A Trump administration request for $250 billion in relief for small businesses stalled in the Senate.
A Trump administration request for quick approval of $250 billion to replenish a new loan program for distressed small businesses stalled in the Senate on Thursday morning after Republicans and Democrats clashed over what should be included.
With Congress in recess and lawmakers scattered around the country, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, attempted to push through the small business loan funding during a procedural session, a maneuver that would have required all senators to agree.
“Treating this as a normal kind of partisan negotiation could literally cost Americans their jobs,” Mr. McConnell said. “Do not block emergency aid you do not even oppose just because you want something more,” he told Democrats.
But Democrats objected, proposing to double the size of the emergency relief bill by adding $100 billion for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments.
“Yes, we know we need more money for this program,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “But for goodness sake, let’s take the opportunity to make some bipartisan fixes to make this program work better.”
Republicans, in turn, blocked the Democrats’ proposal, arguing that the small business program has a more urgent need for funds, and that additional demands for aid could be addressed in future legislation.
“We need to stop turning every conversation into a conversation about everything,” Mr. McConnell said. “We need to patch holes when we see them.”
The dispute is a prelude to what is likely to be a far more complicated and consequential set of negotiations over another sweeping round of government aid that lawmakers expect to consider in the coming weeks. But the interim package appears to face problems of its own, even beyond the Senate.
Without the modifications Democrats are advocating, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California warned on Wednesday that the administration’s $250 billion request would not pass the House. This latest round of negotiation comes on the heels of the $2 trillion stimulus law enacted late last month, which created the small business loan program. The program, which has been inundated with applications from desperate businesses, has been plagued with problems since its launch earlier this month.
Another 6.6 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week as the coronavirus outbreak continued its devastating march through American businesses and jobs, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
With astonishing swiftness, the pandemic has shut down both longstanding and new businesses, leaving veteran workers and recent hires in nearly every type of industry without a paycheck. In just three weeks, more than 16 million Americans have lost their jobs — more losses than the most recent recession produced over two years.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve on Thursday announced another round of emergency measures to help the economy. The central bank said it would use Treasury Department funds to buy municipal bonds and expand its purchases of corporate bonds. The efforts are aimed at shoring up companies as well as state and local governments whose budgets are straining under the cost of the pandemic.
Across the United States, more and more people cannot pay rent. Food banks are so crowded the National Guard has been called out to stuff boxes. Construction sites sit abandoned, shopping malls are ghost towns and roughly 80 percent of hotel rooms stand empty.
But with no vaccine, no reliable drug therapies and no widely available test to tell who might have been exposed to the virus, “shelter at home” orders remain the only reliable tool in slowing the spread. Mindful of that, public health officials warned that, in most places, now was not the time to ease up.
Even though more than 1,000 people are now dying every day in the United States, new infections have slowed in places where stringent restrictions have been in place for more than two weeks.
But the virus has officially reached more than two-thirds of the nation’s rural counties, with one in 10 reporting at least one death. Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, suffered 192 deaths this week. State officials in Illinois reported 82 additional deaths, many in the Chicago area.
Now, with nearly a half million confirmed infections — one-third of the worldwide total — America is the center of the global crisis. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, pointed to revised models showing the estimated deaths dropping to 61,000 deaths from 86,000, but warned “there is still a significant amount of disease.”
New hospitalizations in New York fell for another day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday, even as he announced that another 799 people had died because of the virus.
The state’s fatality count increased to 7,067, and for the second consecutive day, Mr. Cuomo compared the toll of the virus to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, calling the virus a “silent explosion that ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.”
Although the governor said that some data, like the shrinking number of hospital admissions, suggested that New York was making headway, he warned against relaxing compliance with restrictions that governments have imposed in recent weeks.
“The moment you stop following the policies, you will go right back and see that number shoot through the roof,” Mr. Cuomo said in Albany, where state officials are acutely aware that lower hospitalization numbers could be because fewer sick people are turning up, or changing admissions standards, or both.
At the same time, other New York officials have begun to envision — cautiously — an eventual return to some normalcy.
With transmission still widespread, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday he thought New York City could as early as mid-May move to the next stage: one with low-level spread of the virus, in which cases could be more easily traced.
“We can say that it’s time to start planning for the next phase very overtly,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference. (Hours later, Mr. Cuomo was more reluctant to embrace a timeline: “I’m not going to guess when the data will say we should change our practices.” He said that the ability to test rapidly was necessary to restart New York’s economy and that state and federal officials were working to reach that capacity.)
New York has been the hub of the epidemic in the U.S., and in the city, the virus is killing black and Latino people at twice the rate that it is killing white people, according to statistics that the authorities released this week.
Some of the state’s cases have emerged from New York’s sprawling network of group homes for people with special needs.
As of Monday, 1,100 of the 140,000 developmentally disabled people monitored by the state had tested positive for the virus, officials said. One hundred five had died — a rate, far higher than in the general population, that echoes the toll in some nursing homes.
California’s decision to ship hundreds of ventilators to other states this week has been met with alarm by some local officials, who expressed concern about a shortage.
Readying the supplies for heavily-hit states like New York and New Jersey, workers packed the equipment in cardboard boxes and wrote messages of support in black marker. “Prayers from the West Coast,” said one message.
“We couldn’t be more proud as a state to be sending those ventilators back east,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said a total of 500 ventilators would be split among Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Nevada, New Jersey and Washington D.C. He described the shipments as a loan.
But in places like Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, officials expressed concern about a “fragile” supply chain and said hospitals were anxiously preparing for a shortage in ventilators.
The county has been among the hardest hit in the state, with more than 1,100 cases, at least 32 deaths and an outbreak at a nursing home that forced older patients to be evacuated this week, after a beleaguered and sickened staff failed to show up two days in a row.
Officials said this week that the state had denied its request for ventilators, and that a second one was pending.
“We were denied, yet some of the state ventilators went out of the state,” said Karen Spiegel, a member of the board of supervisors.
She said counties often fall last in a hierarchy that prioritizes federal and state governments. “We are the last one down,” she said, “yet we are the first ones working.”
In Santa Clara County, where the need for hospital beds is expected to grow, the health officer issued an order asking everyone in the county to disclose inventories of supplies, including ventilators.
Even as the state gave away some supplies, Mr. Newsom announced one of the highest death tolls in California since the crisis started: 68 people died over the past 24 hours, he said on Wednesday, bringing the state’s total to more than 500.
Officials cautioned that the number of cases had not yet peaked in California, the largest state in the nation, with 40 million residents.
California hospitals collectively have as many as 11,000 ventilators on hand, and the state had separately secured about 8,000 other ventilators, some of which were being refurbished, Mr. Newsom said. “We feel we are adequately resourced for the moment,” he said.
And Mr. Newsom described a broad effort to buy gowns, masks and other equipment. That included a deal to buy 200 million masks a month from factories in Asia, and a plan to spend $1.4 billion on personal protective gear for medical personnel, supermarket workers, employees of the state’s department of motor vehicles and any other “front-line employees walking the streets.”
The scale of the purchase was possible “only in California,” he said, “where our procurement capacity is quite literally second only to the United States itself.”
In the race for coronavirus drugs, a scientist on the front lines is urging caution.
Insistent calls and emails pile up each day for Dr. Andre Kalil at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Patients and their doctors are clamoring for untested coronavirus treatments, encouraged by President Trump, who said that ill patients should have ready access to experimental medicines, like the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
Dr. Kalil, 54, is a principal investigator in the federal government’s clinical trial of drugs that may treat the virus. It is starting with remdesivir, an antiviral drug. The first results will be ready within weeks.
Dr. Kalil has decades of experience grappling with questions about the use — and misuse — of experimental drugs, and he has rarely been more frustrated. He has seen what happens when desperation drives treatment decisions. “Many drugs we believed were fantastic ended up killing people,” he said in an interview. “It is so hard to keep explaining that.”
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, Dr. Kalil said, have never been found to work against any viral disease, including Ebola. (Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus.) And the drugs have side effects, some of which could be fatal.
As patients and the president alike demand treatments, Dr. Kalil wants people to understand that testing is proceeding as quickly as possible.
Although remdesivir is not approved for treatment of any illness, Gilead, which makes the drug, provided it to Covid-19 patients under legal exceptions for “compassionate use.” But demand escalated to such an extent that the company announced last month that it would stop giving out the antiviral.
“I would never give this or any other experimental drug off-label to my patients,” Dr. Kalil said. “There is nothing compassionate about compassionate use. You are treating emotion.”
On March 1, there were 88 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States. By month’s end, there were more than 170,000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compiled data on people who were hospitalized from the virus during that month to get a clearer demographic picture of infected patients who have required the most serious medical care.
Approximately 90 percent of the 1,482 hospitalized patients included in the study released Wednesday had one or more underlying medical conditions. Older people infected with the virus were more likely to be hospitalized; men were more likely to endure severe cases than women; and black people were hospitalized at a higher rate than whites. The study also found that hospitalization rates for the virus have been significantly higher than for recent outbreaks of influenza.
The numbers reflected trends that were reported from other countries at earlier stages of the outbreak. Of the hospitalized patients in the C.D.C. study, 89.3 percent had underlying medical conditions. The most common of those was hypertension, in 49.7 percent of patients, followed by obesity, chronic metabolic disease (like diabetes), chronic lung disease (like asthma) and cardiovascular disease.
The data, based on hospitalizations from March 1 to 30, was taken from a network of hospitals in parts of 14 states, including New York, Connecticut, California and Ohio. The area studied includes only about 10 percent of the overall population of the United States, but is seen as a representative snapshot of the virus’s spread and the demographic breakdown of patients.
A sailor stricken with the virus and assigned to the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt has been admitted to an intensive care unit at a Navy hospital in Guam, a Defense Department official said, marking the first hospitalization of a crew member since an outbreak began aboard the ship last month.
At least 286 members of the crew have tested positive for the virus.
“The sailor tested positive for Covid-19 on March 30 and at the time of hospitalization was in a 14-day isolation period on Naval Base Guam,” Cmdr. Clayton Doss, a Navy spokesman, said in an email.
The outbreak aboard the Roosevelt has been, in many ways, a microcosm of the Defense Department’s handling of the virus within its ranks as military officials have weighed military preparedness with the health of its personnel.
The ship’s commanding officer, Capt. Brett E. Crozier, was relieved after he wrote a strongly worded letter to Navy officials pleading for more help aboard the carrier. The fallout from the episode led to the resignation of Thomas B. Modly, the acting Navy secretary, this week.
Oil spikes on word of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Oil prices spiked on Thursday in anticipation that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia would reach a deal to cut large volumes of production. News of a possible deal spread as OPEC, Russia and other oil producers gathered for a teleconference to discuss an oil glut that has caused a steep fall in prices.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, jumped nearly 12 percent to $36.40 a barrel, as the meeting started, but it gave up most of those gains soon after.
The meeting was called by Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s de facto leader, after President Trump spoke to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s main policymaker, by telephone.
The Saudis have been engaged in a price war with Russia following Moscow’s refusal to go along with a Saudi proposal in early March to trim output to deal with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The spat threatens to swamp oil markets with vast oversupplies of crude.
The virus has killed more people in the Navajo Nation than in the whole of New Mexico.
When Chad Yazzie joined the Navajo Police Department just a few months ago, he expected to issue speeding tickets or break up the occasional fistfight.
“My job is to tell our people to take this virus seriously or face the consequences,” Officer Yazzie, 24, said recently as he set up a police roadblock outside the town of Window Rock to enforce the tribal nation’s 8 p.m. curfew.
Faced with an alarming rise in deaths from what the tribal health department calls Dikos Ntsaaigii-19 — or Covid-19 — Navajo officials have been putting up checkpoints, assembling field hospitals and threatening curfew violators with 30 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.
The measures are part of a scramble to protect more than 150,000 people on the vast reservation, which stretches 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and tens of thousands of others who live in towns bordering the Navajo Nation. As of Wednesday night, the virus had killed 20 people on the reservation, compared with 16 in the entire state of New Mexico, which has a population thirteen times larger.
Attorney General William P. Barr said Wednesday night that the White House should soon reconsider its recommendations that Americans stay at home to combat the coronavirus.
“When this period of time, at the end of April, expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have, and not just tell people to go home and hide under their bed, but allow them to use other ways — social distancing and other means — to protect themselves,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
The White House has asked that all people stay at home this month in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which has begun to overwhelm hospital systems and, by some estimates, could result in more than 100,000 deaths.
Mr. Barr called efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus “draconian,” and he echoed President Trump’s assessment that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease.”
Mr. Barr also raised the specter that the government could improperly impose emergency measures to strip citizens of their civil liberties. He said that he was worried that the government would begin to declare “everything an emergency” and then impose “these kinds of sweeping, extraordinary steps.”
Melania Trump posts messages promoting wearing face coverings — something her husband eschews.
Melania Trump, the first lady, posted a video on Twitter on Thursday advising Americans to wear face coverings in public, echoing public health recommendations that President Trump has personally eschewed.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has told reporters that he would not be interested in wearing a mask unless he deemed it important. Instead, everyone who comes into close contact with the president must now be tested for the virus, according to White House officials.
“I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk,” Mr. Trump said on Friday, “I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself. I just — I just don’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but this will pass and hopefully it’ll pass very quickly.”
Mrs. Trump, who was criticized at the beginning of the outbreak for focusing on building a White House tennis pavilion instead of warning Americans about the spread of the coronavirus, waited until official guidance was released by the administration to begin filming public service announcements and issuing warnings on Twitter.
“Mrs. Trump understands and recognizes the people of this country feel uncertain right now, and wants to do all she can to educate families and children about the importance of social distancing and proper hygiene,” Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “The East Wing is still operational, but most staff is working remotely per CDC and White House guidelines and recommendations.”
The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity, but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn’t changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.
But new needs are emerging in the crisis. “We’ve become a nation that calls like never before,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that oversees phone, television and internet providers. “We are craving human voice.”
Need ways to preserve special days during this time? Check these out.
Stay-at-home orders don’t have to put a damper on things. Here are some ways to celebrate birthdays, weddings and the coming spring holidays.
Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder, Eileen Sullivan, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Andy Newman, Matthew Haag, Simon Romero, Peter Baker, Jim Rutenberg, David Waldstein, Emily Cochrane, Caitlin Dickerson, Maggie Haberman, Nick Corasaniti, Marc Santora, Brooks Barnes, Dan Barry, Conor Dougherty, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Manny Fernandez, Sheri Fink, Michael Levenson and Carl Zimmer.