Coronavirus Live Updates: No New Local Cases in China; Trump Offers Relief to Taxpayers

For the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, China on Thursday reported no new local infections for the previous day, a milestone in its costly battle with the outbreak that has since become a pandemic, upending daily life and economic activity around the world.

Officials said 34 new coronavirus cases had been confirmed, all involving people who had come to China from elsewhere.

In signaling that an end to China’s epidemic might be in sight, the announcement could pave the way for officials to focus more on reviving the country’s economy, which nearly ground to a halt after the government imposed travel restrictions and quarantine measures. In recent days, economic life has been resuming in fits and starts.

But China is not out of danger yet. Experts have said that it will need to see at least 14 consecutive days without new infections for the outbreak to be considered truly over. It remains to be seen whether the virus will re-emerge once daily life restarts and travel restrictions are lifted around the country.

“It’s very clear that the actions taken in China have almost brought to an end their first wave of infections,” said Ben Cowling, a professor and head of the division of epidemiology and biostatistics at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health. “The question is what will happen if there’s a second wave, because the kind of measures that China has implemented are not necessarily sustainable in the long term.”

To contain the outbreak, the authorities shut schools and workplaces and imposed travel and quarantine restrictions on broad swaths of the population and many visitors from abroad. Since January, more than 50 million people in the central province of Hubei, including its capital, Wuhan, where the outbreak began, have been subjected to a strict lockdown.

The Trump administration on Wednesday broadened the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and spelled out the first details of a $1 trillion economic package, asking Congress for an infusion of $500 billion for direct payments to taxpayers and $500 billion in loans for businesses.

President Trump invoked a seldom-used wartime law that allows the government to press American industry into service to ramp up production of medical supplies. He said he would send two military hospital ships to New York and California.

He also directed federal agencies to suspend all foreclosures and evictions until the end of April as the full economic toll of the crisis began to set in around the world. And he agreed with Canada to stop all nonessential traffic across the northern border.

After weeks of playing down the outbreak, Mr. Trump appeared on Wednesday to fully embrace the scope of the calamity, saying he saw himself as a wartime president and invoking memories of the efforts made by Americans during World War II.

“Now it’s our time,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy.”

“I think everyone should be paying attention to this,” said Stephen S. Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “It’s not just going to be the elderly. There will be people age 20 and up.”

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, appealed on Wednesday for people of the millennial generation to stop socializing in groups and to take care to protect themselves and others.

“You have the potential then to spread it to someone who does have a condition that none of us knew about, and cause them to have a disastrous outcome,” Dr. Birx said.

In the C.D.C. report, 20 percent of the hospitalized patients and 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44, basically spanning the millennial generation.

President Trump has defended his increasingly frequent practice of calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” ignoring a growing chorus of criticism that the term is racist and anti-Chinese.

Experts have said that labeling the virus as Chinese will ratchet up tensions between the two countries and result in the kind of xenophobia that American leaders should discourage.

“The use of this term is not only corrosive vis-à-vis a global audience, including here at home, it is also fueling a narrative in China about a broader American hatred and fear of not just the Chinese Communist Party but of China and Chinese people in general,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was attaching “China” to the name of the virus to combat a disinformation campaign promoted by Beijing officials that the American military was the source of the outbreak.

“I didn’t appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them,” Mr. Trump said. “I think saying that our military gave it to them creates a stigma.”

Then in two tweets on Wednesday morning, he pointedly referred to the “Chinese virus.” Asked about the term later in the day, he insisted that he was simply pointing out a fact: that the illness was first detected in China.

Public health officials have tried to avoid names that might result in discriminatory behavior against places or ethnic groups since releasing more stringent guidelines for naming viruses in 2015. On Twitter, the White House has criticized what it called “the media’s fake outrage,” pointing to past illnesses that had been named after places, including the Ebola virus and the West Nile virus.

This could be Estonia’s moment.

As Europe is battered by the coronavirus, the tiny Baltic nation should be relatively resilient: Estonia is known as one of the most tech-savvy countries in the world, potentially a big advantage as the outbreak forces economic activity online.

And then there’s Southern Europe, which bore the brunt of the last big economic crisis and will suffer the most. Countries like Greece and Italy depend heavily on tourism and are still suffering the lingering effects of the eurozone debt meltdown over the last decade, including austerity programs that left their health care systems ill prepared for a pandemic.

But even countries regarded as paragons of competitiveness, like Germany and the Netherlands, may turn out to have weaknesses that, until a few weeks ago, were regarded as strengths.

Germany’s automakers, for example, have dominated the luxury car business. But the virus exposed their dependence on sales in China, and now they are closing factories all over the region.

Politicians, celebrities, social media influencers and even N.B.A. players have been tested for the new coronavirus. But as that list of rich, famous and powerful people grows by the day, so do questions about whether they are getting access to testing that is denied to other Americans.

Some of these high-profile people say they are feeling ill and had good reason to be tested. Others argue that those who were found to be infected and then isolated themselves provided a good example to the public.

But with testing still in short supply in areas of the country, leaving health care workers and many sick people unable to get diagnoses, some prominent personalities have obtained tests without exhibiting symptoms or having known contact with someone who has the virus, as required by some testing guidelines. Others have refused to specify how they were tested.

Such cases have provoked accusations of elitism and preferential treatment about a testing system that has already been plagued with delays and confusion, and now stirred a new national debate that has reached the White House — with President Trump being asked at a Wednesday news conference whether “the well-connected go to the front of the line.”

“You’d have to ask them that question,” he replied, suggesting that should not be the case. “Perhaps that’s been the story of life. That does happen on occasion, and I’ve noticed where some people have been tested fairly quickly.”

The question burst into public view this week after the Brooklyn Nets announced Tuesday that four of their players — including Kevin Durant, one of the biggest stars in the N.B.A. — had tested positive. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York criticized the dynamic, writing on Twitter that while he wished the athletes “a speedy recovery,” he did not think the N.B.A. should be getting tests for its athletes while critically ill patients were kept waiting.

“Tests should not be for the wealthy, but for the sick,” he wrote.

Getting rid of germs is at the top of your mind, and washing your hands properly is the first step in that process. But what about your phone, which you likely handle all day? Here are some tips to help.

Reporting and research was contributed by Javier C. Hernández, Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, Ana Swanson, Nicholas Fandos, Emily Cochrane, Megan Twohey, Steve Eder and Marc Stein.

source: nytimes.com