Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out and Says He Has ‘Total’ Authority to Supersede Governors – The New York Times

Trump defends his response with a campaign-style video and attacks the news media.

President Trump on Monday sought to defend himself against criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic, using a White House briefing to show a campaign-style video reel of cable hits of reporters and Democratic governors complimenting his decision to institute travel restrictions on China, and of other experts playing down the threat of the coronavirus.

“I did a ban on China — you think that was easy?” Mr. Trump said, lashing out at news reporters who raised questions about what steps the administration took in February to slow the spread of the virus.

He defended his response broadly, claiming that, “everything we did was right.”

The combative presentation came just after Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious diseases specialist, walked back remarks that had been interpreted as critical of Mr. Trump. Dr. Fauci said he had been responding to a “hypothetical question” when he said over the weekend that more lives could have been saved had the government moved earlier to shut down schools, businesses and other gatherings.

Dr. Fauci’s original comments, in an interview on CNN, were seen by some as a veiled criticism of Mr. Trump. On Sunday night the president retweeted a message that said “Time to #FireFauci,” leading the White House to issue a statement on Monday saying that the president had no intention of dismissing him.

Dr. Fauci moved on Monday night to clean up the controversy. “There were interpretations of that response to a hypothetical question,” he said, adding that he wanted to clarify what he meant.

Dr. Fauci said that mitigation policies such as limiting large gatherings and encouraging social distancing save lives, and that they can save more lives the earlier they are put into place. He added that Mr. Trump had taken his advice when he and Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, recommended that he issue guidelines asking Americans to stay home.

The unusual White House statement was issued to allay concerns that Mr. Trump might seek to sideline the veteran scientist at the very moment when the president is trying to craft a plan to reopen the country amid the ongoing pandemic, which has killed more than 22,000 Americans.

Mr. Trump reiterated at the briefing that he did not intend to fire Dr. Fauci. “I’m not firing him — I think he’s a wonderful guy,” the president said. Asked about his Twitter post, Mr. Trump played down its significance: “I retweeted somebody, I don’t know.”

When Dr. Fauci was asked if he had walked back his remarks voluntarily, he replied: “Everything I do is voluntary. Please — don’t even imply that.”

Two groups of governors, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, announced Monday that they were forming regional working groups to help plan when it would be safe to begin to ease coronavirus-related restrictions to reopen their economies.

Their announcements came hours after President Trump, who has expressed impatience to reopen the economy, wrote on Twitter that such a decision lies with the president, not the states.

“Well, seeing as we had the responsibility for closing the state down,” Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania said, “I think we probably have the primary responsibility for opening it up.”

He joined the governors of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island on a conference call, where they agreed to create a committee of public health officials, economic development officials and their chiefs of staff to work together as they decide when to ease the restrictions they have put in place to slow the spread of the virus. They said they did not necessarily expect to act together or to create a one-size-fits-all solution, but they stressed the need for regional cooperation.

On the West Coast, the governors of California, Oregon and Washington also announced Monday what they called a Western States Pact to work together on a joint approach to reopening economies. They said that while each state would have its own specific plan, the states would build out a West Coast strategy that would include how to control the virus in the future. “Our states will only be effective by working together,” they said in a joint statement.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Monday that he had been in discussions with the other governors to coordinate efforts on the West Coast. He said that on Tuesday he would outline the “California-based thinking” on reopening and promised it would be guided by “facts,” “evidence” and “science.”

The stay-at-home orders that have kept a vast majority of Americans indoors were issued state by state, by their governors. The president did issue nonbinding guidelines urging a pause in daily life through the end of the month; in some states that had resisted such measures, including Florida, his input helped spur governors to act. If the federal government were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to relax those measures or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel tremendous pressure from their businesses and constituents to relax restrictions.

But Mr. Trump, who said Friday that the decision of when to reopen the country would be the biggest he would ever make, said Monday that the decision for the president, not the governors, to make.

“The president of the United States calls the shots,” Mr. Trump said in a briefing at the White House. He added that he would work with the states, adding that he believed they were anxious to reopen when they can. “When someone is president of the United States, the authority is total.”

Still, several of the governors who spoke Monday made it clear that they did not intend to let businesses in their states reopen until experts and data suggested it would be safe to do so. They noted that their fates were bound by geography. “The reality is this virus doesn’t care about state borders, and our response shouldn’t either,” Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island said.

“We can put together a system that allows our people to get back to work,” Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut said. But he warned against reopening too soon and risking a second wave of infections.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that he was working closely with the White House on his plan to reopen the state’s businesses. He called for a staggered approach in which businesses that have a minimal impact on the spread of the virus would open up first.

“This is not going to be a rush-the-gates” situation, said Mr. Abbott, who has been criticized for making Texas one of the last states to issue a statewide stay-at-home order.

Earlier on Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said New York’s known death toll had exceeded 10,000, with 671 people dying on Sunday. Nearly 2,000 more people were hospitalized on Sunday — a vast number, though lower than previous tallies — and there were fewer intubations. But even as he hinted that he believed that “the worst is over,” he warned the situation would worsen if New Yorkers behaved recklessly.

“Not as bad as it has been in the past, but basically flat, and basically flat at a horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow,” Mr. Cuomo said.

There are more than 500,000 confirmed cases in the United States and more than 23,000 people dead, according to a New York Times database. In one case, a sailor assigned to the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt died of complications stemming from the virus, according to Navy officials. It was the first death for the ship’s crew, which numbers more than 4,800.

Mr. Trump is in a rush to lift restrictions, convinced that the move will rocket the economy out of a deep recession.

Companies say otherwise. So does a wide variety of economic and survey data, which suggests the economy will recover slowly even after the government begins to ease limits on public gatherings and allow certain restaurants and other closed shops to reopen.

U.S. stocks slipped on Monday, a retreat that followed one of Wall Street’s best weeks in decades, as investors weighed the implications of a deal to cut oil production and awaited the release of quarterly earnings reports from corporate America. The S&P 500 fell about 1 percent.

The evidence suggests it’s not just stay-at-home orders and other government restrictions that have chilled economic activity in the United States over the last month: It’s also a behavioral response from workers and consumers scared of contracting the virus.

Even in places without lockdown orders, business has suffered, and unemployment has increased because Americans are avoiding restaurants, airports and shopping centers on their own accord.

Even businesses that are in increased demand because of the pandemic are struggling. Quest Diagnostics announced on Monday that it has approved furloughs for more than 4,000 employees — about nine percent of its work force.

Quest, one of the nation’s largest commercial laboratories for medical testing, said that its recent increase in coronavirus testing has not offset the significant drop in overall testing volume, which it attributed to social distancing guidelines that have led to a reduction in routine medical visits and elective procedures. Total test volume dropped more than 40 percent in the last two weeks of March, the company said.

“None of these changes will impact our ability to deliver critical Covid-19 testing,” Steve Rusckowski, the chief executive of Quest, wrote in an email to colleagues.

Quest said it has performed nearly 800,000 coronavirus tests, and is preparing to begin offering antibody blood tests to identify people who have been exposed to the virus and may have built immunity.

Smithfield Foods said Sunday that its plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., one of the nation’s largest pork processing facilities, would remain closed indefinitely at the urging of the governor and mayor after 293 workers tested positive for the virus.

The plant, which employs 3,700 workers and produces about 130 million servings of food per week, is responsible for about half of the state’s total number of cases.

Meat production workers often work elbow to elbow, cleaning and deboning products in large open areas filled with hundreds of people. The closure at Smithfield follows the halting of production at several other poultry and meat plants across the country as workers have fallen ill with Covid-19.

Many meat processing facilities have been hit hard by the virus. Three workers have died at a Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, Ga. Tyson also shut a pork plant in Iowa after an outbreak there among workers. JBS USA, the world’s largest meat processor, confirmed the death of one worker at a Colorado facility and shuttered a plant in Pennsylvania for two weeks.

In a statement announcing the closure, Smithfield’s chief executive warned that the closures were threatening the U.S. meat supply. The shuttered plant produces about 4 percent to 5 percent of the country’s pork, Smithfield said.

Several meat processing corporations are offering cash bonuses to workers who continue showing up for work amid the pandemic. Workers have said they feel pressured to do so, even if they are feeling unwell. Smithfield said it would continue paying Sioux Falls plant workers for two weeks, “and hopes to keep them from joining the ranks of the tens of millions of unemployed Americans across the country.”

The Census Bureau will seek a four-month delay for its count.

Conceding that its effort to count the nation’s population has been hamstrung by the pandemic, the Census Bureau said it would ask Congress for a four-month delay in delivering the population data used to reapportion the House of Representatives and political districts across the country.

In a news release, the bureau said the new deadline would mean that state legislatures would get final figures for drawing new district maps as late as July 31, 2021. Delivery of that data normally begins in February.

The bureau also said it would extend the deadline for collecting census data, now Aug. 15, to Oct. 31, and would begin reopening its field offices — which have been shuttered since mid-March — sometime after June 1.

Democrats who oversee census operations on the House Oversight and Reform Committee reacted cautiously to the news, which they said was relayed to a handful of members of Congress in a telephone call with officials from the White House and the Commerce Department. The director of the census, Steven Dillingham, apparently did not participate in the call.

Top Democratic leaders on Monday doubled down on their insistence that any infusion of cash for a new loan program to help small businesses affected by the pandemic must include additional funds for state and local governments, hospitals, food assistance and rapid testing.

The demands, reiterated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, is likely to further prolong a stalemate between lawmakers over what was intended to be an interim emergency package before another broader stimulus package.

They came as Democratic leaders announced that the House was pushing back its date for returning to Washington by two weeks, to May 4. Representative Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said the House would remain in recess until that date, “absent an emergency.”

Democrats on Thursday blocked a bid by Republicans to inject $250 billion of new funding into the loan program, insisting on adding money for other priorities and conditions to ensure the loan money would be distributed to small businesses that typically have trouble obtaining credit. But Republicans refused, arguing that any additional funding or policy proposals should wait until future legislation.

The $2 trillion economic stimulus law enacted last month provided $350 billion for the loan initiative, known as the Paycheck Protection Program, and the administration has said it will soon run out of funds, even as businesses say they have yet to receive a majority of the slated billions.

As of early Monday afternoon, more than 4,600 lenders had been approved for more than $230 billion, according to Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, who said there was concern that banks would stop issuing loans if there was not a guarantee that cash would be available from the federal government.

The lines start forming the night before, as people with glassy eyes and violent coughs try to get tested before the next day’s supplies run out. In the darkness, they park their cars, cut their engines and try to sleep.

The backlog for virus testing in New Jersey, the state with the second-highest caseload in the country, has been getting worse, not better, officials say.

So far, New Jersey has conducted over 115,000 tests, about one for every 75 residents. In New York City, the epicenter of the crisis, there is about one for every 18. The tests are a critical tool in measuring the disease’s spread and a requirement for certain forms of treatment. Yet they remain hard to get, and many are actively discouraged from trying.

“It’s unequivocally worsening,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said recently.

Initially, the strain came from a lack of test kits, but now there are not enough nasal swabs or nurses. There is a pileup at the labs themselves and a limited supply of the chemicals needed to identify the virus.

Last Monday, Anita Holmes-Perez felt so sick that she asked her husband to drive her to a testing site at 10:45 p.m. She spent the night constantly adjusting her reclining car seat, lying down until the congestion in her chest forced her to sit up again.

She was battling a fever, a cough, dizziness and a feeling of confusion. “Like you don’t know where you are,” she said.

When medical workers finally took a sample from her the next morning, it would be shipped across the country because the local lab was too full. Three vans would take it part of the way. A plane, sent on a detour by a storm, would take it further. It would be days before she got a result. Until then, Ms. Holmes-Perez waited.

Twelve days before thousands gathered in the streets of New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras, Sarah A. Babcock, the director of policy and emergency preparedness for the city health department, prepared a list of bullet points about the troubling disease that had already sickened thousands in China but had only infected 13 known patients in the United States.

“The chance of us getting someone with coronavirus is low,” Ms. Babcock advised community health providers, according to internal City of New Orleans emails obtained by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and reviewed by The New York Times.

The projection proved to be terribly off-base, as New Orleans would soon erupt into one of the largest hot spots for the virus in the U.S., with one of the nation’s highest death rates. Experts now widely agree that the Mardi Gras festivities likely served to accelerate the spread of the highly contagious disease.

But in the run-up to Mardi Gras Day, on Feb. 25, there were still only 15 confirmed cases of the virus in the country. No major events were being canceled anywhere in the U.S., and “no red flags” had been raised by federal officials, the city’s mayor said in an interview on CNN.

Still, according to the emails, city and state officials were planning both for the celebration and the virus’s eventual arrival, but those preparations were based on a misunderstanding of how the virus was spreading.

As the parades began, things appeared fine. A few days later, the first presumptive virus patient was identified, and reports surfaced of people in other states who had been to Mardi Gras testing positive for the virus.

A study involving chloroquine is stopped after fatal heart complications.

A small study of chloroquine, which is closely related to the hydroxychloroquine drug that Mr. Trump has promoted, was halted in Brazil after virus patients taking a higher dose developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal arrhythmia.

The study, which involved 81 hospitalized patients in the city of Manaus, was sponsored by the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Roughly half the participants were prescribed 450 milligrams of chloroquine twice daily for five days, while the rest were prescribed 600 milligrams for 10 days.

Within three days, researchers started noticing heart arrhythmias in patients taking the higher dose. By the sixth day of treatment, 11 patients had died, leading to an immediate end to the high-dose segment of the trial.

The researchers said the study did not have enough patients in the lower-dose trial to conclude whether chloroquine was effective in patients with severe cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

On Monday, President Trump doubled down on his support of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus, claiming during his daily briefing that an unnamed friend had benefited from the drug.

“Just recently, a friend of mine told me he got better because of the use of that drug,” Mr. Trump said.

Hydroxychloroquine is being tested in the treatment of people with coronavirus, but there is little evidence that it works, other than a handful of small, limited studies. Still, Mr. Trump has enthusiastically promoted it and chloroquine even as his own scientific experts have expressed concerns that there is not enough evidence.

On Monday, Mr. Trump said 28 million doses of hydroxychloroquine had been deployed to hospitals around the country.

“Who knows,” he said, adding that it was being combined with other treatments such as an antibiotic — azithromycin — and zinc. “I think if anyone recommended it other than me, it would be used all over the place.”

As the pain of the coronavirus outbreak continued around the world, leaders in Europe sought to strike a delicate balance as they extended lockdowns and reported worsening conditions but also signaled life may start to return to normal in the coming months.

“The epidemic is not yet under control,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said Monday as he extended a nationwide lockdown until May 11. But, he added, “hope is reborn.”

Mr. Macron’s speech came as health authorities in France reported nearly 15,000 deaths. Warning the transition away from stay-at-home orders would only be possible if France continued to slow the epidemic, he vowed that by May 11, the authorities would be ready to test and quarantine anyone with symptoms and that “general public” masks would be available for all.

• In Italy, officials reported fewer than 600 coronavirus-linked deaths for the fourth time in six days, a significant drop from the peak of the country’s crisis in late March and early April, when it was averaging about 800 fatalities per day. “The trend is now trustworthy,” Luca Richeldi, a pulmonologist who is on the scientific committee that is advising the government, said at a news conference.

• The trajectory of the outbreak in Britain was increasingly worrisome, and the government was expected to extend restrictions well into next month. The number of known infections and fatalities is rising faster in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, putting it on track to surpass the death totals in Italy and Spain. Britain’s 88,621 confirmed cases already are more than the reported total in China, and the country has reported 11,329 deaths. Jeremy Farrar, a leading British medical researcher, told the BBC on Sunday that Britain is “likely to be one of the worst, if not the worst, affected countries in Europe.”

• President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered his bleakest comments yet on his country’s handling of the pandemic, warning officials that the number of severely ill patients was rising and that medical workers faced shortages of protective equipment.

• In Libya’s capital, Tripoli, people are facing a dire decision: whether to stay inside to slow the spread of coronavirus or flee from the violence of a civil war that has not paused for the pandemic. “I sometimes wonder, you know, which death is going to be worse: catching corona or being instantly attacked by a missile,” said one woman, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments by phone next month.

The Supreme Court on Monday outlined its plan for meeting during the pandemic, announcing that it would hear arguments by telephone over six days in May, including cases on subpoenas from prosecutors and Congress seeking the president’s financial records.

“In keeping with public health guidance in response to Covid-19,” a news release from the court said, “the justices and counsel will all participate remotely. The court anticipates providing a live audio feed of these arguments to news media. Details will be shared as they become available.”

The court said arguments would be heard on May 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13, and it listed the 10 sets of arguments it would hear. But it did not say which cases would be heard when. That would depend, the court said, on “the availability of counsel.”

The court said it would also hear arguments over whether members of the Electoral College must cast their votes as they had pledged to do.

The virus contingency plans came as the court was asked to reconsider a decision in light of the pandemic. Three states asked the court to revisit a January ruling that allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to deny green cards to immigrants who make even occasional and minor use of public benefits like Medicaid.

New York, Connecticut and Vermont, along with New York City, asked the justices to temporarily suspend the new program in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Every person who doesn’t get the health coverage they need today risks infecting another person with the coronavirus tomorrow,” said Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. “Immigrants provide us with health care, care for our elderly, prepare and deliver our food, clean our hospitals and public spaces, and take on so many other essential roles in our society, which is why we should all be working to make testing and health coverage available to every single person in this country, regardless of immigration status.”

The pandemic, the motion said, had changed the legal calculus and justified loosening the administration’s new requirements for the so-called public charge rule.

‘The player-coaches for the real world.’

As Americans hunker down during the pandemic, free fitness workouts, many of them delightfully low-tech, have multiplied on social media platforms.

Reporting was contributed by Tim Arango, Mike Baker, Peter Baker, Alan Blinder, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Jason DeParle, Richard Fausset, Ellen Ann Fentress, Sandra E. Garcia, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Christine Hauser, Jack Healy, John Ismay, Sheila Kaplan, Annie Karni, Clifford Krauss, Adam Liptak, Jeffery C. Mays, Jesse McKinley, Aimee Ortiz, Alan Rappeport, Dagny Salas, Marc Santora, Karen Schwartz, Eliza Shapiro, Knvul Sheikh, Eileen Sullivan, Vanessa Swales, Jim Tankersley, Katie Thomas and Michael Wines.