Here’s what you need to know:
- Some states are moving to reopen. But the path ahead is far from simple.
- Trump amplifies drugs and disinfectants as treatments, even as experts push back.
- The U.S. conducted 1.2 million tests in a week, but experts say that is not enough.
- Fearing the virus, people with life-threatening emergencies are avoiding hospitals.
- The pandemic has put international students and Americans abroad in a tough spot.
- U.S. scientists join W.H.O. in calling for better coronavirus antibody tests.
- Many unemployed people are not receiving benefits, Pew finds.
Some states are moving to reopen. But the path ahead is far from simple.
Georgia, Alaska and Oklahoma are beginning the reopening process. But even under the most optimistic estimates, it will be months, and possibly years, before Americans crowd into bars and squeeze onto subway cars as they once did.
Politicians and public health experts have sparred for weeks over when, and under what circumstances, to allow businesses to reopen and Americans to emerge from their homes. But another question could prove just as thorny — how?
Because the restart will be gradual, with certain places and industries opening earlier than others, it will be complicated. The American economy is a complex web of supply chains whose dynamics do not necessarily align neatly with epidemiologists’ recommendations.
“It’s going to take much longer to thaw the economy than it took to freeze it,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton.
The openings have elicited passionate criticism, some from residents and business owners and some from higher places. Gov. Brian Kemp’s order for Georgia was criticized as premature this week by President Trump, who has generally expressed eagerness to open the American economy. In Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms went on national television on Friday morning to urge her constituents to stay home. Many listened, though she admonished those who ventured out Saturday.
The relaxed rules, coming as the nation nears a sobering 50,000 deaths from the virus, varied. Alaska allowed limited in-store shopping at retail stores. Oklahoma reopened its state parks. South Carolina, which was in front of the rest of the country in its effort to draw residents out of their homes, once again allowed access to public beaches. And Georgia officials recommended that salon owners perform temperature checks at their entrances.
In Miami-Dade County, the county hardest hit by the coronavirus in Florida and where a stay-at-home order remains in effect, Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he intended to reopen parks, golf courses and marinas. Beaches would remain closed under the plan.
Mr. Gimenez said the county would still observe new, complicated social distancing rules, and would hire around 400 security workers to enforce them. Basketball games would be banned, for example, but shooting hoops individually would be allowed. Workers would be trained to inform visitors of the rules and ask them to leave the public spaces if they violate them.
In Southern California, where restrictive social distancing measures have remained in place, soaring temperatures tested public discipline as crowds flocked to a subset of beaches that have not been closed to the public. Frustrated officials in Orange and Ventura Counties, which kept beaches open, said on Saturday that they were ramping up their patrols, and were even deploying drones to keep an eye out overhead.
Gov. Gavin Newsom told residents that he did not want to have to report a spike in cases. “But that’s really less up to me,” he said. “It’s more up to all of you.”
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds said that she would allow farmers’ markets to reopen and let doctors perform nonessential surgeries beginning on Monday.
In Kennesaw, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, a sprawling bowling alley and arcade have reopened — but only with special hours.
As things got back underway, all the games were lit up and the prize counter was staffed, but no one was playing. Only a couple of the lanes were being used.
Nori Wittenzellner and Hollie Shepard posed for selfies in front of the bowling alley, wearing their masks. “Because it’s so ridiculous!” Ms. Wittenzellner said. “You cough on your hand, you stick your hand in the finger holes on the ball and you touch your face,” she said.
Ms. Shepard said she understood the urge to reopen businesses. “The economy is taking a dive,” she said. Still, she added, “I think it’s too early.”
Trump amplifies drugs and disinfectants as treatments, even as experts push back.
In Maryland, so many callers flooded a health hotline with questions that the state’s Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that “under no circumstances” should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm.
Even the makers of Clorox and Lysol pleaded with Americans not to inject or ingest their products.
The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus.
Despite a lack of scientific evidence, Mr. Trump has long trumpeted various ideas against the coronavirus, like sunlight and warmer temperatures as well as an array of drugs, including the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which he has promoted as a “what have you got to lose” remedy.
Last month, the president used the White House telecast to push that drug, as well as another, chloroquine, which Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, would days later say were not proven as effective against the virus. First-time prescriptions soared to more than 46 times the rate of the average weekday after that briefing, according to an analysis of prescription data by The New York Times.
While medical experts have since stepped up warnings about the drugs’ possibly dangerous side effects, they were still being prescribed at more than six times the normal rate during the second week of April, the analysis shows. All the while, Mr. Trump continued to extol their use. “It’s having some very good results, I’ll tell you,” he said at a White House briefing on April 13.
As the global death toll from the virus climbs toward 200,000, the response to Mr. Trump’s remarks reflects, at least in part, the outsize reach of the Trump megaphone, even when his pronouncements distort scientific evidence or run counter to the recommendations of experts in his own administration. It also offers the clearest evidence yet of the perils of a president willing to push unproven and potentially dangerous remedies to a public desperate for relief from the pandemic.
The worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate, and some in the party fear that Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.
The new White House press secretary said in a statement that the news media had acted “irresponsibly” in its coverage of the president’s most recent remarks about disinfectant and bleach. But by then even some of the president’s usual allies in conservative news media were sounding the alarm, and Mr. Trump later undermined his press secretary’s argument by insisting that his question had been an elaborate prank that he had engineered to trick reporters.
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he told journalists gathered in the Oval Office on Friday.
The U.S. conducted 1.2 million tests in a week, but experts say that is not enough.
As governors weigh reopening their economies, they continue to be hampered by a shortage of testing capacity, leaving them without the information that public health experts say is needed to track outbreaks and contain them. And while the United States has made strides over the past month in expanding testing, its capacity is nowhere near the level President Trump suggests it is.
There are numerous reasons. It has proved hard to increase production of reagents — sensitive chemical ingredients that detect whether the coronavirus is present — partly because of federal regulations intended to ensure safety and partly because manufacturers, who usually produce them in small batches, have been reluctant to invest in new capacity without assurance that the surge in demand will be sustained.
Some physical components of test kits, like nasal swabs, are largely imported and hard to come by amid global shortages. Health care workers still lack the protective gear they need to administer tests on a wide-scale basis. Labs have been slow to add people and equipment to process the swelling numbers of tests.
On top of all that, the administration has resisted a full-scale national mobilization, instead intervening to allocate scarce equipment on an ad hoc basis and leaving production bottlenecks and shortages largely to market forces. Governors, public health officials and hospital executives say they are still operating in a kind of Wild West economy that has left them scrambling — and competing with one another — to procure the equipment and other materials they need.
The United States conducted about 1.2 million tests from April 16 to April 22, up from about 200,000 tests from March 16 to March 22, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. In both conservative and liberal states, governors, health departments and hospitals are finding innovative ways to cope, but the nation is far from being able to conduct the kind of widespread surveillance testing that health experts say would be optimal.
“We are not in a situation where we can say we are exactly where we want to be with regard to testing,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said this week in an interview with Time.
Fearing the virus, people with life-threatening emergencies are avoiding hospitals.
Bishnu Virachan was a bicycle deliveryman for a grocery store in Queens. With New York City locked down, he was busier than ever.
But in early April, as he was watching television, he said he felt a pain in his heart. It frightened him, but he did not go to the emergency room. Mr. Virachan, 43, was even more afraid of that.
“What can I do? What can I do?” he asked. “Everywhere, the coronavirus.”
Mr. Virachan’s hesitancy almost cost him his life. And he is not the only patient taking grave chances.
Doctors across the country say that fear of the coronavirus is leading many people in the throes of life-threatening emergencies, like a heart attack or stroke, to stay home when ordinarily they would have rushed to an emergency room. Without prompt treatment, many suffer permanent damage or die.
Many hospitals report that heart and stroke units are nearly empty. Some medical experts fear more people are dying from untreated emergencies than from the coronavirus itself.
A recent paper by cardiologists at nine large medical centers estimated a 38 percent reduction since March 1 in the number of patients with serious heart attacks coming in to have urgently needed procedures to open their arteries.
Mr. Virachan was lucky. After a few days, pain overrode fear and he went to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Doctors discovered a nearly complete blockage of his left main coronary artery.
A surgeon opened the artery, but now Mr. Virachan is left with a weakened heart. Had he waited much longer, doctors said, he would have died.
The pandemic has put international students and Americans abroad in a tough spot.
When college campuses shut down around the country, many students moved back in with their parents, bemoaning the loss of independence, social connections and academic networking that are so much a part of the college experience.
But for many of the estimated one million international students attending college in the United States, the situation was much more drastic.
A lot of them came from well-off families who could secure temporary accommodations for them, or fly them home.
But others got here after their families saved, borrowed and sacrificed to pay their tuition and board, which typically is set at top-dollar rates and is an important cash-earner for colleges. For those students, continuing their college careers has become a big “if.”
The few temporary dorms set up by universities can cost more than what they were paying before. Many are couch surfing with friends, and hitting up food banks to eat. Some flew home, though their ability to return, amid visa restrictions and flight bans, is open to question.
One student started getting up at 3 a.m. to continue her linear algebra class online from Tanzania, with a seven-hour time difference.
“My world is shattering,” said Elina Mariutsa, a Russian student studying international affairs and political science at Northeastern University.
Americans abroad have their own dilemma.
Those who had assumed they could stay overseas, and wait for the pandemic to ebb, now face an unnerving choice: Either stick it out, and prepare for the possibility they will be infected with the virus and treated in foreign hospitals, or chance catching it on the way back home.
The State Department is winding down government-organized flights that have so far brought home 65,000 Americans from across the world. Some continue in limited numbers, but “these flights will not go on forever,” said Ian Brownlee, a deputy assistant secretary of state.
There are still at least 17,000 American citizens or legal residents abroad who have indicated they need help and, at this point, the State Department is urging them to take any available flights out.
“You can come back to the United States where you are a citizen and you have access to health care and you have access to an infrastructure that is still intact,” said Dr. William Walters, the State Department’s deputy chief medical officer.
But by hunkering down, in developing countries in particular, where the virus has yet to peak, “you will be an American citizen in a foreign country that didn’t have great infrastructure to begin with,” he said. “And now you have less rights and less access to less infrastructure.”
U.S. scientists join W.H.O. in calling for better coronavirus antibody tests.
Scientists in the United States and abroad are cautioning leaders against overreliance on coronavirus antibody tests, even as the tests have come to be seen as an essential tool for getting workers back to their jobs.
The World Health Organization warned against using antibody tests as a basis for issuing “immunity passports” to allow people to travel or return to work. Countries like Italy and Chile have proposed the permits as a way to clear people who have recovered from the virus to return to work.
Laboratory tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus “need further validation to determine their accuracy and reliability,” the global agency said in a statement on Friday. Inaccurate tests may falsely label people who have been infected as negative, or may falsely label people who have not been infected as positive, it noted. Further, it clarified that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
More than 50 scientists studying the 14 coronavirus antibody tests currently on the market also uncovered troubling shortcomings. Only three of the 14 tests they researched delivered consistently reliable results. And even the best had flaws.
Only one of the tests delivered no false positives — and just two others did well 99 percent of the time. But even those three fell short in detecting antibodies in infected people.
The false-positive metric is particularly crucial, because people who are told they have antibodies may believe themselves immune to the virus when they are not. Four of the tests produced false-positive rates ranging from 11 to 16 percent, and many of the rest hovered around 5 percent.
“Those numbers are just unacceptable,” said Scott Hensley, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
“If your kit has 14 percent false positive,” he added, “it’s useless.”
Many unemployed people are not receiving benefits, Pew finds.
The move in some states to reopen the economy has intensified the dilemma faced by many low-income Americans as they weigh the financial needs of their families against the dangers of contracting the virus on the job, according to civil rights activists and survey data released this week.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that the pandemic has had a devastating impact on minorities and lower-income families: More than half of lower-income adults have had someone in their household lose their job, or seen their pay cut. Among Hispanic adults surveyed, that figure climbs to over 60 percent. More than half of lower-income respondents also said they would struggle to pay their bills this month, the survey found.
A separate analysis from Pew, released on Friday, found that, while the number of new unemployment claims has surged to record highs, many unemployed people will not receive benefit payments.
The rules vary widely by state, according to the analysis. In March, just over 65 percent of unemployed residents of Massachusetts received benefit payments; in Florida, which has been struggling with an unemployment website that Gov. Ron DeSantis calls “a jalopy,” about 8 percent of jobless residents received the aid. (That number has since gone up slightly.)
But as some states start to reopen businesses and revive their economies, researchers have found that many of the jobs that are restored are lower-income positions. That raises a set of challenges for workers: Heightened odds of coming in contact with the virus, while also having limited access to health care compared with other economic groups.
“We know people rely on these jobs,” said Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, who is part of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative. She notes that, in many places, “folks are subject to lose these jobs at the drop of a hat.”
“One of the things that concerns us greatly,” she added, “is this rush for going back to work is built on a premise that our workers and our people are replaceable.”
Experts said it was critical for more widespread testing to be conducted in order to help protect these workers. “Otherwise, we are sending our people into a roaring furnace to get burned up,” said Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, a professor of community health and preventive medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine. “Our people are not disposable.”
Americans confront obstacles, and surprises, in claiming stimulus payments.
The introduction of economic stimulus payments over the past several weeks has brought mixed results and some confusion as the government has struggled to get cash into the hands of some 150 million eligible recipients.
While tens of millions of Americans received payments quickly through direct deposit last week, many others have been offered little information about when their payments might arrive, or have battled identity theft or seizures of their payments by their banks.
The payments have also become a political device, as President Trump has sought to associate the payments with his leadership.
Several people whose payments were approved for direct deposit this month have reported receiving letters from the Treasury Department with a signed statement from the president about the White House’s efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.
“As we wage total war on this invisible enemy, we are also working around the clock to protect hardworking Americans like you from the consequences of the economic shutdown,” one letter said.
The Treasury Department announced last week that some Americans would receive their payments by check, and that in a departure from standard practice, the checks would bear the president’s name.
Regardless of how their payments arrive, more Americans may experience additional delays in the weeks ahead because of systemic disconnects between the Internal Revenue Service and the sprawling tax preparation industry, according to a report in ProPublica.
Biden’s strange challenge: Fighting for the presidency without leaving the house.
With the coronavirus outbreak freezing public life, the prospective Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has been forced to adapt to a cloistered mode of campaigning never before seen in modern American politics.
Interviews with dozens of people in touch with the former vice president and his advisers revealed a newly detailed picture of Mr. Biden’s life in seclusion, one spent in long-distance consultation with a wide array of coalition leaders helping him map out the fall campaign and a potential administration.
For the most part, Mr. Biden is seeking to run a campaign based on something like digital-age fireside chats, offering himself as a calmly authoritative figure rather than a brawler like his opponent.
He does not make a habit of watching the president’s briefings in full; he is said to be fixated mainly on the eventual challenge — if he wins — of governing amid a pandemic.
But he has lamented being deprived of human contact, and he has expressed exasperation with media coverage critiquing his limited visibility compared with President Trump’s daily performances in the White House briefing room.
The pandemic has upended how Muslims celebrate Ramadan.
In normal times, Hussam Ghazzi would usually celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan with friends in New York City. But this year, he is observing the holiday alone in his Manhattan apartment, where he has been holed up for the past five weeks during the coronavirus pandemic.
The isolation has taken an emotional toll on Mr. Ghazzi, 35, but he found some solace on Friday night when he logged on to a friend’s virtual Iftar, the breaking of the fast at sunset, not long after city residents clapped en masse to thank health care workers.
“Even though we were in different time zones, it gave us an opportunity to all be together,” he said.
Like so many other facets of everyday life, the coronavirus pandemic has upended the rituals and traditions of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. With mosques closed, imams reading the Quran online, and families practicing social distancing at home, the holiday, which began on Thursday night, is looking profoundly different across the globe.
In Saudi Arabia, Islam’s most sacred sites were largely deserted as the holy month started, but some Muslims in countries like Indonesia and Egypt were resisting restrictions in ways that could spread the coronavirus.
Across the United States, Ramadan has been met with innovation and generosity at a time when many are struggling with loneliness, economic hardship and the loss of loved ones. Some Muslim organizations and mosques are organizing drive-through fast-breaking meal delivery programs. Many members of the faith who work as front-line health care workers are fasting while tending to the sick and dying.
Even during outbreaks that have taken a steep toll on municipal life, cities with large Muslim populations are stepping up to help the faithful observe the holiday during lockdowns. The mayor of Minneapolis issued a noise permit to allow the call to prayer to be publicly broadcast five times a day, a historic first for an American city.
New York City, home to 22 percent of the American Muslim population, will distribute more than 500,000 halal meals during the holy month. “One of Ramadan’s most noble callings is to feed the hungry,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a news conference on Thursday. “It’s a crucial part of how the holiday is celebrated, to remember to be there for those in need, and that is now harder than ever.”
Pass the time this weekend in a different way.
If you are in need of inspiration for some games to play with your friends or family this weekend, here are some tried-and-true classics, a few new video game finds, and several tips on analog favorites.
Reporting was contributed by Vikas Bajaj, Karen Barrow, Alexander Burns, Ben Casselman, Emily Cochrane, Caitlin Dickerson, Richard Fausset, Ellen Gabler, Shane Goldmacher, Katie Glueck, Michael M. Grynbaum, Maggie Haberman, Christine Hauser, Lara Jakes, Sharon LaFraniere, Dan Levin, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jonathan Martin, Zach Montague, Kwame Opam, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Katharine Q. Seelye, Farah Stockman, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Jim Tankersley, Gina Kolata and Alan Yuhas.
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Coronavirus Live Updates: Some States Move to Reopen - The New York Times
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