Coronavirus Live Updates: Total Number of Confirmed Deaths in U.S. Surpasses Italy – The New York Times

U.S. surpasses Italy in the total number of confirmed deaths.

The United States on Saturday surpassed Italy in the total number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus, reaching its deadliest day on Friday with 2,057 deaths. As of Saturday afternoon, the total stood at 20,229.

Already the pandemic has put more than 16 million out of work, forcing President Trump into the difficult choice of reopening the country as it reels economically from the pandemic.

Deaths in the United States per capita remained lower than in Italy, though some experts have warned that geography and population density have helped cushion the United States so far. To date, the virus has killed 19,468 in Italy, or 32 individuals per 100,000 people. In the United States, the number of deaths per 100,000 people was six.

The countrys death toll, which has more than doubled over the past week, is now increasing by nearly 2,000 most days.

As Mr. Trump grapples simultaneously with the most devastating public health and economic crises of a lifetime, he finds himself pulled in opposite directions. Bankers, corporate executives and industrialists are pleading with him to reopen the country as soon as possible, while medical experts beg for more time to curb the coronavirus.

Tens of thousands more people could die. Millions more could lose their jobs. And his handling of the crisis appears to be hurting his political support in the run-up to Novembers election.

In a Saturday night interview with Jeanine Pirro on Fox News, Mr. Trump said the decision on whether to reopen the country is the toughest he has ever faced, but he intends to make it fairly soon with input from political, business and medical leaders.

Its going to be based on a lot of facts and on instinct also, Mr. Trump said. Whether we like it or not, there is a certain instinct to it. But we have to get our country back. People want to get back. They want to get back to work.

But the decision on when and how to reopen is not entirely his. The stay-at-home edicts keeping most Americans indoors were issued by governors state by state.

The president did issue nonbinding guidelines urging a pause in daily life through the end of the month. And if he were to issue new guidance outlining a path toward reopening, many states would probably follow or feel pressure from businesses and constituents to ease restrictions.

But the central question is how long it will be until the country is fully back up and running.

The governors of Texas and Florida, both Republicans, have started talking about reopening businesses and schools in their states, echoing signals from Mr. Trump.

But the leaders of California and New York, both Democrats, are sounding more cautious notes about how quickly things can get back to normal.

Californias curve is flattening, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Twitter on Friday. But that progress will only hold if we continue to STAY HOME and practice physical distancing. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said that widespread testing for coronavirus antibodies would be required before his state could consider reopening nonessential businesses.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Friday that he wanted the states businesses to reopen sooner than later, insisting that the coronavirus had slowed its spread in some areas, and that it was not as prevalent in Texas as it was in New York, California and other hard-hit states.

Mr. Abbott said he would issue an executive order this week laying out the timetable and standards for reopening Texas businesses. We want to open up, but we want to open up safely, Mr. Abbott told reporters on Friday.

In Texas, the governors announcement came as the state has yet to hit its peak in coronavirus cases; more than 12,000 Texans have tested positive, with 253 deaths. And it came just 10 days after he issued what is effectively a statewide stay-at-home order on March 31, long after most other states had done so.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, said officials in his state were exploring reopening schools in May. But at the same time on Thursday, he made headlines by telling educators that he did not believe anyone under the age of 25 had died of the coronavirus. At least three children have.

A Times examination reveals the extent of President Trumps slow response as the virus spread.

Throughout January, as President Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government including top White House advisers and experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

Dozens of interviews and a review of emails and other records by The New York Times revealed many previously unreported details of the roots and extent of his halting response:

The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus, and within weeks raised options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down large cities.

Despite Mr. Trumps denial, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic.

The health and human services secretary directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus. The president said he was being alarmist.

The health secretary publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a surveillance system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus. It was delayed for weeks, leaving administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading.

For the first time, all 50 states are now under a federal disaster declaration for the same event.

President Trump approved a major disaster declaration for Wyoming on Saturday, the last state to receive the designation in response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It is the first time the government has declared all 50 states a major disaster for the same event, an agency spokesman said. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands have also received the declaration, which provides access to billions in disaster relief funds.

FEMA has obligated more than $5.2 billion of the $60.5 billion allocated for major disasters in what is known as the Disaster Relief Fund, the spokesman said.

Wyoming, which has more than 250 reported cases of the coronavirus, will now have access to federal emergency aid to assist the states recovery efforts. The first coronavirus case in Wyoming was reported on March 11, but no deaths have been recorded.

There are two types of disaster declarations that fall under the Stafford Act, which authorizes federal disaster aid: emergency and major disaster. Requests for both types of declarations are made by state governors and approved by the president, but they offer access to separate buckets of money.

Abortion providers ask Supreme Court to let clinics continue to perform some procedures.

Abortion providers in Texas asked the Supreme Court on Saturday to let their clinics continue to perform some procedures after a federal appeals court upheld orders from state officials prohibiting most abortions.

In their Supreme Court filing, lawyers from Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights said the Texas health crisis did not justify severe restrictions on the constitutional right to abortion.

Three weeks ago, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, ordered a halt to all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary. That included abortions not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother, Ken Paxton, the states attorney general, said in a news release. Other abortions, he said, must be postponed to preserve protective gear and other resources to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Abortion providers promptly challenged the orders as unconstitutional, and the case has twice reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which both times overturned temporary restraining orders issued by Judge Lee Yeakel, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

The latest ruling from the appeals court, on Friday, allowed almost all of the governors order to stay in place, quoting earlier decisions in saying that a state may implement emergency measures that curtail constitutional rights so long as the measures have at least some real or substantial relation to the public health crisis and are not beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law.

Judge Yeakel had allowed exceptions to the governors order, which is scheduled to expire April 21 but may be renewed, for abortions performed using drugs and for women whose pregnancies were in their later stages.

A divided three-judge panel of the appeals court stayed Judge Yeakels latest temporary restraining order, making an exception only for any patient who, based on the treating physicians medical judgment, would be past the legal limit for an abortion in Texas, which is 22 weeks from the last menstrual period, on April 22.

The judges in the majority were Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, appointed by President Trump, and Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, appointed by Mr. Bush. Judge James L. Dennis, appointed by President Bill Clinton, dissented, saying he would have upheld Judge Yeakels order.

Several other states, including Alabama, Ohio and Oklahoma, have also sought to limit abortions as part of their response to the pandemic, and those efforts have been challenged in court. The Texas case is the first to reach the Supreme Court.

The Pentagon said it would use special powers to ramp up production of millions of N95 masks.

The Defense Department announced on Saturday that it would use a Korean War-era law in an attempt to increase American production of badly needed N95 masks by 39 million over the next three months.

The law, the Defense Production Act, allows the government to take extraordinary measures to procure supplies and materials deemed necessary for the nations defense and security.

President Trump invoked the law last month, but its use so far has been limited, even as states and medical facilities sound alarms about the shortage of personal protective equipment, including masks, in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.

Pentagon officials said they had received signoff from the White House late Friday to use the authorities under the law to award $133 million in contracts for the masks, which they anticipate would be delivered in the next 90 days. It was the first time the department had used the authorities related to the virus, though the White House has already taken other steps allowed under the law to try to increase American mask supplies.

The increased production will ensure the U.S. government gets dedicated long term industrial capacity to meet the needs of the nation, Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, a Pentagon, spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

The department did not announce which companies had received the contracts. Defense Production Act authorities include the ability for the government to issue loans to expand production capacity for a given company, to compel companies to prioritize its orders over other clients and to control the distribution of a companys products.

A Trump ally, who the president said had the coronavirus, died from complications.

Stanley Chera, the New York real-estate developer and friend of President Trump whom the president described during a White House briefing as suffering from the coronavirus, has died from complications related to the disease, three people familiar with his death said on Saturday.

Mr. Chera, 78, who was being treated at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, died there, according to the people familiar with what took place.

Mr. Chera had left New York City for Deal, N.J., in early March, as a number of wealthier city residents fled the city, one of the centers of the outbreak, to avoid the virus. It was unclear where Mr. Chera contracted it.

The president repeatedly referred to Mr. Cheras illness while speaking to reporters at the White House. He did not name him, but people close to the president said it was Mr. Chera he had been describing.

At the end of March, as Mr. Trump extended the social-distancing guidelines through April 30, he told reporters of a friend who had suddenly found himself ill.

Hes sort of a tough guy, Mr. Trump said. A little older, a little heavier than hed like to be, frankly. And you call up the next day: Hows he doing? And hes in a coma.

Federal prison chief defends response as infection and unrest spread behind bars.

Jails, prisons and detention centers have emerged as major spreaders of the coronavirus in the United States. At the Cook County Jail in Chicago, at least 492 inmates and employees had tested positive by Saturday, making it the top-known source of U.S. infections. A state prison in Michigan had 194 confirmed cases. And New York Citys jails have been hard hit, with hundreds of inmates and corrections staff contracting the virus.

In the federal system, which holds about 174,000 people across the country, at least 481 inmates and prison workers have tested positive for the virus, according to New York Times tracking data, and at least nine federal inmates have died, mainly in Louisiana. The Times has spoken with dozens of workers and inmates who say the federal Bureau of Prisons was ill-prepared for the outbreak.

On Friday, the director of the federal prison system defended his agencys response in an interview on CNN, saying the pandemic was an overwhelming challenge that no one expected. I dont think anybody was ready for this Covid, so were dealing with it just as well as anybody else, and Id be proud to say were doing pretty good, said Michael Carvajal, who took over as the head of the Bureau of Prisons less than two months ago.

Six of the federal prisoners who died were being held in Oakdale, La., where nearly 1,000 people are incarcerated, and where there have been reports of a revolt among inmates.

Attorney General William P. Barr last week ordered the Bureau of Prisons to release more people from federal custody and to focus on three prisons that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus, including the Federal Correctional Institution Oakdale.

State prisons and jails, which hold the vast majority of the people incarcerated in the United States, have also faced unrest in recent days. More than 100 men at a Washington State prison demonstrated in response to positive tests at the facility. Police officers fired pepper spray and sting balls, which eject rubber pellets, to quell the demonstration. In Kansas, inmates at the Lansing Correctional Facility, where at least 28 people have tested positive, set small fires and broke windows in a demonstration that lasted for nearly 12 hours. Two inmates suffered injuries. In Pennsylvania, families of inmates at the Franklin County jail told The PA Post, a local news website, that the inmates were staging a hunger strike.

And in Texas, the state prison system will no longer take new inmates from county jails starting on Monday, according to the states Department of Criminal Justice. In a letter sent to county sheriffs on Saturday, Bryan Collier, the departments executive director, said the decision put additional strain on counties but was necessary to fight the spread of the virus.

Immigrants held at the Otay Mesa detention center in San Diego, Calif., said in phone calls recorded by their lawyers that guards had pepper-sprayed them on Friday after they demanded masks and began to make their own out of clothing and plastic bags. They also said they were asked to sign liability waivers absolving CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates the facility, from responsibility for any coronavirus-related illnesses.

Amanda Gilchrist, a spokeswoman for CoreCivic, described the document that detainees were asked to sign as an educational document explaining that masks were not entirely protective against the virus. She said the company dropped the requirement after the protest and denied that pepper spray was used. At least 16 detainees at the facility have tested positive, according to local news reports.

New York City schools will be closed through the end of the academic year, the mayor says. Not so fast, Cuomo responds.

New York Citys public schools would remain closed through the end of the academic year, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Saturday, confirming that more than three months of regular schooling for 1.1 million children will be lost because of the spread of the coronavirus.

But soon after the mayor ended his news conference on Saturday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at his own news briefing said there had been no decision on closing schools in the state or city. He described the mayors announcement as Mr. de Blasios opinion. The governor and mayor have been political rivals for years.

It makes no sense for one locality to take an action thats not coordinated with the others, Mr. Cuomo said.

Though New York City is the center of the nations coronavirus outbreak, more than a dozen states and many more local school districts have already announced that their public schools would remain closed through the end of the school year, including California, Pennsylvania and Washington.

But in California, there is one lonely exception: In a rural San Joaquin Valley community where many adults work in citrus and walnut groves, students can still attend kindergarten through eighth grade at Outside Creek Elementary.

Derrick Bravo, the schools principal, superintendent and eighth-grade teacher, said he had leaned on advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which suggested that some small schools outside dangerous areas could remain open.

Last week, 21 students about a quarter the schools normal attendance showed up for classes.

Coronavirus is ravaging nursing homes around New York, as Washington State grapples with its losses.

At Crown Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Brooklyn, workers said they had to convert a room into a makeshift morgue after more than 15 residents died of the coronavirus, and funeral homes could not handle all the bodies.

At Elizabeth Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in New Jersey, 19 deaths have been linked to the virus; of the 54 residents who remain, 44 are sick.

The coronavirus has snatched lives in every part of society, but has perhaps been cruelest at nursing homes and other facilities for older people, where an aging or frail population, chronic understaffing, shortages of protective gear and constant physical contact has hastened its spread.

In all, around 2,000 residents of nursing homes have died in the outbreak in the New York region, and thousands of other residents are sick. But the crisis in nursing homes is also occurring in virus hot spots elsewhere in the country, with infections growing in places like Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

In Washington State, the daughter of a woman who died at a Seattle-area nursing home linked to dozens of deaths has filed what appears to be the first coronavirus-related lawsuit against the facility, accusing the company that runs it of fraud.

Debbie de los Angeles said in her lawsuit that Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., concealed information to hide the ongoing danger and threat at the facility, which is linked to 43 deaths. Her mother, Twilla Morin, died there on March 4. The facility had started noticing an outbreak of respiratory illness in the weeks before Ms. Morins death, but the company has said workers did not realize it was the coronavirus until later.

Guam is the center of the Navys coronavirus outbreak.

Strapped by the same problems facing health care workers around the world, including a limited supply of personal protective equipment, hospital beds and ventilators, Guams government is contending with how it can protect its own people and simultaneously help the crew of infected sailors on the Theodore Roosevelt carrier, which arrived in Guam on March 27. The outbreak on the ship ended up creating a moral crisis for the military.

As an American territory roughly 7,200 miles from the continental United States, Guam in many ways represents the edge of the United States empire, one that happens to be on the front lines of the American deterrence strategy against China.

The island, at 212 square miles, is home to Joint Region Marianas, a military command made up of Andersen Air Force Base on the northern part of the island that supports stealth-bomber rotations, and Naval Base Guam to the south, where four attack submarines are stationed to counter Chinese military expansion in the South China Sea.

Theyre the ones that are out there, protecting our waters, said Lourdes Leon Guerrero, the islands governor, of the Navy. With about two dozen Guam residents serving aboard the carrier, finding space was the least we could do.

In interviews with The New York Times, local residents, and Theodore Roosevelt sailors and their loved ones, described a complicated situation in which the island is providing logistical support to the Navy while also trying to protect the local population from the coronavirus, which could quickly overwhelm Guams fragile health care system.

The first Americans to recover from the virus have emerged.

Elizabeth Schneider hated to appear to be violating rules that were meant to protect others, and that she knew relied on collective determination to enforce.

But the state health department said people who had tested positive for the coronavirus were allowed to leave self-isolation seven days after their first symptom and three days after their last fever. By those metrics, she was free to fly to Tucson, Ariz., to visit her parents.

She would be more useful there, she had reasoned, as her familys designated grocery shopper. Especially since her mother has asthma.

But re-entry to a society that is largely shut down can also come with a new sense of isolation, Ms. Schneider found.

I thought to myself, Should I mention to them that I had it? she said of her fellow passengers on her mostly empty flight. Ultimately I chickened out.

As recently as mid-March, fewer than 5,000 people in the United States had tested positive for the new coronavirus. Some are still coughing, or tethered to oxygen tanks. Many have died. But the first large wave of Covid-19 survivors, likely to be endowed with a power known to infectious disease specialists as adaptive immunity, is emerging.

Republicans press for $250 billion to replenish small-business program as governors push for more aid.

Top Republican congressional leaders said on Saturday that they would continue to push for a stand-alone infusion of $250 billion to replenish a fast-depleting loan program for distressed small businesses, rebuffing their Democratic counterparts who demanded conditions on the new money and additional funds for hospitals, state and local governments and food aid.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said in a joint statement on Saturday that their lawmakers reject Democrats reckless threat to continue blocking job-saving funding unless we renegotiate unrelated programs which are not in similar peril.

The administration requested quick action to approve the money to bolster a loan program created last month by the $2 trillion stimulus law for small businesses, . But Democrats blocked an effort by Republicans to push it through the Senate on Thursday with their demand to place conditions on the new funds.

The National Governors Association on Saturday called on lawmakers to allocate at least an additional $500 billion for states and territories to address budgetary shortfalls that have resulted from this unprecedented public health crisis.

That amount is more than double what Democrats had proposed adding to the package, which was to be an interim step as lawmakers look toward a far larger package expected to top $1 trillion to build on the stimulus law.

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Coronavirus Live Updates: Total Number of Confirmed Deaths in U.S. Surpasses Italy - The New York Times