Here’s what you need to know:
- 4.4 million more workers file for unemployment.
- The House will vote on a $484 billion relief plan, and McConnell suggests states declare bankruptcy.
- After Trump’s rebuke, Georgia’s governor signals he will stick with reopening plans.
- With fears of the virus, migrant teens are moved to ICE detention centers when they “age out” of shelters.
- Florida’s unemployment system falters, leaving hundreds of thousands unpaid.
- The coronavirus and seasonal flu could collide in the fall.
- More than 90 percent of patients in a New York City study had at least one chronic health condition.
4.4 million more workers file for unemployment.
More than 26 million people have joined the ranks of the unemployed over the past five weeks as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the nation’s economy. The U.S. government reported Thursday that 4.4 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week.
The relentless increase in the jobless has intensified the debate over when to lift restrictions that have helped halt the virus’s rapid spread but placed the economy in a stranglehold.
State agencies have scrambled to handle the overwhelming flood of filings as well as a set of federal eligibility rules instituted to deal with the crisis.
With government phones and websites clogged and drop-in centers closed, legal aid lawyers are fielding complaints from people who say they don’t know where else to turn.
“Our office has received thousands of calls,” said John Tirpak, a lawyer with the Unemployment Law Project, a nonprofit group in Washington.
Pain is everywhere, but it is widespread among the most vulnerable.
In a survey that the Pew Research Center released on Tuesday, 52 percent of low-income households — below $37,500 a year for a family of three — said someone in the household had lost a job because of the coronavirus, compared with 32 percent of upper-income families (with earnings over $112,600). Forty-two percent of families in the middle have been affected as well.
Those without a college education have taken a disproportionate hit, as have Hispanics and African-Americans, the survey also found.
The House will vote on a $484 billion relief plan, and McConnell suggests states declare bankruptcy.
Lawmakers are gathering in Washington today to vote on a $484 billion coronavirus package that would revive a depleted loan program for distressed small businesses and provide funds for hospitals and testing.
But it will not provide money for state governments, even as governors across the country have had to divert resources to fight the virus while watching their revenue streams fall off a cliff.
As Carl Hulse notes in his news analysis, Democrats have now blocked two consecutive rescue packages pushed by Republicans and withstood withering criticism to win concessions — and hundreds of billions of dollars — they said were vital, including in the bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday and is slated to clear the House on Thursday.
At nearly $500 billion, the latest measure ended up being almost twice the size and much broader in scope than the original bill Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, had tried to ram through two weeks earlier without negotiations.
It was a potentially dangerous strategy for Democrats, particularly in an election year, but their willingness to take on those risks reflects their confidence that the terrain of the current debate — a public health crisis and economic disaster that will require the broadest government relief effort since the post-World War II era — plays to their core strengths as a party. But it may affect their leverage in the next fight over a much larger stimulus measure that is likely to top $1 trillion.
With commerce ground to a halt, sales taxes, the biggest source of money for most states, have plummeted. Personal income taxes, usually states’ second-biggest revenue source, started falling in March, when millions lost their paychecks and tax withholdings stopped.
April also usually brings a big slug of income-tax money, but this year, the filing deadlines have been postponed until July. It has all added up to a huge challenge for nearly every state in the union.
Mr. McConnell said that states should consider declaring bankruptcy rather than looking to the federal government.
States do not now have the ability to declare bankruptcy to reduce their financial obligations, but Mr. McConnell raised the possibility of letting them do so.
“I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said. “It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available.”
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York accused Mr. McConnell of hyperpartisanship, criticizing him for distinguishing among states based on their political leanings, rather than “states where people are dying. Why don’t we think about that? Not red and blue. Red, white and blue. They’re just Americans dying.”
After Trump’s rebuke, Georgia’s governor signals he will stick with reopening plans.
President Trump on Wednesday criticized the decision of a political ally, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, to allow many businesses to reopen this week, saying the move was premature given the number of virus cases in the state.
“I want him to do what he thinks is right, but I disagree with him on what he is doing,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “I think it’s too soon.”
Mr. Kemp, a Republican, announced on Monday that he had cleared the way for what he described as a measured process meant to bolster the economy, as Georgia, like the rest of the nation, grapples with the devastation brought by the pandemic. The governor’s plan gives permission to gyms, hair and nail salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors to reopen on Friday. Then, on Monday, restaurants are allowed to resume dine-in service, and movie theaters and other entertainment venues can reopen.
Yet the decision was immediately assailed, as public health experts, the mayors of Georgia’s largest cities and others warned that it stood to have perilous consequences. Business owners who were otherwise eager to revive their livelihoods said they would hold off.
Mr. Kemp acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump in a series of Twitter posts after the president’s briefing. And while he praised Mr. Trump for his “bold leadership and insight,” he gave no indication he was reconsidering his decision.
“Our next measured step is driven by data and guided by state public health officials,” he wrote.
States around the nation have been trying to balance combating a public health crisis with the need to ameliorate a growing economic crisis. In some states, small protests — with the support of some conservative groups — have urged governors to ease restrictions. But polls have found that Americans are more fearful of easing restrictions too early than too late, and some business leaders have cautioned against moving too quickly to reopen.
On Wednesday, Mayor Carolyn Goodman of Las Vegas called for the city’s casinos, restaurants and other businesses to immediately reopen but declined to provide any guidance on social distancing measures that might protect employees and customers.
“They better figure it out,” she said in an interview on CNN, during which she said she had offered the city “to be a control group” for relaxing restrictions.
The mayor, an independent, does not have the power to reopen the city’s economy, but Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a Democrat, and the largest union representing Las Vegas casino workers swiftly condemned her comments. “I will not allow the citizens of Nevada, our Nevadans, to be used as a control group,” Mr. Sisolak said.
With fears of the virus, migrant teens are moved to ICE detention centers when they “age out” of shelters.
The Trump administration is moving migrant teenagers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers as they turn 18, putting them at greater danger of exposure to the virus. The health risks with the spread of the virus are a new concern for the policy — that some question if it is even legal.
As of Wednesday night, ICE had confirmed 287 cases among detainees and 35 cases among staff members.
Migrants under 18 have been held in relatively benign shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Immigrations lawyers have said that the safest option for these teenagers would be that they are released to a sponsor, but short of that, the young migrants should be held in shelters and group homes where there is more space and better care than at the detention facilities. The administration’s system of deciding where to place such “age outs” exemplifies the extent of the president’s hard-line immigration policies.
“Our clients are terrified of the prospect of being transferred to a secured detention facility with large numbers of people in close, confined settings, which is in direct contravention with C.D.C.’s advice on how to save oneself from this pandemic,” said Anthony Enriquez, the director of the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities.
The Trump administration has moved to clamp down on immigration as the virus spread, arguing that the efforts would limit additional exposure to Americans and reserve the job market for United States citizens, a theory that past studies have rebuked.
Florida’s unemployment system falters, leaving hundreds of thousands unpaid.
Many states are scrambling to process an avalanche of jobless claims from the crisis, struggling with overloaded websites and phones that don’t answer. But Florida has emerged as one of the slowest in the nation.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have been waiting for weeks for a check. It has taken some as long as that to file. As the website became unusable under the weight of the traffic, the state agreed this month to accept paper applications, a tacit acknowledgment that the system was all but broken. Florida’s breakdown became a national symbol of distress, when footage of a snaking line for those applications outside the public library in Hialeah, a blue-collar city outside Miami, went viral online.
The debacle has become an embarrassment for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who has had to spend more and more time addressing the shortcomings. He called the system “cumbersome” last week and acknowledged that only 4 percent of 850,000 pending claims had been paid. He appointed an unemployment czar and signed executive orders waiving some requirements to ease the traffic on the website. The number of paid claims has slowly inched up.
But the fixes follow what experts say has been an intentional weakening of the unemployment system over a decade, aimed at reducing taxes on employers, that has left Florida particularly ill-equipped to handle the crisis. The state pays one of the lowest levels of benefit in the nation: The maximum is just $275 a week.
“Florida is a terrible state to be an unemployed person,” said Michele Evermore, an unemployment insurance expert at the National Employment Law Project in Washington. “It’s hard to get in. Once you do it’s easy to get disqualified. The benefit level is way below average. And that was before the crisis.”
Mr. DeSantis said that easing the benefits gridlock is his top priority, and blamed the unprecedented number of claims for the breakdown. “Not nearly enough” applications have been processed, he said.
The coronavirus and seasonal flu could collide in the fall.
Could the United States face two epidemics — flu and the coronavirus — at the same time this fall?
That frightening idea was raised by Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during an interview on Tuesday with The Washington Post. He suggested that a new surge in cases could coincide with the next flu season, causing an even more difficult crisis than the one the nation is facing now.
“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.
At the White House briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Trump continued to broadcast his personal hopes for the virus and questioned its ability to last into flu season in the fall and winter.
He said that Dr. Redfield had been misquoted and would clarify his remarks.
Dr. Redfield then said that The Post had quoted him correctly, but tried to dial back the alarm his comments had provoked.
“I think it’s really important to emphasize what I didn’t say,” Dr. Redfield said at the briefing. “I didn’t say this was going to be worse, I said it was going to be more difficult and potentially complicated.”
He reiterated several times that if the situation became more difficult, that did not mean it became worse.
“The key to my comments and the reason I really wanted to stress them was to appeal to the American public to embrace the flu vaccine with confidence,” he said. “One of the greatest tools we have as we go through the fall-winter season is to get the American public to embrace the influenza vaccine and thereby minimize the impact of flu to be the other respiratory disease we confront.”
Mr. Trump, without citing evidence, presented a different theory,
“We may not even have corona coming back,” he said.
“If it comes back,” the president continued, “it won’t be coming back in the form that it was, it will be coming back in smaller doses that we can contain. What the doctor was saying, and I spoke to him at great length, he was saying if it should come back, you have the flu and the embers of corona, but in my opinion from everything I’ve seen, it can never be like anything like we witnessed right now. It’s nothing like — what we’ve just gone through, we will not go through.”
Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts interviewed before the Wednesday briefing doubted that the virus would go away, and did not rule out the prospect of a worse crisis in the fall if the two diseases strike at the same time.
“When flu season comes, there is the possibility that we will be dealing with two respiratory viruses at the same time — flu and Covid,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former head of the C.D.C. and the president of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit focused on disease prevention, said in an email. “This could be a double challenge for our health care systems.”
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also differed from the president’s optimistic forecast.
“We will have coronavirus in the fall,” he said. “I am convinced of that.”
More than 90 percent of patients in a New York City study had at least one chronic health condition.
A new study of thousands of coronavirus patients in New York City area hospitals has found that more than 90 percent had at least one chronic health condition and most had at least two.
The findings are from a paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the characteristics of thousands of Covid-19 patients admitted between March 1 and April 4 to a dozen hospitals in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County, the center of the outbreak in the U.S., that are part of Northwell Health.
Researchers found dozens of children and teenagers were hospitalized with the virus, but survived. Women showed a clear survival edge — fewer of them were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive.
One in five of the hospital stays ended with the patient dying.
Of the 5,700 patients in the study, 1,151 were put on ventilators. Most of the intubated patients, 831, were still on ventilators at the time the data was collected.
Of the other 320 intubated patients, 282 died and 38 were discharged from the hospital. That mortality rate, 88 percent, is higher than some other early case reports, which found death rates ranging from 50 percent to close to 70 percent. But given that the length of hospital stay for the Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it’s possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that they were unlikely to be helped by any treatment.
The paper was written by scientists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research arm of Northwell.
Like several other reports on smaller patient groups from area hospitals, it indicated that obesity, as well as high blood pressure and diabetes, were common risk factors for severe Covid-19 disease requiring hospitalization. One of the most striking findings was that a mere 6 percent of the hospitalized patients had no underlying health conditions at all.
“The number of patients who had chronic comorbidities surprised us,” said Karina Davidson, a senior vice president at the Feinstein Institutes who was the paper’s senior author.
But she cautioned that the study was observational in nature, and there was no comparison group with which to contrast frailties or outcomes.
“We’re simply describing the patients who came in and required hospitalization,” she said. “We are not comparing them to those who were positive and stayed out of the hospital, or who didn’t get infected, or to patients with any other disease.”
On Thursday, New York’s governor said 438 more people had died, according to official state figures, a number that remained troublingly high.
Childhood vaccination rates drop as doctor’s visits are skipped.
As parents around the country cancel well-child checkups to avoid possible exposure to the virus, public health experts fear they are inadvertently sowing the seeds of another health crisis. Immunizations are dropping at a dangerous rate, putting millions of children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other life-threatening illnesses.
“The last thing we want as the collateral damage of Covid-19 are outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, which we will almost certainly see if there continues to be a drop in vaccine uptake,” said Dr. Sean T. O’Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases.
Although current nationwide vaccination figures are not available, anecdotal evidence and subsets of data about rates now rapidly plunging are alarming.
PCC, a pediatric electronic health records company, gathered vaccine information from 1,000 independent pediatricians nationwide and found that in March through mid-April, the administration of measles, mumps and rubella shots dropped by 47 percent; diphtheria and whooping cough shots by 39 percent; and HPV vaccines by 72 percent, compared with the same period last year.
The Massachusetts health department said that doses from a federally funded program called Vaccines for Children were down 68 percent in the first two weeks of April, compared with the previous year. Minnesota reported that its doses of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine dropped by 71 percent toward the end of March.
The problem is global. National immunization programs in more than two dozen countries have been suspended, which could also leave more than 100 million children vulnerable, a consortium of international organizations, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, recently reported.
The U.S. doctor in charge of developing a vaccine says he was ousted for his doubts on hydroxychloroquine.
The official who led the federal agency involved in developing a vaccine said on Wednesday that he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug embraced by President Trump as a virus treatment, and that the administration had put “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
As Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman reported, Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He was given a narrower job at the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections” and repeatedly described by the president as a potential “game changer” in the fight against the virus.
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” he said in his statement. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
Doubts about the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment and the lack of evidence about the drug’s effectiveness — including some small studies that indicated patients could be harmed — appear to have dampened Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for it.
A startling discovery rewrites timeline of virus’s spread in the U.S.
Weeks before there was evidence that the virus was spreading in U.S. communities, Patricia Dowd, a 57-year-old auditor at a Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturer, developed flulike symptoms and abruptly died in her San Jose kitchen, prompting a search for what had killed her. Flu tests were negative. The coroner was baffled. It appeared that she had suffered a massive heart attack.
But tissue samples from Ms. Dowd, who died on Feb. 6, have now shown that she was infected with the coronavirus — a startling discovery that has rewritten the timeline of the virus’s early spread in the United States and suggested that the optimistic assumptions that drove federal policies over the early weeks of the outbreak were misplaced.
The unexpected new finding, as reported by Thomas Fuller, Mike Baker, Shawn Hubler and Sheri Fink, makes clear that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area of California as early as January, even before the federal government began restricting travel from China on Feb. 2. It also raises new questions about where else the virus might have been spreading undetected.
With little local testing throughout February — in part because of botched testing kits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with strict guidelines that limited who could get tested — officials were not aware of the virus transmitting locally in the country until Feb. 26, in Solano County, Calif.
Previous cases had involved people who had traveled to China, where the outbreak began, or who had been exposed to someone who was sick. But the Feb. 26 case in Solano County was of unexplained origin. Similar cases of community transmission were quickly identified in nearby Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose, as well as in Washington State and Oregon.
The new test results made public late Tuesday show that even this timeline failed to reveal how long the virus had been circulating. Ms. Dowd had not recently traveled outside the country, the authorities said, and yet she died a full 20 days before the earliest recorded case of community transmission. Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the virus.
“Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,” Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s medical officer, said in an interview.
Texas allows abortions to resume, after a long back and forth.
In a surprise move on Wednesday night, the authorities in Texas abandoned their fight to include abortion in a list of medical procedures that must be delayed during the pandemic.
During the weeks of legal wrangling that went all of the way to the Supreme Court, Texas had argued that abortion was like any other elective surgery, and should be delayed to preserve the personal protective equipment needed by medical workers exposed to the virus.
Lawyers for abortion clinics said the state was using the pandemic to advance its own political agenda, and took the state to court.
Abortion access in Texas swung wildly for a month, with clinics canceling dozens of appointments and rescheduling them days later, as the case bounced through the court system. Texas residents scrambled, with some traveling long distances to clinics in nearby states like Kansas and Colorado.
At least six other states — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee — have tried similar abortion restrictions, often through emergency orders by their governors.
But hospitals around the country have been under financial strain after postponing often lucrative elective surgical procedures to make way for virus patients, and last week, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas eased the restrictions on some surgical procedures. A court filing in a federal court in Texas late Wednesday confirmed that abortions were included in the relaxing of the rules.
“Finally, women in Texas can get the time-sensitive abortion care that they are constitutionally guaranteed,” said Nancy Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents some of the clinics. “Women never should have had to go to court to get essential health care.”
Dyana Limon-Mercado, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, said, “The past month has been an unthinkable nightmare for Texans who have been forced to travel out of state just to access essential health care.”
Islam’s call to prayer will play on loudspeaker in Minneapolis to aid social distancing during Ramadan.
Islam’s call to prayer will play throughout a Minneapolis neighborhood during Ramadan as the authorities urge people to stay apart during the holy month.
The call, known as Adhan, will be played over a loudspeaker in the Cedar-Riverside area of the city five times a day until Ramadan’s conclusion next month.
“At a time when physical distancing requires we pray apart, it’s incumbent on leaders to create a sense of togetherness where we can,” Mayor Jacob Frey, who helped arrange a noise permit, said in a statement.
“Adhan provides solidarity and comfort — both of which are essential during a time of crisis,” he said. “As our Muslim community prepares for Ramadan, we hope the broadcast will offer a measure of stability and reassure our entire city that we are all very much in this together.”
The call will come from a loudspeaker positioned outside the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque, near downtown and the University of Minnesota, and will be played “at volumes consistent with city regulations.”
Local officials said they expected thousands of people would be able to hear it.
Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the playing of the call would be “welcomed by the Muslim community and all those who value diversity and mutual understanding.”
Ramadan, which begins Thursday and concludes May 23, is among the holiest periods for Muslims, who fast during the day throughout the month.
Here are tips on tending to your budget.
You may be wondering how to cut some expenses right now. One way is to figure out who owes you money from the many services you pay for but aren’t in business right now. Think day camps, gyms and airlines. But when is it fair to ask for your money back? Here are some guidelines to help.
Hospitals have adopted anthems like “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Empire State of Mind” to celebrate recovery.
Pick a hospital in the metropolitan area of New York these days, and you are likely to find that the staff has identified a song as the fitting soundtrack to the release of patients who had been hospitalized because of the virus.
Many have chosen “Here Comes the Sun,” long associated with finding joy through hard times. When it and other songs are played, it is not only a tribute to the resilience of the patient, but also an anthem of affirmation for the medical professionals: Through long shifts, with few positive moments and supplies stretched thin, they have saved another life.
What’s happening around the world? Check it out.
Reporting was contributed by Eileen Sullivan, Alan Blinder, Patricia Cohen, Patricia Mazzei, Sabrina Tavernise, Carl Hulse, Sheri Fink, Mike Baker, Thomas Fuller, Shawn Hubler, Peter Baker, Karen Barrow, Jan Hoffman, Roni Caryn Rabin, Pam Belluck, Lara Jakes, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Rick Rojas, Katie Rogers, Marc Santora, Dionne Searcey, Nancy Coleman and Neil Vigdor.
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