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Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Administration Models Predict Near Doubling of Daily Death Toll by June
The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
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The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program
Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”
Slide 1 of 50: Workers change signage to reflect positive messages on the marquee at the Quarry Cinema, which is set to reopen in June, in San Antonio, Monday, May 4, 2020. Texas' stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic have expired and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has eased restrictions on many businesses including theaters. (
partially reopened are still seeing an increase in cases, including Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas, according to Times data. Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska also are seeing an increase in cases and reopened some businesses on Monday. Alaska has also reopened and is seeing a small number of increasing cases.
While the country has stabilized, it has not really improved, as shown by data collected by The Times. Case and death numbers remain stuck on a numbing, tragic plateau that is tilting only slightly downward.
a large white building with United States Supreme Court Building in the background: The development is a momentous step for the Supreme Court and another example of how the pandemic has forced American society to adjust.
seeking President Trump’s financial records, which could yield a politically explosive decision this summer as the presidential campaign enters high gear.
The justices may not return to the bench in October if the virus is still a threat, as several of them are in the demographic group thought to be most at risk. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 87, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer is 81. Four additional members of the court — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor — are 65 or older.
Carnival, which was criticized after outbreaks at sea, plans to restart cruises in August.
The cruise giant Carnival Corporation
said on Monday that it planned to reopen cruising on eight of its ships before the end of the summer.
While it has canceled service on some of its cruise lines through September, Carnival said it would offer cruises from ports in Miami, Galveston and Port Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 1. Carnival has more than 100 ships across its various brands.
Carnival, the world’s largest cruise line, has been at the center of the coronavirus pandemic since the beginning, widely blamed for a series of major outbreaks that spread the disease across the world. Last week, Congress
began investigating the company’s handling of the virus, asking it to turn over internal communications related to the pandemic.
It is unclear how the outbreak will look in August. The day the company announced its plans to restart some cruises, some federal agencies were
privately projecting a steady rise in cases and deaths over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1.
In its statement on Monday, Carnival said that all North American cruises set to depart between June 27 and July 31 would be canceled.
“We will use this additional time to continue to engage experts, government officials and stakeholders on additional protocols and procedures to protect the health and safety of our guests, crew and the communities we serve,” the company said.
House Republicans agitate for a full reopening of Congress as the Senate plans to reconvene.
The top House Republican pushed back on Monday against efforts by Democratic leaders to move the chamber toward remote legislating and teleworking amid the crisis, laying out a detailed plan for reopening Congress for regular business.
With the House in an extended recess on the advice of Congress’s top doctor, Republicans laid out their plan for meeting during the pandemic and called on Democrats to quickly agree to a path to reconvening.
“The business of the people’s House is ‘essential work’ that must not be sidelined or ground to a halt,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and minority leader, and two of his deputies, wrote in a letter laying out the plan.
They urged caution on adopting new rules to allow House members to vote by proxy from outside of Washington and committees to meet virtually, the centerpieces of Democrats’ proposal for shifting to a remote form of business while the virus continues to spread throughout the country, including the capital.
“Before we rush to discard over 200 years of precedent, we should require that rigorous testing standards be met, ample feedback be provided, and bipartisan rules of the road be agreed upon and made public to truly safeguard minority rights,” the Republicans wrote.
After weeks of sporadic meetings and curtailed operations, the Senate was set to return on Monday, with new social distancing and other health precautions in place.
The full Senate was to reconvene for the first time in a month to restart the process of confirming federal judges and Trump administration nominees, beginning with a vote Monday afternoon on the nominee inspector general for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Republican leaders planned to put in place new guidelines that limit how many staff aides are working and prevent crowding in hearing rooms, offices and the Senate floor.
In the House, the Republicans called for measures “to reduce density and congestion in every facet of our work,” like staggering how many members are on the chamber floor at once and using bigger hearing rooms. Leaders should start by calling back to Washington certain committees with necessary business, like the annual defense policy bill and government spending bills, the Republicans suggested.
As daily deaths fall in New York, Cuomo outlines criteria for reopening.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York
listed seven requirements that each of
the state’s 10 regions would need to meet before restrictions meant to slow the virus’s spread could be eased:
■ A 14-day decline in hospitalizations, or fewer than 15 hospitalizations a day.
■ A 14-day decline in virus-related hospital deaths, or under five a day.
■ A rate of new hospitalizations below 2 per 100,000 residents per day.
■ A hospital-bed vacancy rate of at least 30 percent.
■ At least 30 percent of I.C.U. beds available.
■ At least 30 virus tests per 1,000 residents per month.
■ At least 30 contract tracers per 100,000 residents.
He said that some parts of the state would probably meet those thresholds a lot sooner than others. Some parts of the state, including central New York and the sparsely populated northern end of the state, are already meeting five of the seven requirements.
New York City is meeting only three — the declines in hospitalizations and hospital deaths and the number of contact tracers.
The governor reported 226 more deaths in the state — the lowest one-day figure since March 28 and down more than 70 percent from early April, when nearly 800 people per day were dying of the virus. The number of hospitalized patients with the virus and the number of new admissions to hospitals also continued to fall, though much more gradually than they had increased.
In New Jersey, all public and private schools will remain closed for the rest of the academic year, Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced on Twitter on Monday, a week after saying there was “a chance” they would reopen. His decision followed similar steps by
New York and
Pennsylvania.
The F.D.A. says companies selling antibody tests must prove accuracy within 10 days.
The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that companies selling coronavirus antibody tests
must submit data proving accuracy within the next 10 days or face removal from the market.
The antibody tests are an effort to detect whether a person had been infected with the virus, but results have been widely varied and little is known about whether those who became ill will develop immunity and, if so, for how long.
Since mid-March, the agency has permitted dozens of manufacturers to sell the tests without providing evidence that they are accurate — and many are wildly off the mark.
The F.D.A.’s action follows
a report by more than 50 scientists, which found that only three out of 14 antibody tests gave consistently reliable results, and even the best had flaws. An evaluation by the National Institutes of Health has also found “a concerning number” of commercial tests that are performing poorly, the agency said.
Around the globe, government and health officials have hoped that antibody tests would be a critical tool to help determine when it would be safe to lift stay-at-home restrictions and reopen businesses. The highly infectious Covid-19 disease has now killed nearly 70,000 people and sickened more than 1.1 million in the United States alone.
While 11 companies have been given F.D.A. clearance to sell the antibody tests, many other products do not have agency authorization. The result has been a confusing landscape in which tests by established companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Cellex and most recently, Roche Diagnostics, are competing with unapproved tests made by unknown companies and sold by U.S. distributors with spotty track records.
In a statement on Monday, Dr. Anand Shah, the F.D.A. deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, and Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, defended the agency’s initial policy saying the tests were never intended to be used as the sole basis for determining whether anyone had been infected.
“We unfortunately see unscrupulous actors marketing fraudulent test kits and using the pandemic as an opportunity to take advantage of Americans’ anxiety,” they said in the statement. “Some test developers have falsely claimed their serology tests are F.D.A. approved or authorized. Others have false claimed that their tests can diagnose Covid-19 or that they are for at-home testing.”
Dr. Shah and Dr. Shuren also pointed to the N.I.H. evaluation that showed a number of tests producing faulty results. The F.D.A. declined to provide details on the number of tests that were studied, or how many did not work. They also said that the F.D.A. is reviewing more than 200 antibody tests to determine whether they work well enough to get the agency’s go-ahead.
Intelligence officials back Trump’s assertion that they downplayed the virus threat in January.
The intelligence agencies sought on Monday to back President Trump’s assertions that he was given only minimal warnings about the threat of the coronavirus early in the year, singling out their own lapses without noting that around the same time, scientists, public health officials and national security officials were sounding alarms.
Mr. Trump was first briefed by intelligence agencies about the novel coronavirus on Jan. 23, said Susan Miller, the spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But she acknowledged that the initial briefing downplayed its threat. Mr. Trump was “told that the good news was the virus did not appear that deadly,” Ms. Miller said. As the world has painfully learned, that assessment was wrong.
Ms. Miller’s statement came after weeks of Mr. Trump and administration officials railing at what they have called inaccurate accounts in the news media that intelligence agencies put multiple warnings about the virus in the president’s daily intelligence briefing. On Sunday, Mr. Trump said the intelligence agencies in January had told him the virus was
“not a big deal.”
Though information about the virus in late January was imperfect, the warnings from other officials were stark enough to prompt the Trump administration to decide by the end of January to restrict travel from China.
Some intelligence officials have said that the pandemic’s spread has never been fundamentally an intelligence issue and that the warnings of scientists have always been far more important. When the warnings that intelligence agencies did give to officials were combined with what public health and bio-defense officials were learning, a clearer picture of a global threat emerged early.
By focusing on what Mr. Trump was told in January, administration officials are also able to distract from the timeline of events in February. It was during that month that
critical missteps by the Trump administration led to wasted time and delays in responding to the virus.
Three hospital workers gave out masks. Weeks later, they all were dead.
They did not treat patients, but Wayne Edwards, Derik Braswell and Priscilla Carrow held some of the most vital jobs at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.
As the virus tore through the neighborhood, their department managed the masks, gloves and other protective gear inside
Elmhurst, a public hospital at the center of the city’s outbreak. They ordered the inventory, replenished the stockroom and handed out supplies, keeping count as
the number of available masks began to dwindle.
By April 12, they were all dead.
The pandemic has taken an undisputed toll on
doctors,
nurses and other
front-line health care workers. But it has also ravaged the often-invisible army of nonmedical workers in hospitals, many of whom have fallen ill or died with little public recognition of their roles.
The victims included the security guards watching over emergency rooms. They were the chefs who cooked food for patients. They assigned hospital beds and checked patients’ medical records. They greeted visitors and answered phones. They mopped the hallways and took out the garbage.
“
You know how people clap for health workers at 7 o’clock? It’s mainly for the nurses and doctors. I get it. But people are not seeing the other parts of the hospital,” said Eneida Becote, whose husband died last month after working for two decades as a patient transporter. “I feel like those other employees are not focused upon as much.”
More states are allowing certain businesses to open up.
After
a wave of reopenings over the weekend, at least six more states will begin allowing certain businesses to open back up on Monday, the latest expansion in economic activity despite rising coronavirus cases.
In Florida, restaurants, stores, museums and libraries are allowed to reopen with fewer customers, except in the most populous counties, which have seen a majority of the state’s cases. Restrictions on certain businesses or parts of the state were also lifted in Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and West Virginia.
About half of all states have now begun reopening their economies in some significant way, introducing a pivotal new chapter. Some states have lifted stay-at-home orders or reopened businesses even though reported new cases are rising or remaining steady. Public health experts have warned that reopening too soon could lead to a new wave of cases and deaths.
“The fact remains that the vast majority of Americans have not been exposed to the virus, there is not immunity, and the initial conditions that allowed this virus to spread really quickly across America haven’t really changed,” said Dr. Larry Chang, an infectious-diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins University.
Though businesses are almost universally reopening under restrictions, such as allowing fewer customers or enforcing social distancing, experts say it’s too soon to tell how much that will help stop the spread of the virus. “Reopening is not a one-way street,” Dr. Chang said. “If there is a surge in cases, you may need to clamp down again.”
Officials in Miami Beach said Monday that they would again close a popular park after “not everyone followed the rules put in place” to curb the spread of the virus. According to the local authorities, park rangers at the city’s parks issued 7,329 warnings about face coverings and 478 concerning social distancing across Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
In Texas, just days after Gov. Greg Abbott lifted statewide restrictions that allowed many businesses across to reopen with limited occupancy, a federal task force was expected in Amarillo on Monday to combat an alarming surge of cases largely attributed to outbreaks in area
meatpacking plants.
Mayor Ginger Nelson advised residents in a Facebook post that the federal team would be taking over coronavirus testing and investigations to assist state and county officials in an urgent response against rising coronavirus rates.
A new group of citizens informing on their neighbors for violating stay at home orders is emerging.
Largely confined to their homes and worried about the spread of the virus and its risks to their own health or that of loved ones, a segment of the United States has turned informant, calling the police, public health authorities and the employers of people they believe are violating social-distancing decrees or stay-at-home orders.
These complaints have led to shut downs of dog groomers and massage parlors as well as citations and police scoldings to restaurant and bar owners whose patrons are lingering too close to one another.
The citizen action comes into direct conflict with new and mounting calls for the economy to reopen. In one instance, a Wisconsin doctor was photographed at a rally protesting a stay-at-home order, without a mask and arm-in-arm with a fellow demonstrator. The photo was shared on Facebook, and the doctor was suspended by his hospital for a week.
But such reporting also has occurred in more local ways, with neighborhood websites that once served as bulletin boards for lost cats or plumber recommendations now becoming social distancing complaint boxes.
And as Mr. Trump and many Republican governors aggressively push to reopen businesses and some Democratic officials call for continued restraint, the actions are sometimes becoming politicized.
Some liberals said they think that calling out violators is a civic duty and a matter of public health. But Vicki McKenna, a conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin who has promoted rallies resisting the state’s shutdown orders, likened the outing of social-distancing offenders to the actions of informants in a totalitarian state.
“There’s a creepy Orwellian sensibility people have,” she said.
New Mexico invokes a riot law to seal off Gallup, amid an outbreak on the nearby Navajo Nation.
All the roads into Gallup, N.M., a city on the edge of the Navajo Nation, are closed. The soldiers at the checkpoints have their orders: outsiders must turn around and drive away.
The threat of the coronavirus in Gallup became so serious last week that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham invoked the state’s Riot Control Act to lock down the entire city. The downtown of shops, bars and Indian trading posts is now nearly deserted.
“We’re scared to death, so this had to be done,” said Amber Nez, 27, a shoe store saleswoman and Navajo Nation citizen who lives in Gallup. “I only wonder why we didn’t do this sooner.”
The lockdown comes as state and local authorities grapple with
one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the United States on the nearby Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Indian reservation, and a surge in detected cases in places near the reservation.
Gallup, a city of 22,000, serves as a regional hub for the Navajo and other nearby Native American pueblos. Many citizens of various tribal nations regularly drive into Gallup to buy food and other goods.
As of Sunday, the Gallup area had the third-highest rate of infection of any metropolitan area in the United States. Only the areas around New York City and Marion, Ohio, the site of a large prison cluster, had higher rates.
Normal wasn’t working, many California liberals say, as they push agenda in crisis.
Housing for the homeless. Criminal justice reform. Addressing the digital divide for schoolchildren in rural areas.
Propelled by the urgency of the coronavirus crisis, and despite severe economic headwinds, liberal Californians see this moment as an opening to push through an agenda that addresses some of the state’s most intractable and long-debated problems.
Already, thousands of people have been let out of the state’s jails and prisons, cash bail has been eliminated for most crimes, thousands of homeless people now have roofs over their heads, and children in rural and poor areas of the state are being sent tens of thousands of laptop computers for distance learning — temporary measures to confront the pandemic that leaders are hoping will become durable solutions to longstanding problems of inequity.
While many in the country talk about returning to normal, a common refrain is emerging among California’s powerful political left wing and many liberal leaders across America: Normal wasn’t working.
“We are doing things today that should have been done a long time ago,” said George Gascon, a former San Francisco district attorney who is now running for the same office in Los Angeles, and who has been at the vanguard of a national movement of prosecutors looking to reduce mass incarceration. “The reset button was pushed, and I don’t see us coming back.”
Trump stepped up criticism of China, part of an international backlash over the outbreak.
Mr. Trump accused the Chinese government of making a “horrible mistake” in its virus response and of then orchestrating a cover-up that allowed the pathogen to spread around the world.
“My opinion is they made a mistake. They tried to cover it, they tried to put it out. It’s like a fire,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday night during a
virtual town hall on Fox News. “You know, it’s really like trying to put out a fire. They couldn’t put out the fire.”
China did
eventually suppress the disease with a harsh lockdown, but public health experts have criticized Beijing for
withholding information and
acting too late.
Mr. Trump, who has come under fierce criticism for his handling of the crisis, also issued the latest in a
series of accusations from members of his administration laying blame on China for the creation and spread of the virus.
“We’re going to be giving a very strong report as to exactly what we think happened,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think it will be very conclusive.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was even more explicit, saying on Sunday that the
coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the virus first appeared.
That conflicts with the judgment of most virologists and
of U.S. intelligence agencies, which say that the virus was
“not man-made or genetically modified.”
Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that there was “enormous evidence” that the virus came from the lab but then declined to provide any details. He also said he agreed with the intelligence assessment.
The theories are not mutually exclusive: Some officials who have examined the intelligence reports, which remain classified, say it is possible that an animal infected with the virus in the laboratory was destroyed and that a lab worker was accidentally infected in the process. But that is just one of many theories still being examined.
China has
previously denied the virus originated in a laboratory.
The editor in chief of The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, condemned the U.S. administration for making accusations without presenting evidence.
“Don’t just say there’s enormous evidence, Pompeo should present them to the world,” the editor, Hu Xijin,
wrote on Twitter. “By demanding to investigate Wuhan lab they are trying to create continuous controversy and focus, to fool the American public.”
China’s state-run news agency
Xinhua released an animated video featuring Lego-like figures representing the two countries mocking the United States response to the virus.
It is not just the Trump administration that has been increasingly critical of China.
The Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent for Europe, Steven Erlanger, reports that
a backlash across the globe is building against Beijing for its initial mishandling of the crisis, creating a deeply polarizing battle of narratives and setting back China’s ambition to fill the leadership vacuum
left by the United States.
An Amazon executive quit over the firings of employees who protested.
A vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said on Monday that
he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon Web Services,
wrote in a blog post that his last day at the company was on Friday. He criticized a number of recent firings by Amazon, including that of an employee in a Staten Island warehouse, Christian Smalls, who had led a protest in March calling for the company to provide workers with more protections.
Mr. Smalls’s firing has drawn the scrutiny of
New York State’s attorney general.
Mr. Bray also criticized
the firing last month of two Amazon employees, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who
circulated a petition in March on internal email lists that called on Amazon to expand sick leave, hazard pay and child care for warehouse workers.
Mr. Bray, who had worked for the company for more than five years, called the fired workers whistle-blowers, and said that firing them was “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How might the setups of offices change?
The modern corporate office is renowned for open, collaborative work spaces and standing desks with room for two giant computer monitors.
Soon, there may be a new must-have perk: the sneeze guard.
This plexiglass barrier that can be mounted on a desk is one of many
ideas being mulled by employers as they contemplate a return to the office after lockdowns. Their post-pandemic makeovers may include hand sanitizers built into desks that are positioned at 90-degree angles or that are enclosed by translucent plastic partitions; outdoor gathering space to allow collaboration without viral transmission; and windows that actually open, for freer air flow.
The conversation about how to reconfigure the American office is taking place throughout the business world, and the question is whether any of the changes being contemplated will actually result in safer workplaces.
“We are not infectious disease experts, we are simply furniture people,” said Tracy D. Wymer, vice president for workplace at Knoll, a company that makes office furniture and has been engaged by anxious clients to come up with ways to make workplaces less of a health risk.
The actual disease experts say that a virus-free office environment is a pipe dream. Dr. Rajneesh Behal, an internal medicine physician and the chief quality officer of One Medical, a primary-care chain that recently held a webinar for businesses on how to reopen, said, “A core message is, do not expect your risk goes down to zero.”
Countries are taking steps to ease restrictions, and their neighbors are watching closely to see what happens.
At least 12 countries began easing restrictions on public life on Monday, as the world tried to figure out how to placate restless populations tired of being inside and reboot stalled economies without creating opportunities for the virus to re-emerge.
The steps, which include reopening schools and allowing airports to begin domestic service, offer the rest of the world a preview of how areas that have managed to blunt the toll might work toward resuming their pre-pandemic lives. They also serve as test cases for whether the countries can maintain their positive momentum through the reopenings, or if the desire for normalcy could place more people at risk.
Most of the countries easing their restrictions are in Europe, including Italy, one of the places where the virus hit earliest and hardest, leaving
more than 28,000 dead. The country plans to reopen some airports to passengers.
In Germany, where
widespread testing has kept the pandemic under control, children will return to schools. Austria also plans to restart its school system.
In Lebanon, bars and restaurants will reopen, while Poland plans to allow patrons to return to hotels, museums and shops.
India allowed businesses, local transportation and activities like weddings to resume in areas with few or no known infections. Wedding ceremonies with fewer than 50 guests would be permitted and self-employed workers like maids and plumbers can return to work.
Tracking symptoms can help you and your doctors.
Marking your calendar at the first sign of illness, and noting your fever and oxygen levels, are
important steps in monitoring an infection.
Follow what’s happening around the globe with our team of international correspondents.
Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Brooks Barnes, Julian Barnes, Alan Blinder, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Michael Cooper, Caitlin Dickerson, Reid J. Epstein, Nicholas Fandos, Adam Liptak, Patricia Mazzei, Sarah Mervosh, Matt Richtel, Rick Rojas, David Sanger, Marc Santora, Dionne Searcey, Michael D. Shear, Eileen Sullivan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Tracey Tully and Neil Vigdor.
