Here’s what you need to know:
- Trump did not wear a mask in public in Michigan, which he visited after threatening its federal funds.
- Trump orders flags to be lowered to half-staff to memorialize the dead.
- ‘Jaw-dropping’ unemployment fraud discovered in Washington State.
- Facebook will allow employees to work from home permanently, but those who do may face pay cuts.
- As states reopen, efforts to ramp up testing have been hampered by the fragmented U.S. health system.
- The U.S. says it will provide up to $1.2 billion to a drug company to develop a vaccine.
- As 2.4 million workers filed for unemployment benefits, economists fear many jobs won’t return.
Trump did not wear a mask in public in Michigan, which he visited after threatening its federal funds.
President Trump, who has defiantly refused to wear a mask in public despite the recommendations of federal health officials, toured a Ford plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., on Thursday with his face uncovered. It was against the factory’s guidelines and the urging of Michigan’s attorney general, who had written him earlier that it was “the law of this state.”
Mr. Trump said he had put on a mask when he was asked to on a private portion of the tour, showing reporters a navy blue one with the presidential seal on it but not wearing it, even as the Ford executives around him wore masks.
“I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” Mr. Trump said. After his visit, the website TMZ published an unverified photo of Mr. Trump in a mask that it said was taken during the private part of the tour.
The Ford Motor Company later said in a statement that William Clay Ford Jr., its executive chairman, had “encouraged President Trump to wear a mask when he arrived.”
“He wore a mask during a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years,” the statement said. “The president later removed the mask for the remainder of the visit.”
Dana Nessel, the state’s attorney general, had sent the president an open letter asking him to wear a face covering during his visit.
“It is not just the policy of Ford, by virtue of the governor’s executive orders,” Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, wrote. “It is currently the law of this state. Michigan has been hit especially hard by the virus, with more than 50,000 confirmed cases and 5,000 deaths.”
The president’s arrival in Michigan, a key swing state where the virus has become a polarizing flash point, came just a day after he threatened to withhold federal funding from the state for taking steps to make it easier to vote by mail amid the pandemic.
The state has also seen a series of small but intense demonstrations against stay-home restrictions, some of which Mr. Trump encouraged, which at one point saw armed protesters enter the State Capitol in Lansing.
Michigan is critical to Mr. Trump’s hopes of winning re-election, but he has been behind in recent public polling there. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, and her name often comes up in lists of possible running mates for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee.
After Mr. Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state over its efforts to ease absentee voting, White House officials said on Thursday that he had granted Ms. Whitmer’s request, declaring a federal emergency in Michigan. The declaration authorizes federal agencies to coordinate a response to flooding caused when torrential rainfall breached two dams in Central Michigan.
During his visit, Mr. Trump continued to press for the easing of more social-distancing restrictions. He blamed Democrats for keeping the economy closed and suggested voters would punish them in the presidential election and view it as “a November question.”
Ms. Whitmer eased several virus-related restrictions in the state on Thursday, moving to allow gatherings of up to 10 people and saying that beginning May 26, retail businesses would be allowed to see customers by appointment.
The president has repeatedly taken aim at Ms. Whitmer during the pandemic, referring to her as “the woman in Michigan” and at one point egging on protesters looking to ease restrictions by tweeting “Liberate Michigan.”
On Thursday, a judge backed Ms. Whitmer’s use of emergency powers to establish sweeping restrictions across the state, tossing out a lawsuit filed by Republican lawmakers over her approach.
Trump orders flags to be lowered to half-staff to memorialize the dead.
President Trump said Thursday that he would order flags on all federal buildings and national monuments to half-staff over the next three days in memory of Americans who had died of the virus.
On Memorial Day, he said, the flags at half-staff would be honoring the nation’s war dead.
The announcement, made on Twitter, came several hours after the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate had asked Mr. Trump to lower the flags as the country reached 100,000 virus-related deaths in the next few days.
In a letter to Mr. Trump on Thursday morning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, called for “a national expression of grief,” and lowering the flags would be an appropriate gesture at a time when the United States is preparing to honor those it lost to war on Memorial Day.
“Respectful of them and the loss to our country, we are writing to request that you order flags to be flown at half-staff on all public buildings in our country on the sad day of reckoning when we reach 100,000 deaths,” they wrote. “It would serve as a national expression of grief so needed by everyone in our country.”
More than 93,000 people have now died, according to a tally by The New York Times, and an average of more than 1,000 deaths a day are still being recorded.
Mr. Trump has not led any observance of national mourning since the pandemic began claiming American lives by the thousands. In his recent public comments, he has steered clear of talking about the deaths, focusing instead on the need to reopen the country — a process he describes as a “transition to greatness” — and defending his own handling of the crisis.
‘Jaw-dropping’ unemployment fraud discovered in Washington State.
Fraudsters targeting Washington State’s unemployment system claimed hundreds of millions of dollars before officials were able to identify and crack down on the coordinated attack, officials said Thursday.
“I realize this is a jaw-dropping figure,” said Suzi LeVine, the commissioner of the state Employment Security Department. The fraudulent claims had been filed on behalf of tens of thousands of people, and many involved individuals who had not lost their jobs, she said.
The U.S. Secret Service said in a memo last week that it appeared that an international group of fraudsters was targeting unemployment systems, particularly in Washington State. Investigators said the impostors appeared to be working with a database of personal information that allowed them to submit claims.
Washington State had moved to make payments available quickly and deliver them to direct-deposit accounts. But the state began realizing the scope of the problem when people who had not filed for unemployment received mail saying that they had.
Ms. LeVine said the state had increased security on its systems and delayed payments in order to prevent further fraud. That has blocked thousands of other claims worth an additional hundreds of millions of dollars.
Facebook will allow employees to work from home permanently, but those who do may face pay cuts.
Facebook said on Thursday that it would allow many employees to work from home permanently. But there’s a catch: They may not be able to keep their Silicon Valley salaries in more affordable parts of the country.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told workers during a staff meeting that within a decade as many as half of the company’s more than 48,000 employees would work from home.
Tech executives have long believed that person-to-person communication was a big part of the creativity that went into generating popular products. They built giant campuses that reflected that belief — from the ornate offices of Apple, Google and Facebook in Silicon Valley to the new Amazon headquarters in Seattle — and used free shuttle buses, free cafeterias and personal services like dry cleaning to give employees little reason to go home, let alone avoid the office.
If other giant companies follow Facebook’s lead, tech employment could start to shift away from expensive hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle and New York. But the option to work from home could have a price for tech workers: Starting in January, Facebook’s employee compensation will be adjusted based on the cost of living in the locations where workers choose to live.
As states reopen, efforts to ramp up testing have been hampered by the fragmented U.S. health system.
The inability of the United States to provide broad diagnostic testing, widely seen as a pivotal failing in the nation’s effort to contain the virus, has been traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration and supply shortages of swabs and masks.
But the fragmented, poorly organized American health care system has also made it difficult for hospitals and other medical providers to quickly overcome obstacles to testing.
“It’s still amazing to me, like, how can that be the case, that there is not a more systematic way to address a central need?” said Fyodor Urnov, the scientist who oversaw the transformation of the Innovative Genomics Institute into a clinical laboratory.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has delivered a mixed message on testing, saying on May 11 that in ramping up, “we have met the moment and we have prevailed,” while a few days later, he suggested that testing was “overrated” and that the high number of cases in the United States could be traced to more prevalent testing.
The picture for testing is improving, slowly. The United States is completing more than 300,000 tests a day, double the amount of a month ago, according to The Covid Tracking Project.
Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day — and as many as 20 million — to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested. Without sufficient testing it will be hard to identify and contain new outbreaks.
Most testing is not done by public health authorities — whose labs have been chronically underfunded — but by hospital laboratories and major for-profit testing companies.
There have been calls for more than a decade to create a national laboratory system that could oversee a testing response in a public health crisis. An effort to create one 10 years ago withered away over time because of a lack of funding.
The U.S. says it will provide up to $1.2 billion to a drug company to develop a vaccine.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday it would provide up to $1.2 billion to the drug company AstraZeneca to develop a potential coronavirus vaccine from a laboratory at Oxford.
The deal with AstraZeneca is the fourth and by far the largest vaccine research agreement that the department has disclosed. The money will pay for a clinical trial of the potential vaccine in the United States this summer with about 30,000 volunteers.
The H.H.S. statement said the agency and AstraZeneca “are collaborating to make available at least 300 million doses,” and projected that the first doses could be available as early as October.
That is a very accelerated, ambitious timetable. Most public health experts and scientists caution that a viable vaccine that could be mass produced would probably not be available until sometime next year, at the earliest. Infectious disease experts also warn that many candidate vaccines take years to perfect, or fail, and in some cases cause such severe side effects that human trials are halted. Plus, billions of doses would be needed around the world.
AstraZeneca said it was also discussing deals for simultaneous production by other companies, including the giant Serum Institute of India, a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world.
The U.S. is distributing billions of dollars to companies to develop vaccines through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
In addition to the money for AstraZeneca, the authority, known as Barda, has already agreed to provide up to $483 million to the biotech company Moderna and $500 million to Johnson & Johnson for their separate vaccine efforts. It has also agreed to provide $30 million to a virus vaccine effort by the French company Sanofi.
Scores of vaccine efforts are underway around the world, and several potential vaccines are now in at least small-scale clinical trials.
Mr. Trump reorganized vaccine and treatment efforts after the head of Barda, Rick Bright, protested his ouster as head of the agency a few weeks ago, filing a whistle-blower complaint that contended he had been pressured to seek approval for certain treatments. Just last week, Mr. Trump named Moncef Slaoui, a venture capitalist who was a longtime vaccine executive at GlaxoSmithKline and most recently also a board member for Moderna, to help oversee “Operation Warp Speed,” the federal drive to accelerate ways to combat the virus.
As 2.4 million workers filed for unemployment benefits, economists fear many jobs won’t return.
Even as restrictions on businesses began lifting across the United States, another 2.4 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week, the government reported on Thursday, bringing the total to a staggering 38.6 million in nine weeks.
And while the Labor Department has found that a large majority of laid-off workers expect their joblessness to be temporary, there is growing concern among economists that many jobs will never come back.
“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University.
Mr. Bloom, a co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market, estimates that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.
“Firms intend to hire these people back,” Mr. Bloom said, referring to a recent survey of businesses by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “But we know from the past that these aspirations often don’t turn out to be true.”
The economy that comes back is likely to look quite different from the one that closed. If social-distancing rules become the new normal — causing thinner crowds in restaurants, theaters and stores, at sports arenas and on airplanes — then fewer workers will be required.
As more large companies embrace remote work, some plan to reduce their real estate footprint, which will in turn reduce the foot traffic that feeds nearby restaurants, shops, nail salons and other businesses.
The pain is already widespread. A household survey from the Census Bureau released Wednesday found that 47 percent of adults said they or a member of their household had lost employment income since mid-March. And New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday that nearly one in four New Yorkers needs food.
To address the problem, the city will increase to 1.5 million the number of meals it distributes each day by next week. A million meals will be delivered; the rest will be available for pickup at schools.
The push to vote by mail grows in several states even as the president argues against it.
Mr. Trump is continuing to rail against voting by mail, which is increasingly viewed as a necessary option for voting amid a pandemic.
His antipathy, however, has done little so far, to slow its growth as an option in both Democratic and Republican states, Michael Wines reports. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so.
Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters. And that doesn’t count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which vote-by-mail is the preferred method by law.
Part of the growth is because of the specter of people voting and getting sick amid the pandemic, as happened in Wisconsin last month. But part reflects the growth of voting by mail as an increasingly desired option even before the coronavirus. In 2016, nearly one in four voters cast absentee or mail ballots, twice the share just 16 years ago, in 2004.
Many of the states that have relaxed their rules have done so only for pending primary elections, leaving the possibility that they could refuse to relax them in November. And some conservative groups plan to sue to limit its use. Like Mr. Trump they cite largely undocumented allegations of fraud.
But Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist and expert on mail ballots, said it’s unlikely states that allowed mailing voting in primaries will forbid it in November.
“The horse is out of the barn whether it’s primaries or the general election,” he said. “The optics are such that states will be under enormous pressure to continue to allow mail voting in the fall.”
Scientists predict a busy Atlantic hurricane season amid the pandemic.
The coming Atlantic hurricane season is “expected to be a busy one,” with the likelihood of as many as 19 named storms, including as many as six major hurricanes, a federal weather scientist said Thursday. The forecast could be further complicated by the pandemic, which is hobbling relief agencies and could turn evacuation shelters into disease hot spots.
Gerry Bell, the lead hurricane season forecaster with the climate prediction center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, delivered the forecast as part of the annual announcement of the agency’s hurricane season outlook.
The pandemic will add to the challenges of the season: There are worries about shelters and how to protect people evacuating without exposing them to the virus. Relevant work forces have been strained, too, with just 38 percent of staff members from the Federal Emergency Management Agency available to be deployed to a disaster zone.
A spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, which manages most of the country’s shelters, said the organization is “prioritizing individual hotel rooms over congregate shelters.”
But, she said, individual rooms might not be an option in large-scale disasters, so the organization would instead rely on “additional safety precautions” for group shelters, such as health screenings, masks, additional space between cots and extra cleaning and disinfecting.
The Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1 and runs through Nov. 30, though the emergence of Tropical Storm Arthur this month made this the sixth year in a row in which a named storm has slipped in before the official beginning of the season.
Disease models suggest tens of thousands of U.S. deaths could have been prevented.
Total reported deaths in the
United States on May 3
Estimated deaths on May 3 if social distancing
started one week earlier than it did
New York City
17,581
65,307
29,410
New York City
2,838
Los Angeles
Los Angeles
1,223
451
Total reported deaths in the
United States on May 3
Estimated deaths on May 3 if social distancing
started one week earlier than it did
65,307
29,410
New York City
New York City
17,581
2,838
Los Angeles
Los Angeles
1,223
451
Total reported deaths in the
United States on May 3
65,307
New York City
17,581
Los Angeles
1,223
Estimated deaths on May 3 if social distancing
started one week earlier than it did
29,410
New York City
2,838
Los Angeles
451
Total reported deaths in the
United States on May 3
65,307
New York City
17,581
Los Angeles
1,223
Estimated deaths on May 3 if social distancing
started one week earlier than it did
29,410
New York City
2,838
Los Angeles
451
Estimated deaths on May 3 if social distancing
started one week earlier than it did
Total reported deaths in the
United States on May 3
New York City
17,581
65,307
29,410
New York City
2,838
Los Angeles
Los Angeles
1,223
451
If the United States had begun imposing social-distancing measures one week earlier in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the pandemic, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers. And about 17,000 fewer people in the New York area would have died in the outbreak.
And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than when most people started staying home, a vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.
The enormous cost of waiting to take action reflects the unforgiving dynamics of the outbreak that swept through American cities in early March. Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found.
“It’s a big, big difference,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and the leader of the research team. “That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths.”
How Earlier Control Measures Could Have Saved Lives
Number of reported
deaths by May 3
65,307
60,000 deaths
Estimated deaths if
social distancing
started …
40,000
… one week earlier
than it did in March
Range of
estimates
29,410
20,000
… two weeks earlier
11,253
0
March 1
April 1
May 3
Number of reported
deaths by May 3
65,307
60,000 deaths
Estimated deaths
if social distancing
started …
40,000
… one week earlier
than it did in March
Range of
estimates
29,410
20,000
… two weeks earlier
11,253
0
March 1
April 1
May 3
Number of reported
deaths by May 3
65,307
60,000 deaths
Estimated deaths
if social distancing
started …
40,000
… one week earlier
than it did in March
29,410
20,000
… two weeks earlier
11,253
0
March 1
April 1
May 3
Number of reported
deaths by May 3
65,307
60,000 deaths
Estimated deaths if
social distancing
started …
40,000
… one week earlier
than it did in March
29,410
20,000
… two weeks earlier
11,253
0
March 1
April 1
May 3
The findings are based on infectious-disease modeling that gauges how reduced contact between people starting in mid-March slowed transmission of the virus.
On March 16, Mr. Trump urged Americans to limit travel, avoid groups and stay home from school. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City closed schools on March 15, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York issued a stay-at-home order that took effect on March 22.
But in cities like New York, where the virus arrived early and spread quickly, those actions were too late to avoid a calamity. Dr. Shaman’s team modeled what would have happened if those same changes had taken place one or two weeks earlier and estimated the spread of infections and deaths until May 3.
The results show that as states reopen — all 50 states had eased restrictions somewhat as of Wednesday — outbreaks can easily get out of control unless officials closely monitor infections and immediately clamp down on new flare-ups.
And they show that each day that officials waited to impose restrictions in early March came at a great cost.
When asked about the modeling at his daily briefing on Thursday, Mr. Cuomo cited a lack of early information about the virus, saying that “if this country knew more and knew it earlier, I think we could have saved many, many more lives.”
The governor did not directly address his own decisions, saying federal agencies or international health organizations should have detected earlier warning signs.
“Now, who should have known?” he said.” It’s above my pay grade as governor of one state.”
Statewide in New York, another 105 people died, Mr. Cuomo said Thursday, a fourth straight day of fatalities just above 100. More than 28,000 people have died in the state.
New York State sees more reports of children with a severe syndrome linked to the virus.
New York State is now investigating 157 cases of a severe inflammatory syndrome affecting children that appears to be linked to the virus — a 53 percent increase over the last nine days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.
“The more we look, the more we find it,” he said.
The condition, which the C.D.C. is calling multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, often appears weeks after infection in children who did not experience first-phase virus symptoms. Instead of targeting the lungs as the primary virus infection does, it causes inflammation throughout the body and can cripple the heart.
A majority of the children in the state found to have the illness so far have tested positive for the virus or antibodies, the governor said. Researchers were now examining whether the infected children were genetically predisposed to the syndrome, he added. As of last week, there were three deaths.
In New York City, nearly one in four people does not have enough food, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday. Officials said the city would boost the amount of food it distributes to 1.5 million meals daily by next week; 32 million meals have been handed out already in the crisis.
Before the virus hit, the mayor said, officials believed that “somewhere over a million people in the city” needed food more at some point in the year. That number is now thought to be two million or more, he said.
Separately, the family of every public school student in New York City will soon receive more than $400 per student to help pay for food while school buildings are shut down, regardless of income, through a federal relief program.
A Memorial Day transformed, from observances to how much hand sanitizer can go through airport security.
For some people, the Memorial Day weekend is typically a time to pay respects to the dead. For others, the three-day weekend is a time to travel or hit the beach.
This year, the pandemic is ensuring that nothing will be quite the same.
Some places will have scaled-down observances, such as a virtual “flag garden” in Massachusetts and streamed service in Minnesota. In Berks County, Pa., veterans’ groups and volunteers will plant 50,000 flags at the graves of fallen veterans, after the state waived restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus.
Airports will be less crowded but transformed. The Transportation Security Administration said Thursday that passengers would be asked to scan their own boarding passes and place any food in their luggage in a separate bin during screening to limit cross contamination. And it is relaxing the 3.4 ounce rule: Passengers will be allowed to bring up to 12 ounces of hand sanitizer with them on their journey.
In many states, the beaches are open or opening for Memorial Day weekend, in many cases with new rules. Since no activity is risk-free, here are some things to remember when planning a beach day: Know the rules, keep moving or stay far away from others, use your own gear and check out the restroom facilities when you arrive.
China imposes a quarantine in its northeast.
The latest outbreak in China is concentrated in Jilin, a northeastern province of 27 million people near the borders with Russia and North Korea. Jilin has reported only about 130 cases and two deaths, but experts there have warned of a potential “big explosion.”
Want some tips for biking as a family?
The humble bicycle is the surprise star of lockdown. With youth sports on hold, car traffic down 75 percent or more throughout the United States and cooped-up children doing parkour on the living room furniture, family bike rides have never sounded better. Here are some tips for a safe and successful trip.
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Karen Barrow, Katie Benner, Julie Bosman, Niraj Chokshi, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Michael Cooper, Andrew Das, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Christopher Flavelle, Chaseedaw Giles, James Glanz, Matthew Goldstein, Abby Goodnough, Kathleen Gray, Maggie Haberman, Sheila Kaplan, Annie Karni, David Kirkpatrick, Heather Murphy, Andy Newman, Azi Paybarah, Linda Qiu, William K. Rashbaum, Campbell Robertson, John Schwartz, Anna Schaverien, Lauren Sloss, Kaly Soto, Chris Stanford, Alexandra Stevenson, Eileen Sullivan, Vanessa Swales, Katie Thomas and Benjamin Weiser.
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