Here’s what you need to know:
- The reality of the coronavirus in the U.S. is an unrelenting crush of cases and deaths.
- Trump is heading to Arizona for his first cross-country trip since the virus emerged.
- An internal Trump administration report expects about 200,000 daily cases by June.
- N.Y. doctors warn about a mysterious illness affecting children that might be tied to Covid-19.
- California is to allow some stores to reopen and give counties more discretion in setting guidelines.
- A study by the Fed suggests sickness helped drive extremism in the 20th century.
- Senators are holding their first socially distanced hearing today.
The reality of the coronavirus in the U.S. is an unrelenting crush of cases and deaths.
While the worst-hit parts of the United States have seen new infections recede and hospitalizations drop after strict social-distancing measures were put in place, the country is still in the firm grip of a pandemic.
For every indication of improvement in controlling the virus, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere, providing a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections.
As states continue to lift restrictions, impatient Americans are freely returning to shopping, lingering in restaurants and gathering in parks. New flare-ups and super-spreader events are expected to be close behind.
New Reported Cases by Day
As the New York metro area has seen a recent decline in new cases, the number of cases in the rest of the United States has steadily increased.
Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith and Amy Harmon report that any notion that the threat is fading away appears to be magical thinking, at odds with what the latest numbers show.
Coronavirus in the United States now looks like this: More than a month has passed since there was a day with fewer than 1,000 deaths from the virus. Almost every day, at least 25,000 new cases are identified, meaning that the total in the United States — which has the highest number of known cases in the world with more than a million — is expanding by 2 to 4 percent daily.
Rural towns that one month ago were unscathed are suddenly hot spots. It is rampaging through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons, killing the medically vulnerable and the poor, and new outbreaks keep emerging in grocery stores, supermarkets or factories, an ominous harbinger of what a full reopening of the economy could bring.
While dozens of rural counties have no known coronavirus cases, a panoramic view of the country reveals a grim and distressing picture.
“If you include New York, it looks like a plateau moving down,’’ said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. “If you exclude New York, it’s a plateau slowly moving up.”
Consider Chicago and Los Angeles, which have flattened their curves and avoided the explosive growth of New York City. Even so, coronavirus cases in their counties have more than doubled since April 18. Cook County, home to Chicago, is now sometimes adding more than 2,000 new cases in a day, and Los Angeles County has often been adding at least 1,000.
It is not just the major cities. Smaller towns and rural counties in the Midwest and South have suddenly been hit hard, underscoring the capriciousness of the pandemic.
Dakota County, Neb., which has the third-most cases per capita in the country, had no known cases as recently as April 11. Now the county is a hot zone for the virus.
Trump is heading to Arizona for his first cross-country trip since the virus emerged.
Mr. Trump is set to travel Tuesday morning on his first cross-country trip since early March, a further sign that the president is eager for a return to more normal routines after weeks of restrictions — and a possible indication of concern about his re-election prospects.
He is headed to Phoenix, where he will tour a Honeywell International Inc. plant that is manufacturing medical masks. Mr. Trump will give remarks there and will also hold a round table on Native American issues. He will return to Washington on Tuesday night.
The trip is an opportunity for the president, who has been criticized for not doing more to prepare for the virus, to demonstrate that vital supplies are being manufactured on a mass scale. It also brings him to a potential battleground state for his re-election campaign. Mr. Trump held one of his last campaign rallies in Phoenix on Feb. 19, before social distancing practices were put into effect. His last rally was in Charlotte, N.C., on March 2.
Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, a Republican, has been relatively cautious about reopening the state’s economy in comparison to other Republican governors in the country. Official figures show that the state has had 8,919 cases and 362 deaths, though infectious disease specialists say the state is probably undercounting deaths.
Mr. Trump may face pushback in the discussion about the impact of the virus on Native Americans. Tribal nations including the Navajos are suing the Treasury Department over the administration’s failure to distribute billions of dollars in relief allocated to the tribes in the $2.2 trillion package.
The trip will be Mr. Trump’s third known outing from the White House since mid-March. Mr. Trump spent last weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, and traveled to Norfolk in late March to see off a Navy hospital ship bound for New York. Vice President Mike Pence has made several trips out of Washington since mid-April, and last month addressed the Air Force Academy’s graduating class in Colorado Springs.
An internal Trump administration report expects about 200,000 daily cases by June.
The sprawling Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, hastily converted into a hospital this winter, has closed, and the military personnel stationed there have been redeployed. A temporary triage unit in Central Park will soon fold up its tents, and the Navy ship that raced to help the city’s besieged hospitals has departed.
But even as New York reported a daily death toll of 226, the lowest in weeks, and as Gov. Andrew Cuomo outlined a soft blueprint for how New York State’s economy might begin to restart, there was growing concern that the scattered and often chaotic approach to mitigating the spread of the virus on a national level was failing.
While President Trump pressed states to reopen their economies, his administration was privately projecting a steady rise in coronavirus infections and deaths over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1 — nearly double the current level.
The more dire assessments reflect the decisions of governors across the country to ease social-distancing measures even as the number of new cases holds steady and, in some cases, is even rising.
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas have all allowed some businesses to reopen despite seeing increasing cases, according to a New York Times database.
The projections, based on data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and laid out in an internal document obtained Monday by The New York Times, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May, up from about 30,000 cases now. There are currently about 1,750 deaths per day, the data show.
That was not the only forecast of more carnage. Another model, closely watched by White House officials, raised its fatality projections on Monday to more than 134,000 American deaths by early August from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The model, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, more than doubled its previous projection of about 60,000 total deaths, an increase that it said partly reflects “changes in mobility and social-distancing policies.”
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
N.Y. doctors warn about a mysterious illness affecting children that might be tied to Covid-19.
Fifteen children, many of whom had fallen ill the coronavirus, have recently been hospitalized in New York City with a mysterious syndrome that doctors do not yet fully understand but that has also been reported in several European countries, health officials announced on Monday night.
Many of the children, ages 2 to 15, have shown symptoms associated with toxic shock or Kawasaki disease, a rare illness in children that involves inflammation of the blood vessels, including coronary arteries, the city’s health department said.
None of the New York City patients with the syndrome have died, according to a bulletin from the Health Department, which described the illness as a “multisystem inflammatory syndrome potentially associated with Covid-19,” the disease caused by the virus.
Reached late Monday night, the state health commissioner, Dr. Howard A. Zucker, said state officials were also investigating the unexplained malady.
The syndrome has received growing attention in recent weeks as cases have begun appearing in European countries hit hard by the coronavirus.
Last week, an alert was sent to general practitioners in London warning that “there has been an apparent rise in the number of children of all ages presenting with a multisystem inflammatory state requiring intensive care across London and also in other regions of the U.K.”
The chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, told reporters that a link with the coronavirus was “certainly plausible.”
Asked about the British reports, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, a World Health Organization scientist, told reporters last week that the inflammatory syndrome “seems to be rare.”
“There are some recent rare descriptions of children in some European countries that have had this inflammatory syndrome, which is similar to the Kawasaki syndrome, but it seems to be very rare,” she said.
Pediatricians in France, Italy and Spain have also reported dozens of cases of children presenting symptoms of toxic shock or Kawasaki syndrome, but doctors have said that it is too early to link them to Covid-19.
In the northern Italian town of Bergamo, one hospital saw 20 cases in April alone, and in four Parisian hospitals, 20 children have been hospitalized with inflammatory heart conditions. Spain has recorded a few dozen cases, and Switzerland and Belgium have reported a handful.
No deaths have been recorded as yet.
The New York City health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, said in a statement: “Even though the relationship of this syndrome to Covid-19 is not yet defined, and not all of these cases have tested positive for Covid-19 by either DNA test or serology, the clinical nature of this virus is such that we are asking all providers to contact us immediately if they see patients who meet the criteria we’ve outlined.”
“And to parents,” she added, “if your child has symptoms like fever, rash, abdominal pain or vomiting, call your doctor right away.”
California is to allow some stores to reopen and give counties more discretion in setting guidelines.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Monday that the state would allow some stores to reopen on Friday, and that, if individual counties desired, they could relax restrictions further as long as they took precautions.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said that among the businesses that could reopen on Friday, with modifications, were clothing stores, bookstores, florists and sporting goods stores, as well as manufacturing businesses that supply those shops.
The announcement was a cautious step toward removing some of the most severe restrictions that California had placed on everyday life. Dozens of states — led largely by those with Republican governors — have undone restrictions meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
“This is a very positive sign, and it’s happened only for one reason,” Mr. Newsom said at a news conference. “The data says it can happen.”
Store owners will be allowed to open for pickup on Friday only if they alter their workplaces, and they must enforce social distancing. Mr. Newsom added that more details about the required modifications would be released on Thursday.
The governor also said that if local health officials and county governments certified that they were ready to restart further, they would be able to open restaurants and other hospitality-sector businesses, with modifications. The counties would have to submit plans to the state health agency, and they would be made publicly available.
And in a further development to the saga of closed beaches that has extended to several coastal states, Mr. Newsom said he would allow two beaches in Orange County — Laguna and San Clemente — to reopen, after he had previously banned all of the county’s beaches from opening.
The two beaches, Mr. Newsom said, had “put together an outstanding plan to reopen” with modifications.
A study by the Fed suggests sickness helped drive extremism in the 20th century.
A jump in flu deaths early in the 20th century may have helped to drive the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Federal Reserve Bank of New York research showed, in a stark warning that pandemics can drive societal change.
“Influenza deaths of 1918 are correlated with an increase in the share of votes won by right-wing extremists,” Fed economist Kristian Blickle wrote. The finding holds even counting for a city’s ethnic and religious makeup, regional unemployment, past right-wing voting, and other local characteristics.
He points out that local public spending dropped in the wake of the deadly flu, especially on services that benefitted young people, like school. That spending decline itself does not seem to drive the right-wing political extremism that followed, the paper found.
On the other hand, “the correlation between influenza mortality and the vote share won by right-wing extremists is stronger in regions that had historically blamed minorities, particularly Jews, for medieval plagues,” Mr. Blickle wrote. He adds that “the disease may have fostered a hatred of ‘others’, as it was perceived to come from abroad.”
Mr. Blickle notes that the study has limitations. Data on the period is somewhat sporadic, so the conclusions are based on a small sample. Disentangling disease repercussions and the after-effects of World War I are difficult.
Still, the “results are striking in part because they are robust to a large battery of alternate specifications despite being based on a relatively small sample,” he writes, and they suggest that influenza mortality “profoundly shaped German society going forward.”
In the months since the virus spread around the world, The Times’s Neil MacFarquhar reported, America’s extremists have attempted to turn the coronavirus pandemic into a potent recruiting tool in the deep corners of the internet and on the streets of state capitals by twisting the public health crisis to bolster their white supremacist, anti-government agenda.
Although the protests that have broken out across the country have drawn out a wide variety of people pressing to lift stay-at-home orders, the presence of extremists cannot be missed, with their anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic signs and coded messages aimed at inspiring the faithful, say those who track such movements.
April is typically a busy month for white supremacists. There is Hitler’s birthday, which they contort into a celebration. There is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the domestic attack 25 years ago that killed 168 people and still serves as a rallying call for new extremist recruits.
But this April, it was the coronavirus, and the disruption it wreaked on society, that became the extremists’ battle cry.
Embellishing Covid-19 developments to fit their usual agenda, extremists have spread disinformation on the transmission of the virus and disparaged stay-at-home orders as “medical martial law” — the long-anticipated advent of a totalitarian state.
Senators are holding their first socially distanced hearing today.
The Senate on Tuesday began to consider the nomination of Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, to be director of national intelligence, in its first hearing since the coronavirus pandemic sent its members home a month ago.
The hearing was unusual, with a measure of social distancing enforced. The room — a smaller venue than has been used for similar proceedings — was mostly empty as the hearing began. Of those present, many wore masks, including Senators Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee chairman, and Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s top Democrat. Mr. Burr removed his mask from his face as he spoke to gavel in the hearing, and Mr. Ratcliffe did not wear one.
President Trump first proposed installing Mr. Ratcliffe, a loyal supporter, in the job last summer, only to abruptly rescind the plan after lawmakers questioned Mr. Ratcliffe’s lack of experience and partisan record in the House, and news reports highlighted several instances in which Mr. Ratcliffe had appeared to inflate or distort aspects of his résumé.
This time, Mr. Ratcliffe seems likely to receive a warmer reception, at least from Republican lawmakers who control the Senate. Senators want a permanent director to oversee the 17 agencies that compose the intelligence community as they wrestle with how to make sense of the origins and impact of Covid-19, both at home and abroad.
Pfizer begins human trials for a potential vaccine.
Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech have announced that their possible coronavirus vaccine has begun human trials in the United States. If the tests are successful, the vaccine could be ready for emergency use in the country as early as September.
The two firms are jointly developing a vaccine candidate based on genetic material known as messenger RNA, which carries the instructions for cells to make proteins. By injecting a specially designed messenger RNA into the body, the vaccine could tell cells how to make the spike protein of the virus without actually making a person sick.
The technology has the advantage of being faster to produce, and tends to be more stable than traditional vaccines. But no vaccine made with this technology for other viruses has reached the global market.
Pfizer and BioNTech injected the first volunteers with their vaccine candidate, BNT162, last month in Germany. The shot was given to 12 healthy adults, although the trial will eventually expand to 200 participants. In the United States, the drug companies plan to test the vaccine on 360 healthy volunteers for the first stage of the study, adding up to 8,000 volunteers by the end of the second stage.
Given the need to quash the virus, vaccine makers are racing to speed up their timelines for development, a process that typically takes years. Pfizer and BioNTech say they hope to have several million doses by September, if everything goes well with these human trials.
“We need to think differently, we need to think faster,” said Dr. Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer. “If we get hit with a second wave of coronavirus infections in October at the same time as the flu, things will be much worse than what we’ve already experienced.”
At the same time, the global search for a vaccine was bolstered by a fund-raising conference on Monday organized by the European Union.
Nations from around the world — including Australia, Canada, Japan, and Norway — pledged $8 billion to fund laboratories that have promising leads in developing and producing a coronavirus vaccine.
The United States opted not to participate.
Senior Trump administration officials have sought to talk up American contributions to coronavirus vaccine efforts worldwide, but did not explain the United States’ absence at the European-organized conference.
Quarantine Diaries: Giving birth during the pandemic.
For many without steady internet access, parking lots are now digital lifelines.
On a recent evening in Rutherfordton, N.C., Beth Revis drove to the parking lot of a closed elementary school and connected to the building’s free Wi-Fi. Then, she taught a two-hour writing class from her driver’s seat.
Ms. Revis held a flashlight to her face with one hand and a selfie stick with her smartphone attached in the other, looking at the device to speak to her students.
Getting the internet in her area had always been a headache, Ms. Revis said. “But during the pandemic,” she said, “it has turned from a mild inconvenience to a near impossibility.”
For Ms. Revis and many others across the country, parking lots have been a digital lifeline during the pandemic. Instead of spending hours in restaurants, libraries and cafes, people without fast internet access at home are sitting in lots near schools, libraries and stores that have kept their signals on.
“I hope that there is a lesson learned from this,” said Gina Millsap, the chief executive of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas. “Broadband is like water and electricity now, and yet it’s still being treated like a luxury.”
One in four Americans do not have high-speed internet access at home, according to the Pew Research Center, either because it is too expensive or because they live in a rural area with limited service. Some use their smartphone data plans for high-speed internet access, but those plans are often insufficient to handle work from home and distance learning.
This morgue worker is placing flowers on every new body bag.
A few days a week, a woman arrives at the Metropolitan Plant and Flower Exchange — a bunker along Route 17 North in Paramus, N.J. They know her by her hospital scrubs.
She picks up her standing order — yellow daffodils — and brings them with her to work at Hackensack University Medical Center.
They are not for her office or for co-workers. She carries them out back and walks into a parking garage. There are now three long trailers there, with loud motors powering their refrigerators. Inside each trailer are bodies in bags, stacked on shelves three high — coronavirus victims awaiting pickup.
The woman’s name is Tanisha Brunson-Malone, and she is a forensic technician at the hospital’s morgue who performs autopsies and oversees funeral home pickups of patients who have died. And she has been entering each trailer, walking the aisles between rows and placing a flower on each new body bag.
Ms. Brunson-Malone’s gesture is all but invisible, seen by only some colleagues and the funeral home workers who arrive to claim bodies. Her flowers are for the dead alone, a fleeting brush with dignity and decorum on the way from one sad place to another.
Before, she would open up the trailers each day and see how many people were dying alone. So she decided to give them a more dignified send-off. She said she spends $100 a week on flowers.
“I was kind of like their voice,” she said, “because they were voiceless.”
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Dermatologists say that painful red or purple lesions on your toes should prompt testing for the virus, even though many patients have no other symptoms. Here’s what you need to know about chilblains and other coronavirus symptoms.
Follow what’s happening around the globe with our team of international correspondents.
In China, grieving survivors want answers but the authorities are silencing them. The government is clamping down as relatives of victims, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before spreading across the country and to the rest of the world.
Reporting was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Jesse McKinley, Joseph Goldstein, Elian Peltier, Marc Santora, Julian E. Barnes, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Nicholas Fandos, Cecilia Kang, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Lara Jakes, Michael Wilson, Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith, Amy Harmon, Knvul Sheikh and Matt Stevens.
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