Here’s what you need to know:
- As April ends, states ask: What can open, and what needs to stay closed?
- New Jersey is reporting more new daily deaths than any state.
- Democrats assail McConnell for calling the Senate back.
- Nursing homes will face federal inspections, Trump says.
- More airlines are requiring crews and passengers to wear masks.
- Trump officials are said to have pushed spies to hunt for unproven links between the virus and a lab in Wuhan.
- Unemployment claims pass 30 million. That’s likely an undercount.
As April ends, states ask: What can open, and what needs to stay closed?
States around the country continued on Thursday to navigate a high-stakes public-health balancing act, with some preparing to ease coronavirus restrictions and others imposing new ones — all under the watchful eye of stir-crazy residents eager to return to their favorite stores, restaurants and beaches.
In California, Florida and other coastal states, governors wrestled with squaring constituents’ demands for relief from the spring heat against the potentially lethal consequences of loosening social distancing rules in ways that might make beach blankets and lawn chairs new virus hot spots.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Thursday shut down the beaches in Orange County, rolling back earlier attempts at giving people there a chance to stroll along the shore while staying a safe distance from one another. But Alabama moved to reopen its beaches, and Texas will do the same in parts of the state on Friday, even as health experts warn that doing so could produce a surge in new virus cases.
“This disease isn’t going away,” Mr. Newsom warned, noting that the pandemic had claimed at least 95 lives in California in the previous 24 hours.
Still, millions more Americans will soon be able to eat at restaurants and shop in stores by Friday, the first day of May. Governors in several states — including Alabama, Maine, Tennessee and Texas — planned to allow stay-at-home orders to expire, paving the way for certain businesses to reopen and ending an unparalleled month in which nine in 10 residents in the United States were told to stay at home to help stop the spread of the virus.
Federal guidelines encouraging people to curtail nearly all public activities were also poised to expire Thursday, after President Trump indicated he did not intend to extend them. Iowa, North Dakota and Wyoming were among the other states planning to ease their rules.
The latest reopenings represent a pivotal moment in America’s response to the virus, even as the number of deaths from it in the United States has surged past 60,000. Texas is expected to take one of the most expansive actions on Friday, allowing retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters and malls to reopen and operate at 25 percent capacity.
But figuring out how to keep coastal areas safe through a patchwork of evolving rules represents one of the toughest dilemmas for state officials. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has resisted pressure to close all beaches, insisting that the decision should be made locally. The governors of states as disparate politically as Texas, Alabama and New Jersey all moved this week to loosen similar restrictions.
On both coasts, access to the ocean has taken on a more practical attraction: Temperatures in California reached 100 degrees last week, and parts of Florida have been experiencing record heat, making beaches one of the few places for residents without pools to cool off outdoors.
“The beach is sort of this sacred space, almost, for Florida,” said Craig Pittman, the author of five books about the state. “A lot of people who grew up here think of it as, ‘That’s my beach.’ If you can’t go to the beach, what is Florida?”
New Jersey is reporting more new daily deaths than any state.
New Jersey reported 460 new virus-related deaths on Thursday, more than any other state in the nation.
The state is now reporting more new deaths than its neighbor, New York, which saw 306 new deaths on Thursday, less than half of what it was reporting each day when the outbreak peaked there this month.
“This is the single biggest day that we’ve had,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said, calling the daily toll “a very sobering number.”
The increase came in a week when Mr. Murphy, encouraged by other measures that showed New Jersey making progress in fighting the virus, began to sketch out how the state might reopen in the weeks ahead. The plans include the reopening of state and county parks on Saturday, a move Mr. Murphy attributed to steady declines in virus-related hospitalizations and the rate of positive tests.
New Jersey has had the second-highest number of virus cases in the United States, behind only New York. So far, at least 7,228 residents have died, a figure Mr. Murphy called “staggering.”
Mr. Murphy warned weeks ago that both the outbreak and the state’s efforts to fight it trailed what was happening in New York.
“We’re a couple of beats behind New York,” he said on April 13 at a news conference with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and several other governors. At the time, the number of deaths in New York was surging even as hospitalizations had started to level off.
Democrats assail McConnell for calling the Senate back.
Senator Mitch McConnell’s plan to bring the Senate back to Washington next week drew criticism on Thursday from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, who said it could endanger not only lawmakers and their aides but also low-level workers, many of whom are minorities and at higher risk of infection and death.
Democrats have been particularly critical of the decision to return given that Mr. McConnell has not scheduled any virus-related work and is instead planning to move ahead on nominations, including of a judge nominated for a federal appeals court.
Mr. McConnell’s announcement comes as virus cases keep rising in the District of Columbia, where nearly half the population is black. District residents are still bound by a stay-at-home order.
Democratic leaders scrapped their plans to call the House back into session next week, saying they were acting on the advice of Congress’s attending physician, who told them it was a health risk.
Eight Capitol Police officers and 11 facilities workers have already tested positive, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, wrote in a letter to Mr. McConnell, adding that, “returning the Senate for nonessential business is not worth the risk.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said her new plan was to reconvene the week of May 11 and begin consideration of another sweeping response measure that could top $1 trillion. She said the measure would include funding for state, local, tribal and municipal governments, which Mr. McConnell has resisted.
Mr. Trump suggested Thursday evening that he was in no hurry to pass more aid for states, saying at a White House briefing that “the Republican-run states are in strong shape,” a dynamic that he suggested would strengthen his “negotiating position.”
He said that he would look at the issue, after a pause. “If we do that, we’ll have to get something for it,” he said.
Nursing homes will face federal inspections, Trump says.
President Trump announced that the federal government would increase inspections of nursing homes, which have been at the center of the pandemic. The facilities would be required to report cases directly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with testing data posted online.
“I guess you could call it a little bit of a weak spot because things are happening at the nursing homes that we are not happy about,” Mr. Trump said at the White House during an event focused on protecting older Americans from the virus. “We don’t want to have them happen, so we will be taking care of it very carefully and methodically.”
The inspections will be financed by money from the federal relief packages approved by Congress, Mr. Trump said. Testing data from nursing homes will be posted online, and facilities will be required to report cases to residents and their family members, the president said. Mr. Trump said a commission of industry experts, doctors, scientists, family members and patient advocates would be formed to monitor safety and quality.
The announcement reiterated a significant effort to address one of the deadliest settings of the pandemic in the United States. The virus has devastated nursing homes, which house the infirm and elderly, often with insufficient resources.
“This is a big deal,” said Dr. Kevin Kavanaugh, a Kentucky physician who has lobbied for greater transparency from nursing homes. “If you report these pathogens, you’re able to better formulate strategies to prevent them from coming in,” he said. “If you cover up the problem, you have no idea how to stop it from happening.”
The New York Times has identified more than 6,400 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities across the United States with coronavirus cases. More than 100,000 residents and staff members at those facilities have contracted the virus, and more than 17,000 have died. That means more than a quarter of the deaths in the pandemic have been linked to long-term care facilities.
More airlines are requiring crews and passengers to wear masks.
After flight attendants and pilots criticized them for not doing more to protect employees, large airlines in the United States and around the world announced this week that they would require their crews to wear masks.
Some went even further and said passengers would have to do so, too.
American Airlines and Delta Air Lines said Thursday that they would start requiring all passengers to wear a face covering in the coming weeks, a policy that would also apply to their flight attendants. They join Lufthansa, JetBlue and Frontier Airlines, all of which made similar announcements this week.
Southwest Airlines said this week that its flight attendants would soon be wearing masks, joining United Airlines, which announced a similar policy late last week.
Airlines have been slow to require masks in part because they have been hard to come by, and labor unions like the Association of Flight Attendants have been pushing for federal policies to make masks mandatory.
So far, the Trump administration has resisted a mask mandate.
For many flight crews, the risk of infection has been mitigated by the nearly complete drop-off in air travel. Most planes are flying virtually empty. But some early data suggest that air travel might be past its lowest point of the crisis.
Trump officials are said to have pushed spies to hunt for unproven links between the virus and a lab in Wuhan.
Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the outbreak, according to current and former American officials. The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.
Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from administration officials will distort assessments about the virus and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with Beijing over the outbreak that has infected more than three million people across the globe.
Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.
For months, spies and government officials have wrestled with varying theories about how the outbreak began. Many agree on the importance of determining the genesis of the pandemic. In government and academia, however, experts have ruled out the notion that it was concocted as a bioweapon. And they agree that the new pathogen began as a bat virus that evolved naturally, probably in another mammal, to become adept at infecting and killing humans.
Mr. Trump leaned into the theory that it originated in a Chinese lab at a White House briefing Thursday evening, but offered no evidence. Asked if he had seen anything that gave him a high degree of confidence that the virus had originated at the lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Mr. Trump replied, “Yes, I have.” But asked what gave him that confidence, he said, “I can’t tell you that; I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
Unemployment claims pass 30 million. That’s likely an undercount.
The figures announced Thursday by the Labor Department brought the number of workers joining the official jobless ranks in the last six weeks to more than 30 million, underscoring just how dire economic conditions remain.
Many state agencies still find themselves overwhelmed by the flood of claims, leaving perhaps millions with dwindling resources to pay the rent or put food on the table.
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If anything, the job losses may be far worse than government figures indicate, according to many economists. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that roughly 50 percent more people than counted as filing claims in a recent four-week period may have qualified for benefits but were stymied in applying or did not even try because they found the process too formidable.
“The problem is even bigger than the data suggest,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with the institute, a left-leaning research group. “We’re undercounting the economic pain.”
As Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano reported, systems that were devised to treat each unemployment case as potentially fraudulent are now rushing to deal with millions of newly unemployed people.
The state unemployment systems that were supposed to help millions of jobless workers were full of boxes to check and mandates to meet that couldn’t possibly apply in a pandemic.
States required workers to document their job searches, weekly; to register with employment services, in person; to take a wait period before their first check, up to 10 days.
Such requirements increased in the years following the Great Recession, as many states moved to tighten access to or reduce unemployment benefits. With them, most states cut the share of jobless workers they helped.
Now these requirements have been getting in the way. Effectively, many states have been trying to scale up aid with systems built to keep claims low.
Stocks fell on Thursday, giving up some of their gains from the day before, after the weekly unemployment report. The S&P 500 closed down nearly 1 percent.
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New York City will halt subway service between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. to disinfect trains.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Thursday that the New York City subway would halt service from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. each night so trains could be disinfected.
The policy will go into effect next Wednesday, the governor said. Public transit in New York City is the only system in the United States, and among the relatively few in the world, that runs 24 hours a day.
“This is as ambitious as anything we’ve ever undertaken,” Mr. Cuomo said.
He said that shuttle buses, dollar vans and even for-hire vehicles would provide what he called an “essential connector” during those hours to transport workers who needed to get to their jobs.
The announcement came after days of building tension over homeless people using subway trains as an alternative form of shelter and creating what many felt were unsanitary conditions on trains. On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo, who effectively controls the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the transit system, had declared the situation “disgusting.”
The governor said Thursday that Mayor Bill de Blasio would help lead the effort to coordinate transportation during the subway’s service gaps, and praised the mayor for his cooperation.
Mr. de Blasio, appearing at Mr. Cuomo’s briefing via video, said that the effort would be a way to help homeless people, whose life on the subways he called “an unacceptable reality.”
Gilead plans to give away the first 1.5 million doses of remdesivir, if the F.D.A. grants approval.
Gilead Sciences plans to give away the first 1.5 million doses of remdesivir, an antiviral drug shown to modestly reduce recovery time in virus patients, if the Food and Drug Administration grants emergency approval.
Gilead could charge for the drug under a so-called emergency use authorization from the agency. But at least at the beginning, Gilead will provide the drug free of charge, Dan O’Day, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Thursday.
The company started planning in January to manufacture remdesivir in large quantities, well before large federal trial of the antiviral drug began at the end of February.
The results, announced by administration officials on Wednesday, showed that patients receiving the drug recovered in 11 days on average, compared with 15 days for patients receiving a placebo.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the results were “a very important proof of concept” but not a “knockout.”
Gilead has about 1.5 million vials of remdesivir on hand, enough to treat 140,000 to 150,000 patients with a 10-day course, Mr. O’Day said. Gilead should have enough to treat 500,000 patients by the fall, and one million by December, he added.
Gilead has not decided yet on whether or what to charge for the drug in the long run, Mr. O’Day said.
Gilead has a controversial history with drug pricing, noted Aaron Kesselheim, a health care economist at Harvard.
The company bought a drug that cured hepatitis C from a small company, and then charged so much for it that many state Medicaid programs and prison systems could not afford it.
Dr. Kesselheim said pricing for remdesivir should take into account a large public investment in the drug. It was developed and tested by scientists at Vanderbilt University and Emory University, among other institutions, and the federal trial was taxpayer-funded, he noted.
The Food and Drug Administration has authorized emergency use of a high-pressure ventilator developed by NASA engineers who usually work on interplanetary space missions. The device is one of numerous ventilators and other medical tools that engineers and scientists around the world have devised to help hospitals respond to the strain of Covid-19 cases.
Pence, criticized for going maskless to the Mayo Clinic, wears one to a General Motors plant.
Vice President Mike Pence was photographed wearing a face mask for the first time on Thursday during a visit to a General Motors plant in Indiana.
Mr. Pence was criticized earlier this week for flouting the guidelines of Mayo Clinic that asked for all visitors to wear face masks. Surrounded by administration officials and medical professionals wearing masks, Mr. Pence appeared to be the only person at the clinic who was not covering his face.
At the time, Mr. Pence defended himself, saying he was tested regularly for the coronavirus, so there was no need for him to wear a face mask because he was not at risk of contributing to asymptomatic spread, an argument that experts immediately dismissed as faulty. But in his first public outing since then, Mr. Pence appeared to concede to public pressure and covered his face.
He did not address the fact that he appeared to have ignored the Mayo Clinic’s own guidelines. Administration officials said that Mr. Pence wore the mask in deference to G.M.’s policy at the plant he was visiting. They also said Mr. Pence was never informed of the Mayo Clinic’s policy and indicated Mr. Pence would continue to appear without a mask at other events.
“Mayo Clinic shared the masking policy with the vice president’s office,” said Ginger Plumbo, a spokeswoman for the clinic.
The vice president visited a General Motors plant in his home state that had been converted into a ventilator production site. He participated in a round-table discussion with employees there.
“It’s amazing to think this floor was empty about a month ago,” Mr. Pence said. “It was a partnership to meet a vital need for Americans struggling in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic.”
There’s no evidence that drugs championed by Trump help virus patients, researchers say.
A report from Harvard researchers adds to the growing doubts about chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drugs that Mr. Trump has repeatedly advocated for virus patients.
The drugs “should only be used with caution and in the context of carefully thought out clinical trials, or on a case-by-case basis after rigorous consideration of the risks and benefits,” the researchers wrote, in an article posted Thursday in The Faseb Journal, published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
The authors found evidence that the drugs could harm Covid patients, but no evidence that they could help, in an analysis of 10 published studies.
The drugs can cause dangerous abnormalities in heart rhythm, especially in high doses or when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin — which some doctors have recommended — or with other drugs that may also disrupt heart rhythm.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a similar warning last week, as did the agency led by Dr. Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Harvard researchers also noted that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine affect the immune system, which could have unintended consequences in virus patients, maybe even diminishing their ability to fight it off.
The Army defends a West Point graduation; Chicago offers a virtual one featuring Oprah.
Top Army leaders on Thursday defended their decision to summon 1,000 cadets back to West Point in June for a graduation ceremony featuring a speech by the president. The students would have to return anyway to take physical exams, pack their belongings and move out of their barracks, they said.
Mr. Trump and the academy have been criticized since he abruptly announced on April 17 that he would be speaking at West Point, the only major service academy he had not yet addressed. Students had left campus in early March as the outbreak in New York State intensified.
The West Point superintendent said on Thursday that returning seniors would be screened, tested and quarantined for 14 days before graduation. Ample medical supplies and personnel were on hand, he said, adding, “we’ve created a safety bubble.”
By contrast, the city of Chicago had a workaround for its more than 40,000 graduating high school seniors stuck at home: a virtual commencement ceremony featuring Oprah Winfrey.
The ceremony, details of which are still being worked out, will take place in mid-June. It will include performances, speeches and a keynote address by Ms. Winfrey, who lives and works in the city and will not be paid for her remarks. Students from local private and religious schools will also be included.
In an interview, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago said it had been a difficult period for the city’s students, whose studies and post-graduation plans were affected by a teacher’s strike in addition to school closures.
Macy’s plans to reopen all of its stores in 6 to 8 weeks.
Macy’s, one of the biggest department store chains in the United States, announced on Thursday an ambitious plan to reopen all of its 775 locations, including Bloomingdales and Bluemercury, in the next six to eight weeks, the latest sign of how eager the nation’s largest retailers are to return to business.
The reopening plan will start on Monday with 68 stores in Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, and another 50 locations on May 11. Macy’s said it would reopen stores only in markets where state and local governments said it was safe for nonessential retailers to return to business. The chain temporarily closed its stores on March 18, causing a majority of its sales to disappear, and furloughed most of its 123,000 employees in the past month.
Macy’s expects that its reopened stores will bring in only about 15 to 20 percent of their typical business at first and “slowly build” from there, the company’s chief executive, Jeff Gennette, said during a presentation. He acknowledged that it was an open question as to whether shoppers would return.
There will be new protocols for fitting rooms and beauty counters, associates will wear company-issued cloth masks and sometimes gloves, hand sanitizer stations will be placed by elevators and escalators, and plexiglass barriers will be installed at cash registers.
Need help figuring out the balance between your screens and your life?
Phones and computers are keeping us tethered to the outside world during the pandemic. But being thoughtful about your use of screens can help you emerge from this crisis empowered.
Follow updates on the pandemic from our team of international correspondents.
Britain is not ready to loosen restrictions, even as its neighbors do so. The Russian prime minister says he is sick with the coronavirus.
Reporting was contributed by Emily Badger, Peter Baker, Karen Barrow, Alan Blinder, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Kenneth Chang, Niraj Chokshi, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Maria Cramer, Alan Feuer, Jacey Fortin, Thomas Fuller, Oskar Garcia, Michael Gold, Dana Goldstein, Denise Grady, Shawn Hubler, Danielle Ivory, Annie Karni, Kate Kelly, Gina Kolata, Lisa Lerer, Sapna Maheshwari, David McCabe, Sarah Mervosh, Tariro Mzezewa, Amelia Nierenberg, Alicia Parlapiano, Matt Phillips, Brad Plumer, Matt Richtel, Marc Santora, Eric Schmitt, Ashley Southall, Eileen Sullivan, Kenneth P. Vogel, David Waldstein and David Yaffe-Bellany.
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