Here’s what you need to know:
- A majority of U.S. states don’t meet the White House’s guidelines for reopening.
- Millions more Americans are expected to be added to jobless rolls, and even more economic pain is forecast.
- Trump wants the nation to move on despite risks of an even greater death toll.
- Most U.S. outbreaks were seeded by travel from New York, researchers find.
- The U.N. needs billions more than predicted to handle the global humanitarian disaster.
- A test for the coronavirus that could be as simple as a pregnancy test.
- Readers describe a way of finding solace: a daily walk.
A majority of U.S. states don’t meet the White House’s guidelines for reopening.
More than half of states have begun to reopen their economies or plan to do so soon. But most fail to meet criteria recommended by the Trump administration to resume business and social activities.
The White House’s nonbinding guidelines suggest that states should have a “downward trajectory” of documented cases or of the percentage of tests that come back positive. Public health experts have criticized the metrics because they don’t specify a threshold for case numbers or positive rates and do not define a downward trajectory.
Still, most states that are beginning to open for business fail to adhere to even those recommendations: In more than half of states easing restrictions, case counts are trending upward, positive test results are on the rise, or both, raising concerns among public health experts.
“With so many places opening up before we see indicators of meaningful, sustained transmission declines, there is substantial risk of resurgence,” said Kimberly Powers, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Associated Press reported on Thursday that a set of detailed documents created by the United States’ top infectious disease experts to give local leaders advice on how to reopen safely had been shelved by the Trump administration.
The 17-page report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was supposed to be published last Friday and was more detailed than the guidelines released by the White House, according to the A.P.
Millions more Americans are expected to be added to jobless rolls, and even more economic pain is forecast.
The current economic picture is, in a word, bleak. But even in the longer term, many economists warn, the outlook is far from promising, and the quick rebound that President Trump has touted may not materialize.
The decline has been so sudden and so widespread, and consumers are so frightened, that the road back to the economy of 2019 looks more like a slog than a leap.
Roughly 30 million people in the United States have filed for unemployment benefits and millions more are expected to swell that figure when the Labor Department releases its latest weekly report this morning.
The country has already suffered its worst decline in gross domestic product in a decade; the worst retail sales report on record; the worst week ever for unemployment claims and two subsequent reports that were twice as bad as that.
When another government report is issued on Friday, it is expected to show an April unemployment rate likely to hit 15 percent or higher, by far the worst since the Great Depression. And the deterioration has happened with almost unfathomable swiftness: Two months earlier, the rate was 3.5 percent, a 50-year low.
Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expect the report to show that U.S. payrolls fell by 22 million jobs last month — a decade’s worth of job gains wiped out in weeks. The payroll processing company ADP said on Wednesday that the private sector lost more than 20 million jobs in April, with the cuts spread across every sector and size of employer.
To put that in perspective: In the worst month of the last recession in 2008 and 2009, the U.S. lost 800,000 jobs.
And it is part of a broader global downturn.
Europe’s economy will shrink by 7.4 percent this year, according to projections by the European Commission. In the recession of 2009 that followed the global financial crisis, it contracted by 4.5 percent.
The Bank of England anticipates that the British economy, already presumed to be in recession, could contract an astonishing 30 percent in the first half of the year, according to a scenario published on Thursday.
But the central bank decided not to introduce new stimulus spending and the bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, sounded a note of optimism, predicting that the economy would recover “much more rapidly than the pull back from the global financial crisis” in 2008.
In the United States, workers in the restaurant, travel, hospitality and retail industries were among the first to lose their jobs when the outbreak forced business shutdowns. But in recent weeks, layoffs spread to engineers at Uber, advertising account executives at Omnicom, designers at Airbnb and other office employees.
Experts say it is impossible to calculate just how many jobs might come back as states consider lifting shelter-in-place rules.
“We don’t know what normal is going to look like,” said Martha Gimbel, an economist and a labor market expert at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative. “It’s just too early to tell.”
Trump wants the nation to move on despite risks of an even greater death toll.
Confronted with the worst public health crisis in the United States in generations, President Trump declared himself a wartime president. Now he has begun doing what past commanders have done when a war goes badly: Declare victory and go home.
The war, however, does not seem over. Outside New York, the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is still growing, not receding. The latest death toll estimates have more than doubled from what Mr. Trump predicted just weeks ago. And polls show the public is not ready to restore normal life.
But Peter Baker writes that Mr. Trump’s cure-can’t-be-worse-than-the-disease logic is clear: As bad as the virus may be, the cost of the virtual national lockdown has grown too high. With at least 30 million people out of work and businesses collapsing by the day, keeping the country at home seems unsustainable. With the virus still spreading and no vaccine available until next year at the earliest, though, the president has decided that for life to resume for many, some may have to die.
“Hopefully that won’t be the case,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday when asked if deaths would rise as a result of reopening, but he added, “It could very well be the case.”
“But we have to get our country open again,” he continued. “People want to go back, and you’re going to have a problem if you don’t do it.”
Most U.S. outbreaks were seeded by travel from New York, researchers find.
New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research has revealed, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.
The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York through much of the country before the city began setting social-distancing limits. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas and as far away as the West Coast.
The findings by geneticists were drawn by tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious-disease experts.
The central role of New York’s outbreak shows that decisions made by state and federal officials — including waiting to impose distancing measures and to limit international flights — helped shape the trajectory of the outbreak and allowed it to grow in the rest of the country.
“We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.
The U.N. needs billions more than predicted to handle the global humanitarian disaster.
The United Nations on Thursday more than tripled the size of its humanitarian aid appeal to help the most vulnerable countries threatened by the coronavirus pandemic to $6.7 billion, from the $2 billion initially sought just six weeks ago.
The enormous expansion of the appeal, announced by Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian aid official at the United Nations, reflected what he described as an updated global plan that includes nine additional countries deemed especially vulnerable: Benin, Djibouti, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Togo and Zimbabwe.
While the peak of the pandemic in the poorest countries is not expected until somewhere between three and six months from now, the United Nations said in a statement that, “There is already evidence of incomes plummeting and jobs disappearing, food supplies failing and prices soaring, and children missing vaccinations and meals.”
Mr. Lowcock, who heads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, warned that, “Unless we take action now, we should be prepared for a significant rise in conflict, hunger and poverty.” He added that “the specter of multiple famines” loomed if the help fell short.
Even as the 193-member organization announced the new target for humanitarian fund-raising, it was still facing challenges in fulfilling the $2 billion goal set by the secretary general, António Guterres, on March 25. About $1 billion has been raised.
That money, the United Nations said, has gone to funding for hand-washing stations in vulnerable locations such as refugee camps, the distribution of gloves and masks, and the training of more than 1.7 million people, including health workers, on virus identification and protection measures.
Mr. Lowcock’s office projected recently that the long-term cost of protecting the most vulnerable 10 percent of people in the world from the worst impacts of the pandemic was approximately $90 billion. That amount is equivalent to about 1 percent of the current economic stimulus packages announced by the world’s most affluent countries.
A test for the coronavirus that could be as simple as a pregnancy test.
A team of scientists has developed an experimental prototype for a relatively quick, cheap test to diagnose the coronavirus that gives results as simply as a pregnancy test does.
The test is based on a gene-editing technology known as Crispr, and the researchers estimated that the materials for each test would cost about $6.
“We’re excited that this could be a solution that people won’t have to rely on a sophisticated and expensive laboratory to run,” said Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and one of the pioneers of Crispr technology.
On Tuesday, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues posted a description of their device on a website dedicated to their project, but their method has not yet been tested by other scientists, nor have their findings been published by a scientific journal that subjected them to scrutiny by independent experts.
Two other teams of researchers, one in Buenos Aires and the other in San Francisco, are also working to devise new tests to detect the virus using gene-editing technology.
Readers describe a way of finding solace: a daily walk.
“I miss breathing in the air.” “Sometimes the city is like a dreamy, slowed-down version of itself.” “I close my eyes and listen to the waves.”
With the coronavirus sickening thousands more each day, a walk outside is one of the few options for escaping the drumbeat of bad news.
We asked readers to tell us about the walks they are taking, what they see on their travels and how they feel as they cover old ground or explore new paths.
They wrote of stepping outside of their homes, outside of their deepening anxieties, outside of the sense that time is now measured against job losses, infections and death. They told us about waving to train conductors, like a child; about a flower’s flash of color and its scent on the breeze, filtered through the fabric of a mask; and about the realization “that there are some things that survive.”
The sports world is slowly rumbling back to life.
As the United States and other countries start to ease lockdown restrictions, sports are slowly awakening from a two-month hiatus.
Soccer teams in Germany, Italy and Spain have resumed training in the hopes of restarting their seasons, professional golfers are looking at a return to competition soon, and touring tennis pros learned this week that an altered version of a team season is in the works. Professional baseball began again in South Korea on Tuesday, some N.B.A. training facilities may open on Friday, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship and NASCAR plan to hold events this month.
But any return will be uneven. In the United States, 50 states may produce 50 different sets of regulations for what kind of activity is allowed, complicating each athlete’s individual efforts to get back into competitive shape.
Still, the timeout has left fans thirsting for games and athletes desperate to compete.
“Just the very fact that we’re trying to figure out ways for sports to continue without fans shows you how much we deeply want and need sports,” said the sports psychologist Mary Jo Kane. She spoke by telephone after finishing a nine-hole round of golf, a part of her weekly routine that she said she missed when courses near her home in Minnesota were closed.
Bored? Take a craft trip back to the 1800s.
In the midst of quarantine, flower pressing, natural dyeing and other traditional activities have made a comeback. Here are some “new” old-timey projects to try:
Follow the news from our international correspondents.
In India, a gas leak that poisoned hundreds may have resulted from the rush to reopen a chemical plant after weeks of lockdown.
Reporting was contributed by Benedict Carey, James Glanz, Keith Collins, Lauren Leatherby, Ben Casselman, Marc Santora, Patricia Cohen, Tiffany Hsu, Peter Baker, Carl Zimmer, Rick Gladstone, Karen Crouse, Matthew Futterman, Tariq Panja and Nicholas Fandos.
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May 07, 2020 at 05:16PM
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Coronavirus Live Updates: Most States Are Reopening Despite Rising Case Counts - The New York Times
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