the same room with someone who is infected or might be infected. Current guidelines already suggest that anyone at high risk should stay home and not be out in public in the first place.

Aerosols are generally considered to be particles under 5 microns in diameter, about the size of a red blood cell, and can be spread in the environment by talking and breathing. But some researchers argue that this is a false dichotomy. Infectious droplets can’t easily be divided into those that are big enough to fall to the ground quickly and those that stay aloft because so much depends on environmental conditions and how deeply they penetrate into the respiratory tract.

People still need to shop and take care of necessities, Dr. Osterholm said, but reducing the risk of exposure to all possible modes of transmission — infected surfaces, droplets and smaller aerosols — is important.

“Your job is to limit it as much as you can.”




N.Y.C. will spend $170 million on emergency meals.

“I pledge to you, and I’m very confident making this pledge: We will not allow any New Yorker to go hungry,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news briefing.

The effort will include purchasing 18 million ready-to-eat meals, signing up entire public housing buildings for home meal delivery and hiring more than 11,000 drivers licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to deliver meals.

Even before the crisis, hunger was already widespread in the city and 1.2 million people in the city were classified as food insecure, Mr. de Blasio said.



Protesters have taken to the streets in several states to urge governors to reopen businesses and relax rules that health officials have said are necessary to save lives.

In Lansing, Mich., on Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators honked from their cars and some waved flags on the State Capitol grounds at a protest called “Operation Gridlock.” In Frankfort, Ky., dozens of people shouted through a Capitol building window as Gov. Andy Beshear held a virus briefing. And in Raleigh, N.C., a woman was arrested after violating the governor’s stay-at-home order at a protest that drew at least 100 people on Tuesday, The News & Observer reported.

More protests are planned in other states, including Texas, Oregon and Washington, as the economic and health effects of the coronavirus continue to worsen, with more than 28,000 people dead and at least 16 million out of work. The demonstrations are a sign that despite the rising death toll and pleas of public health experts, some workers are growing agitated about lost wages, emergency orders and the tightening restrictions that governors have placed on their movements.



A small-business loan program is nearly out of money.

Funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, an initiative created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law to help small businesses weather the crisis, could run out as early as Wednesday night, amid a standoff in Congress over replenishing it.

congressional leaders and the Trump administration have failed to reach agreement on adding hundreds of billions of dollars to replenish the program, hamstrung by a dispute over whether to enact sweeping changes to how it allocates loans to businesses across the country.

Democrats support additional spending but have insisted on attaching new restrictions to ensure the money flows to minority-owned businesses and other companies that are traditionally disadvantaged in the lending market.

The small-business loan program — which enjoys broad bipartisan support — was among the first to be unveiled, but its introduction has been plagued with problems even as businesses have inundated banks with requests for a piece of the money.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and aides to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Speaker Nancy Pelosi conferred later in the day and were expected to continue discussions on Thursday.



Trump’s move to freeze aid to the W.H.O. draws condemnation.

President Trump’s public campaign against the World Health Organization — and his order to freeze all money to the group in the middle of a pandemic — is the culmination of mounting anger among his White House advisers, Republican lawmakers and conservative news media about the organization’s lavish praise of China’s response to the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump’s decision to attack the W.H.O., a unit of the United Nations, comes as he is under intense fire at home for his administration’s failure to respond aggressively to the virus, which as of Wednesday had claimed more than 25,000 lives in the United States and infected at least 600,000 people. There are cases in all 50 states.

The director general of the organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on Wednesday expressed dismay that Mr. Trump was calling to halt funding as the W.H.O. fights the pandemic.

“W.H.O. is not only fighting Covid-19,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said. “We’re also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, H.I.V., tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health and many other diseases and conditions.”

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, praised the organization on Wednesday in tones at odds with the president’s harsh criticism. He told “CBS This Morning” that questions about the W.H.O.’s pandemic response should be left until “after we get through this.”

The president’s decision came amid concerns about the W.H.O.’s approach to China. Inside the West Wing, officials said, there was near-unanimous agreement among the president’s advisers that the W.H.O. was heavily influenced by the Chinese government and too slow to sound the alarm because it trusted China’s assurances that the virus was under control and did not pose a global threat.

N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count. UPDATES

The city has added more than 3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive.

New York City, already a world epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700 victims on Tuesday, after officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.


The new figures, released by the city’s Health Department, drove up the number of people killed in New York City to more than 10,000, and appeared to increase the overall United States death count by 17 percent to more than 26,000.

The numbers brought into clearer focus the staggering toll the virus has already taken on the largest city in the United States, where deserted streets are haunted by the near-constant howl of ambulance sirens. Far more people have died in New York City, on a per-capita basis, than in Italy — the hardest-hit country in Europe.

And in a city reeling from the overt danger posed by the virus, top health officials said they had identified another grim reality: The outbreak is likely to have also led indirectly to a spike in deaths of New Yorkers who may never have been infected.

Three thousand more people died in New York City between March 11 and April 13 than would have been expected during the same time period in an ordinary year, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the commissioner of the city Health Department, said in an interview. While these so-called excess deaths were not explicitly linked to the virus, they might not have happened had the outbreak not occurred, in part because it overwhelmed the normal health care system.




What Doctors on the Front Lines Wish They’d Known a Month Ago. Ironclad emergency medical practices — about when to use ventilators, for example — have dissolved almost overnight.

Just about a month ago, people stricken with the new coronavirus started to arrive in unending ranks at hospitals in the New York metropolitan area, forming the white-hot center of the pandemic in the United States.

Now, doctors in the region have started sharing on medical grapevines what it has been like to re-engineer, on the fly, their health care systems, their practice of medicine, their personal lives.

Doctors, if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourselves in early March?

“What we thought we knew, we don’t know,” said Dr. Nile Cemalovic, an intensive care physician at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx.

Medicine routinely remakes itself, generation by generation. For the disease that drives this pandemic, certain ironclad emergency medical practices have dissolved almost overnight.

The biggest change: Instead of quickly sedating people who had shockingly low levels of oxygen and then putting them on mechanical ventilators, many doctors are now keeping patients conscious, having them roll over in bed, recline in chairs and continue to breathe on their own — with additional oxygen — for as long as possible.

The idea is to get them off their backs and thereby make more lung available. A number of doctors are even trying patients on a special massage mattress designed for pregnant women because it has cutouts that ease the load on the belly and chest.
ther doctors are rejiggering CPAP breathing machines, normally used to help people with sleep apnea, or they have hacked together valves and filters. For some critically ill patients, a ventilator may be the only real hope.

Then there is the space needed inside of buildings and people’s heads. In an instant, soaring atrium lobbies and cafeterias became hospital wards; rarely-used telemedicine technology has suddenly taken off, and doctors are holding virtual bedside conferences with scattered family members; physicians force themselves to peel away psychically and emotionally from fields of battle where the opponent never observes the cease-fire that the rest of society has entered.

“Never in my life have I had to ask a patient to get off the telephone because it was time to put in a breathing tube,” said Dr. Richard Levitan, who recently spent 10 days at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.

Why is this so odd? People who need breathing tubes, which connect to mechanical ventilators that assist or take over respiration, are rarely in any shape to be on the phone because the level of oxygen in their blood has declined precipitously.

If conscious, they are often incoherent and are about to be sedated so they do not gag on the tubes. It is a drastic step.

Yet many Covid-19 patients remain alert, even when their oxygen has sharply fallen, for reasons health care workers can only guess. (Another important signal about how sick the patients are from Covid-19 — the presence of inflammatory markers in the blood — is not available to physicians until laboratory work is done.)

Some patients, by taking oxygen and rolling onto their sides or on their bellies, have quickly returned to normal levels. The tactic is called proning.

Doctors at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan have described it on Twitter; a flier is posted next to beds at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens as a guide for patients on how often to turn themselves.

At Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, Dr. Nicholas Caputo followed 50 patients who arrived with low oxygen levels between 69 and 85 percent (95 is normal). After five minutes of proning, they had improved to a mean of 94 percent. Over the next 24 hours, nearly three-quarters were able to avoid intubation; 13 needed ventilators. Proning does not seem to work as well in older patients, a number of doctors said.

No one knows yet if this will be a lasting remedy, Dr. Caputo said, but if he could go back to early March, he would advise himself and others: “Don’t jump to intubation.”

The total number of people who are intubated is now increasing by 21 per day, down from about 300 at the end of March. The need for mechanical ventilators, while still urgent, has been less than the medical community anticipated a month ago.

One reason is that contrary to expectations, a number of doctors at New York hospitals believe intubation is helping fewer people with Covid-19 than other respiratory illnesses and that longer stays on the mechanical ventilators lead to other serious complications. The matter is far from settled.

“Intubated patients with Covid lung disease are doing very poorly, and while this may be the disease and not the mechanical ventilation, most of us believe that intubation is to be avoided until unequivocally required,” Dr. Strayer said.

This shift has lightened the load on nursing staffs and the rest of the hospital. “You put a tube into somebody,” Dr. Levitan said, “and the amount of work required not to kill that person goes up by a factor of 100,” creating a cascade that slows down laboratory results, X-rays and other care.

By committing all the resources of the hospital to highly complex care, mass mechanical ventilation of patients forms a medical Maginot line.

For heavier patients, Dr. Levitan advocates combining breathing support from a CPAP machine or regular oxygen with comfortable positioning on a pregnancy massage mattress. He had one shipped to the hotel where he was staying in New York and brought it to Bellevue.

The first patient to rest on it arrived with oxygen saturation in the 40s, breathing rapidly and with an abnormally fast heartbeat, he said. After the patient was given oxygen through a nasal cannula — clear plastic tubes that fit into the nostrils — Dr. Levitan helped her to lie face down on the massage table. The oxygen level in her blood climbed to the mid-90s, he said, her pulse slowed to under 100 and she was breathing at a more normal pace. “She slept for two hours,” he said.

His brothers are donating more mattresses. “We have to see how it pans out, but it makes a lot of sense,” Dr. Swaminathan said. “Obesity is clearly a critical risk factor.”

Dr. Josh Farkas, who specializes in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Vermont, said the risks of proning were low. “This is a simple technique which is safe and fairly easy to do,” Dr. Farkas said. “I started doing this some years ago in occasional patients, but never imagined that it would become this widespread and useful.”

PIERS MORGAN: America doesn't want a King Trump, still less a deluded, boastful, petty and spiteful Emperor with no clothes

It's become an increasingly nauseating spectacle and last night, President Trump reached a new low with a press briefing performance that was frankly an utter disgrace. In a preposterous claim, Trump announced he has 'total authority' as President to make any decision he likes. When asked if he could order state governors to remove lockdown restrictions and reopen the US economy, Trump replied: 'When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that's the way it's gonna be. It's total. It's total. The governors know that.' He was immediately challenged by CNN's Kaitlan Collins who said, 'that is not true', and asked him which governors had agreed that he could overrule them. 'I haven't asked anybody,' Trump snarled back. 'You know why? Because I don't have to.' When Collins courageously persisted, saying 'but who told you the president has total authority?' Trump simply raised his finger and said: 'Enough.' Yet she was right, and he was wrong. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose calm, authoritative leadership during the crisis has been a masterclass in how to handle such a seismic event, was quick to deny Trump's absurd claim. 'The president does not have total authority,' he said. 'We have a constitution, we don't have a king.' Exactly. Nor does America have an Emperor, much as Donald Trump likes to think he's one.

Why Biden’s Polling Lead vs. Trump Isn’t as Solid as It Looks

Consider two important measurement differences: battleground states versus other states, and registered voters versus likely voters.





NY TIMES

President Trump and Joe Biden begin the general election campaign locked in a highly competitive contest that remains fought along the lines of the 2016 presidential election, according to national and battleground state polls.

If anyone holds the early edge, it is Mr. Biden. He leads by an average of six points in national live-interview polls of registered voters. But the election will be decided by voters in the battleground states, not registered voters nationwide, and there the story is not nearly so clear or rosy for Mr. Biden.

At the moment, a reasonable estimate is that Mr. Biden is performing four or five points worse among likely voters in the critical states than he is among registered voters nationwide. As a result, he holds only a narrow and tenuous edge in the race for the Electoral College, if he holds one at all.

Even under ordinary circumstances, with seven months to go until the election, there would be plenty of time for the race to change. This cycle, the country also faces a pandemic and a severe economic downturn with the potential to upend the race.

Already, an initial uptick in the president’s approval rating has dissipated, perhaps because a rallying effect has given way to more focus on the administration’s coronavirus response. There will be many opportunities for the polls to shift again, and the president faces many downside risks without a return to normal life and to economic growth before the election.

But at least for now, the polls suggest that American voters are divided along familiar lines, despite countless events that seemed to have the potential to redraw them.

The president begins the campaign with strong support from the white working class who powered his upset win four years ago. He leads among white voters without a college degree, 61 percent to 32 percent, in an average of live-interview polls conducted since March 15, matching or perhaps even exceeding his margin over Hillary Clinton in methodologically similar polls conducted late in the 2016 campaign.

Voters Remain Divided Along Lines of 2016 Election

National polls continue to show a wide split between white voters with or without a college degree. 

The percentage-point Democratic lead by voter group in pre-election polls of registered voters

60

40

20

0

-20

Nonwhite

White

White, 4-year degree

White, no 4-year degree

2004

2008

2012

2016

2020

By The New York Times | Source: Upshot analysis of live-interview R.D.D. poll data from the Roper Center, ABC/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Monmouth University,

The results suggest that Mr. Biden, despite his reputed appeal to blue-collar workers, has made little to no progress in winning back the white voters without a college degree who supported Barack Obama in 2012 but swung to Mr. Trump in 2016.

Mr. Biden counters with a wide lead among white voters with a college degree, who support him by a similar or greater margin than they did Mrs. Clinton four years ago. Over all, he leads, 55-40, among that group of registered voters in an average of recent surveys.

Mr. Biden also holds the expected wide advantage among nonwhite voters, though here there is consistent evidence of a small yet discernible shift in the president’s direction, including in the large series of New York Times/Siena College polls from last November. Mr. Trump, in contrast, seems to do a tick worse among white voters than he did four years ago, whether because of a slight decrease in his standing among college-educated white voters or the growing share of white voters who possess a four-year degree.

As a result, Mr. Trump appears to retain his relative advantage in the disproportionately white working-class battleground states that decided the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Biden leads in polls of registered voters in these states, but by a narrower margin than he leads nationwide. It raises the possibility that Democrats could win the most votes and lose the White House for the third time in six presidential elections.

How Battleground States Compare  

There have been few state polls, but so far Joe Biden is doing better nationwide than he is in battleground states.

Average lead for Mr. Biden in live-interview polls conducted since Jan. 1, 2020

United States (24 polls)

Michigan (6)

Arizona (3)

New Hampshire (2)

Pennsylvania (3)

Wisconsin (7)

Florida (2)

Texas (7)

Iowa (2)

+6.2

+4.1

+4.0

+3.0

+2.1

+1.1

-1.0

-2.2

-6.0

Includes polls with any live-interview component. Poll results weighted by the square root of the number of polls conducted by a pollster in a geographic area. Shows only battleground states with more than one general election poll.

By The New York Times

Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2016, has backed Mr. Biden by just over one percentage point in an average of seven live-interview surveys conducted so far this year, compared with a six-point Biden lead in national surveys over the same period.

Mr. Trump’s relative advantage in the Electoral College, though persistent so far, is not unshakable. To this point, his apparent strength in Wisconsin has tended to expand his Electoral College advantage. But a fairly modest shift in that state or another could expand or contract it.

Arizona and Florida are two possible candidates. White voters without a degree represent a smaller share of the electorate in those states than they do in the Midwest. Arizona polls in particular give Democrats some cause for hope: Mr. Biden has led live-interview polls by four points in Arizona. A breakthrough by Democrats in Arizona would essentially cancel out their weakness in Wisconsin. It would make Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden leads by about two points, the pivotal state on the electoral map.

One reason for Mr. Biden’s strength in Arizona and Florida might be older voters, who represent an above-average share of white voters in the two states. On average, Mr. Biden leads among voters over age 65 by a margin of 53 percent to 44 percent nationwide, including a lead in every live-interview national poll reporting a result for the group. It is a substantial improvement over Mrs. Clinton’s six-point deficit among the group in pre-election polls in 2016.

Mr. Biden’s early strength among older voters is not easy to explain. It cannot be fully accounted for by the changing composition of each age group, although the ascent of the baby boomers into the oldest age cohort may be part of the reason, along with the gradual departure of the more conservative Silent Generation from the electorate altogether. Mr. Trump seems to have made gains among voters 45 to 65, or perhaps even younger, canceling out his losses among older voters over all.

Mr. Biden’s relative strength among older voters may also help counteract his expected weakness among likely voters, relative to registered voters, when pollsters apply likely-voter screens later in the cycle. In polling, Republicans usually fare about two points better among likely voters than registered voters, who tend to be relatively young and diverse.

This cycle, the coronavirus pandemic raises additional questions about the eventual turnout, particularly if it leads to widespread voting by mail. But no matter the method, Democrats typically find themselves at a turnout disadvantage, and it is doubtful that Mr. Biden will maintain the whole of his current polling advantage among likely voters. Even when Democrats benefited from a surge in turnout in well-educated suburbs during the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans fared better among likely voters than among registered voters.

Together, Mr. Trump’s relative advantage of one to two points among likely voters compared with registered voters — and his relative advantage of three and even four points in the tipping-point states — means that the typical national poll of registered voters is probably around four or five points worse for Mr. Trump than his standing among likely voters in the most pivotal states. Mr. Biden’s already narrow polling lead in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Arizona might be vanishingly small after a likely voter screen.

Of course, no one knows what American life will look like by the time of the election. Perhaps the country will still be in lockdown, saddled by 30 percent unemployment, and convinced that the president’s slow response cost lives and damaged the economy. Or maybe the country will be swept by euphoria as lockdowns are lifted a month or two ahead of the election and a liberated population sends its children to school, visits friends, goes to the park and enjoys double-digit G.D.P. growth in the third quarter.

The pandemic also could change how the election is administered, potentially yielding a novel turnout that’s impossible to predict at this stage. It undoubtedly has the potential to reshape the views of the electorate, even if it hasn’t done so yet.

‘Worst Is Over,’ Cuomo Says as States Snub Trump on Restarting Economy. UPDATES

Northeastern governors ally to plan for lifting virus restrictions, and Western states also announce they will work together to plan for the future.


With the number of new deaths and rate of hospitalizations falling in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that “the worst is over” in the coronavirus pandemic, and he announced an alliance with six other Northeastern governors to explore how to eventually lift restrictions — a move that appeared to be an implicit rebuke to President Trump.

The governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts and Rhode Island said they would begin to draw up a plan for when to reopen businesses and schools, and how quickly to allow people to return to work safely, although the timeline for such a plan remained unclear.


“If you do it wrong, it can backfire, and we’ve seen that with other places in the globe,” Mr. Cuomo said. “What the art form is going to be here is doing that smartly and doing that in a coordinated way.”


India extends nationwide lockdown, ordering more than 1 billion people to remain at home.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India extended a nationwide lockdown on Tuesday for nearly three more weeks, preventing more than 1 billion from leaving their homes.

He lauded  the country for acting aggressively against the coronavirus and urged Indians not to “let our guard down.”

In an address to the nation, Mr. Modi said extending the existing 21-day lockdown until May 3 was necessary to prevent a spike in cases and that tougher restrictions could follow. He applauded Indians for following the measures “like a dedicated soldier.”

“If you look at it only economically, it has been expensive,” Mr. Modi said of the lockdown. “But you can’t put a price on the lives of Indians.”

Mr. Modi said some relaxations to the lockdown could be implemented after April 20 in certain areas if they showed strict observance of the rules. But for now he urged all 1.3 billion Indians to wear masks, stay inside, respect health care workers and help older people.

India has a relatively low number of confirmed infections, with about 10,000 cases, 339 deaths and a doubling rate of about six days. But a rapid spread could be devastating. Health care facilities are poor, and hundreds of millions of Indians live in dense urban areas, making it difficult to follow social distancing.

Thousands of migrant workers were initially trapped in big cities, far from their home villages. Some embarked on hundred-mile journeys by foot to reach their homes.

“If we have patience, we will defeat the coronavirus,” he said.



Cuomo: ‘The worst is over’ if New Yorkers remain resolute.

“I believe the worst is over if we continue to be smart,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily briefing. “I believe we can start on the path to normalcy.”

But the governor wavered on the pronouncement several times. Asked a follow-up question at the briefing about whether he was confident the worst was indeed over, Mr. Cuomo said he was not. He repeated that the state was experiencing plateaus in key categories, but that if New Yorkers did not continue to follow the current restrictions, the situation would worsen.

He said the number of deaths, while “basically flat,” was “basically flat at a horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow.”

Still, despite there being more than 5,000 virus-related deaths in the state in the past week and nearly 19,000 people still in hospitals, Mr. Cuomo noted that most of the main measures of the outbreak’s severity were either leveling off or decreasing:

The state’s one-day toll of 671 deaths, while still “horrific,” Mr. Cuomo said, was the lowest it had been in a week. The total has been below last week’s peak, 799, for the past four days.

The number of intubated patients — most of whom, he said, would never recover — had dropped in two of the past three days.

The number of newly hospitalized patients, 1,958, was the lowest it had been in two weeks.

The three-day average increase in the number of hospitalized patients dropped to 85, the smallest increase to date.

The number of people who tested positive for the virus on Sunday, 6,337, was the lowest it has been in almost three weeks. The state has 195,031 confirmed virus cases, 106,673 of them in New York City.

Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have emphasized for the past several days that any return to a semblance of normal life in the city and state will proceed in phases, during which  restrictions will be eased based on measurable progress against the virus.

The governor on Monday said that even if he were correct that the worst had passed, it could easily take 12 to 18 months for the state’s economy to return to normal.

Over 20 N.Y.C. public schoolteachers have died of the virus.

The virus has caused the deaths of at least 50 Education Department employees, including 21 teachers, in New York City, officials said on Monday.

The dead include Sandra Santos-Vizcaino, 54, a third-grade teacher at Public School 9 in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, who died March 31, and Dez-Ann Romain, the principal at Brooklyn Democracy Academy in the Brownsville section. She died on March 23 at 36.

Among the other Education Department employees who have died, 22 were paraprofessionals who provided support for children with disabilities, and two were school administrators. The dead also included a guidance counselor, a member of the food staff, and two employees at the department’s central office.



Virus-related hospital admissions dropped in N.Y.C., the mayor said.

The number of virus patients admitted to hospitals in New York City dropped 17 percent from Saturday to Sunday, Mr. de Blasio said early Monday.

The mayor said that 383 people had been admitted on Sunday, down from 463 the day before.

In other encouraging news, Mr. de Blasio said that the number of people in intensive-care units in the city’s public hospitals had also declined, although only slightly, to 835 from 857.

The developments came as the mayor unveiled a new public effort to track the three measures he has said must move downward consistently and in unison for New York City to lift the restrictions that have shut down the city.

The measure are: the number of people suspected of having the virus who are admitted to hospitals; the number of people suspected of having the virus who are admitted to intensive care units; and the percentage of people who test positive for the virus.

“I’m pleased to report we do see all the important indicators moving in the right direction,” the mayor said. But as he has for several days, he emphasized that any change in the city’s restrictions was also contingent on more widespread testing than was currently available.

Other highlights from the mayor’s morning briefing included:

The suspension of alternate-side parking rules has been extended to April 28.

He called on the Rent Guidelines Board to enact a rent freeze.

He urged the state to let tenants who have lost income because of the virus defer the payment of rent and repay over a 12-month period.


People who see violations of social-distancing rules will soon be able to report them by sending a photograph, along with location information, to 311.

Liberal challenger defeats conservative incumbent in Wisconsin Supreme Court race

A liberal challenger defeated the conservative incumbent for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a key race at the heart of Democratic accusations that Republicans risked voters’ health and safety by going forward with last week’s elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Jill Karofsky beat Daniel Kelly, whom then-Gov. Scott Walker (R) appointed to the state’s high court in 2016. Trump endorsed Kelly and on Election Day urged Wisconsin voters “to get out and vote NOW” for the justice.

With 90 percent of returns counted, Karofsky led Kelly by more than 100,000 votes, about seven percentage points.

Heavy mail-in balloting may have upended assumptions about relative advantage; according to statistics issued Monday by the state Elections Commission, nearly 1.1 million Wisconsinites cast ballots that way, nearly as many as total turnout in last year’s Supreme Court race — and more than the total turnout in the court races in each of the previous two years.

GOP maneuvering could ultimately prove to be a miscalculation, especially if a spike in coronavirus infections becomes apparent in the coming days that can be attributed to in-person voting last week.

Republicans entered the election with a 5-2 majority on the state Supreme Court, meaning that a Democratic victory still leaves liberals in the minority until 2023, the next time a conservative justice will face voters.

But an ongoing legal battle over a voter roll purge raised the stakes of this year’s election, with implications for November. Kelly recused himself, and conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with voting rights groups to halt the purge. That left the court deadlocked 3-3 and gave Democrats a shot at stopping the purge, one of their top priorities ahead of the 2020 election.


Trump’s propaganda-laden, off-the-rails coronavirus briefing

Near the start of his daily coronavirus briefing on Monday, President Trump made a statement that betrayed, better than just about anything, how he views the purpose of such briefings.

Before playing a campaign-style video intended to show his decisive action on the virus and to accuse his critics of being the actual culprits on downplaying the threat, Trump cued it up by talking about what he wanted to do after it played.

“Most importantly,” he said, “we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here, which is the success we’re having.”

Trump’s self-promotion, falsehoods and use of dodgy medical advice in these coronavirus briefings have led to a dialogue about whether networks should carry them live. And on Monday, he seemed to be daring all of them to stop, turning the whole thing into a spectacle of government-produced propaganda and even more personal score-settling and grievances.

Most notable was the video that was played. In it, media figures were shown early in the outbreak comparing the virus to the seasonal flu, as Trump has been criticized for doing much later on. Other clips played up the impact of his ban on travel from China, while yet more showed Trump personally making pronouncements about the steps he was taking — even at a time he was repeatedly and much more strongly downplaying the threat of the virus.

Trump was pressed on the production of the video, and he said it was made by White House officials.

Trump proceeded to downplay many complaints about the federal response, going so far as to say that there is no problem with the number of ventilators and other equipment available. The reality is significantly different, according to the states.

Trump also at one point maintained, “Everything we did was right.” When pressed on the claim, he declined to restate it but cast blame on governors for not stockpiling more ventilators.

It was soon noted that the video Trump had cued up left out a significant chunk of time in February — after the China travel ban and before Trump acknowledged the severity of the situation in mid-March — in which he didn’t take significant steps.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has rebuked President Trump's claims that he has blanket authority to order a reopening of the country and cease stay-at-home orders, saying Monday night that the last time he checked the US had 'a constitution...not a king'. In a heated press conference inside the White House on Monday evening, Trump asserted that his office holds 'absolute power' over the shutdowns prompted by the novel coronavirus outbreak, hours after Cuomo and governors from eight other states unveiled their own multi-state pact to co-ordinate their eventual re-openings. 'When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,' Trump told reporters, declining to specify where his authority to overrule states resides when pressed by DailyMail.com. 'The federal government has absolute power.' But Trump's claims of total authority were quickly refuted by Cuomo, who slammed the president's 'abrogation of the Constitution' in an interview on MSNBC.