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Thursday, April 30, 2020
Michigan Governor Reinstates State of Emergency as Protests Ramp Up
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Hundreds of Rohingya Muslims Stuck at Sea in Refugee Crisis With ‘Zero Hope’
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Will New N.C.A.A. Rules Really Keep Agents and Boosters at Bay?
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New top story from Time: 3 Out of the 4 Major U.S. Airlines Will Require Passengers to Wear Masks on Flights
Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines will make passengers wear face masks, establishing a new standard for the industry as it fights to win back customers during a pandemic.
The larger carriers are following JetBlue Airways, which announced April 27 that travelers would have to cover their nose and mouth throughout trips starting May 4. Delta and United start their mandate the same day, with American’s kicking in on May 11. Small children are exempt.
The requirement is meant to help soothe concerns that aircraft cabins foster the spread of Covid-19. The airlines cited guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in implementing the change. The coverings help prevent anyone who may be unknowingly infected with the new coronavirus from spreading it in a confined space like an airplane cabin.
“We take seriously the CDC guidelines for adding this extra layer of protection,” Bill Lentsch, Delta’s chief customer experience officer, said in a statement Thursday. “We believe this change will give customers and employees some additional comfort when traveling with us.”
Southwest Airlines remains the outlier among the largest carriers. It said it will provide masks to those who want them, but hasn’t made them mandatory.
The union representing flight attendants from 20 airlines welcomed the new rule, and urged for it to be expanded.
The Association of Flight Attendants wants the federal government to mandate “masks for crew, front line employees and all passengers,” said Sara Nelson, president of the group.
Lobby, Too
Masks will be compulsory just on board American and United flights, while Delta and JetBlue are requiring them starting in the check-in lobby, gate areas, jet bridges as well as during flights. Frontier Airlines Inc., a discounter, also said it would require passengers to wear masks.
American will begin making masks and hand sanitizing wipes or gel available to some passengers on Friday, expanding to all flights as it’s able, the Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier said. Masks made at home from cloth or other household items can be used, it said.
United, Delta and American already require some employees to wear face masks, or will do so soon.
Anderson Cooper Announces Birth of His First Child
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Coronavirus Live Updates: In China, Loosened Restrictions Lead to Travel Rush
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Investors’ Confidence Lifts U.S. Stocks to Best Month Since 1987: Live Updates
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Making Space in Marriage, Even as the Walls Close In
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New top story from Time: ‘We Never Considered a Full Lockdown.’ South Korea’s Health Minister on the Country’s Fight Against Coronavirus
It wasn’t looking good for South Korea in mid-February. The nation had the world’s second highest number of coronavirus cases after China, owing to a cluster of infections that arose from the Shincheonji Church in the city of Daegu, some 150 miles south of the capital Seoul.
But thanks to early preparations, and a robust public health response based around extensive testing and tech-powered contact tracing, the nation’s tally of infections has been kept to just 10,765, about half directly related to Shincheonji. More impressive still, no major lockdown or restrictions on movement have been imposed, save a few scattered curfews.
On Apr. 15, some 29 million people turned up to vote in parliamentary elections—yet no known infections arose, thanks to strict social distancing at the polls. On Wednesday, South Korea had zero local infections for the first time since the outbreak was first recorded 72 days previously (though four new cases had been imported.) “This is the strength of South Korea and its people,” President Moon Jae-in said on announcing the news.
South Korea’s health and welfare minister Park Neung-hoo explained to TIME exactly how his nation engineered such a remarkable turnaround. The following written answers were translated from Korean and have been edited for length and clarity.
What was your reaction when you first heard about the virus? I imagine you must get a lot of these alerts that turn out to be nothing?
The bitter memory of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) puts me on edge whenever a novel virus infection is reported, so we thoroughly check up on any new viral outbreaks. [South Korea had the second-largest number of MERS cases after Saudi Arabia and its public health response was highly criticized.] So we tried to collect as much information as possible, and I thought that quick, early action should be taken.
What were the most critical policies toward containing COVID-19?
As COVID-19 displays very unique features, we needed to be creative and innovative, as well as using traditional methods to combat the virus. For example, drive-thru screening clinics, an ICT [information and communications technology] app called Special Immigration Procedure [provided to new airport arrivals], and Life Treatment Centers for patients with mild symptoms were innovative. If we had failed to separate them and tried to put all new patients in hospitals, our overloaded healthcare system could have collapsed.
In addition, if we had delayed developing test kits by a month, without prior and proactive consultation and cooperation with the private sector, our current system based around quick, mass testing couldn’t have been established.
How do instant test results help thorough contact tracing?
COVID-19 is highly contagious in the early stage of infection and even when the symptom is mild, and it spreads fast. Therefore, it is critical that the infected patient is identified and isolated as quickly as possible in containing the spread of the virus. For this, a quick test is essential.
How important has technology proved for contact tracing?
ICT plays a decisive role in accurately identifying people and swiftly locating their contacts. For example, tracing them through credit card usage, CCTV, mobile phone location tracing, and so on helps us to learn about a patient’s travel time, route and location quickly, and can also help to identify close contacts of the patient. The faster we find the contacts, the better we are able to stem further spread of the virus.
Why did you decide to make drive-through testing so widespread?
Drive-thru screening clinics are much faster and safer than ordinary screening clinics. Examination, temperature check, and specimen collection are done while the driver is still sitting in the car. Conventional specimen collection may take half an hour compared with only ten minutes in total for drive-thru. And the risk of cross infection between the medical professionals and visitors is significantly reduced.
What would be your advice for other nations trying to contain COVID-19?
Since COVID-19 spreads very fast, an early diagnostic test is critical. About 80% of COVID-19 patients have mild symptoms, and only 10% have severe symptoms. So the medical system needs to respond accordingly. In other words, efficient allocation of limited medical resources is very important.
Next, the greatest leverage we have for controlling COVID-19 is people’s trust in the state. Deep trust not only minimizes public anxiety, but is critical in inducing the participation and cooperation of the people in enforcing the potent vaccine that is social distancing.
For this, it is very important to provide relevant information to the people in the most transparent possible manner. In addition, it is also important to have smooth inter-ministerial and central-to-local governmental communication.
How did you resist the urge to impose more draconian containment measures like in China or other countries?
We never considered a full lockdown as part of our policy response to COVID-19. Although there was an explosive new outbreak in a certain region, we had confidence that we could locate contacts and isolate them successfully.
South Korea is a democracy which respects and ensures the individual freedom of the people as much as possible, so we relied on people’s voluntary cooperation based on their trust in pubic anti-epidemic authorities.
As such, instead of physical lockdown, we fought the virus through an epidemiological approach such as wide diagnostic testing and isolation of contacts, while encouraging people’s voluntary cooperation for social distancing. We believed this was more effective than forcible measures and indeed it paid off.
How do you weigh public health concerns versus restarting the economy?
Finding a mid-point between economic activities and containing an epidemic outbreak is a delicate balancing act. Given the nature of COVID-19, it will be next to impossible to wipe it out without the development of a vaccine.
The key is whether we are able to keep COVID-19 cases within our medical system’s capacity to treat to patients. In Korea, we set strict standards and regularly evaluate how patient numbers match our medical capacity, allowing us balance the two pressing needs [of public health and economy.]
Do you feel public pressure to end containment measures and open up?
Just like epidemic prevention is part of our life, so are socioeconomic activities. We need economic activities to ensure a sustainable anti-epidemic response. I perceive the need and feel the pressure for normalization of economic activities.
Anti-epidemic authorities are making an ongoing assessment of the current progress and are exploring ways to achieve both minimal risk of spread of infection and normal life and economic activities. For example, from the end of March until mid-April, strengthened social distancing was enforced. From Apr. 20 to May 5, some public facilities are reopening, gradually easing the strength of social distancing.
We will continue to adjust the level of social distancing in consideration of further progress, and we are ready to implement a “social distancing in normal life,” under which our normal life and virus containment can both be achieved in balance with each other.
—With reporting and translation by Stephen Kim/Seoul
Quotation of the Day: Billions Slide Down Ladder That Took Decades to Climb
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Labs Across U.S. Join Federal Initiative to Study Coronavirus Genome
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New top story from Time: Why Many Japanese People Are Ignoring Their Government’s Pleas to Stay Home During a Major Holiday Break
(TOKYO) — Under Japan’s coronavirus state of emergency, people have been asked to stay home. Many are not. Some still have to commute to their jobs despite risks of infection, while others continue to dine out, picnic in parks and crowd into grocery stores with scant regard for social distancing.
On Wednesday, the first day of the “Golden Week” holidays that run through May 5, Tokyo’s leafy Shiba Park was packed with families with small children, day camping in tents.
The lure of heading out for Golden Week holidays is testing the public’s will to unite against a common enemy as health workers warn rising coronavirus cases are overwhelming the medical system in some places. Experts say a sense of urgency is missing, thanks to mixed messaging from the government and a lack of incentives to stay home.
In distant, tropical Okinawa, locals have resorted to posting social media appeals to tourists not to visit, “to protect our grannies and grandpas.”
“Please cancel your trip to Okinawa and wait until we can welcome you,” Okinawa’s governor Denny Tamaki tweeted. “Unfortunately Okinawa can provide no hospitality and our medical systems, including on remote islands, are in a state of emergency.”
In this country driven by conformity and consensus, the pandemic is pitting those willing to follow the rules against a sizable minority who are resisting the calls to stay home.
To get better compliance, the government needs stronger messaging, said Naoya Sekiya, a University of Tokyo professor and expert of social psychology and risk communications.
A tougher lockdown would also help.
While the halfhearted adherence to the calls to stay home has dismayed Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, none of those spurning the advice are breaking the law. Legally, the state of emergency can only involve requests for compliance. Violators face no penalties. There are few incentives to close shops.
The main message has been economy first, safety second: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has insisted Japan will not adopt European-style hard lockdowns that would paralyze the economy. His economy minister heads the government’s coronavirus task force meetings.
“The message coming from the government is rather mild, apparently trying to convey the need to stay home while prioritizing the economy,” Sekiya said. Since people lack a shared sense of crisis, instead of staying home they’re hoping for the best and assuming they won’t get infected, he said.
Three-quarters of people responding to a recent survey by the Asahi newspaper said they are going out less than usual. But just over half felt they could comply with Abe’s call to reduce their social interactions by 80%.
People of all ages are shrugging off the stay-at-home request. The popular “scramble” intersection in downtown Tokyo’s Shibuya looked uncrowded, but eateries and pubs on backstreets were still busy. In the western suburb of Kichijoji, narrow shopping streets were jammed during the weekend with families strolling and heading to lunch. Pachinko pinball parlors have drawn ire for staying open despite name-and-shame announcements and other pressure to close. Bars and restaurants are ignoring a requested 8 p.m. closing time.
“It’s ridiculous,” said an 80-year-old man drinking Wednesday at a downtown bar. “What am I supposed to do at home? I’d only be watching TV.”
Officials are trying to fight back. In Kichijoji, they patrolled shopping arcades carrying banners saying “Please, do not go out.” Local mayors appealed to the government to close the crowded Shonan beach, popular with surfers and families, south of Tokyo. Some prefectures have set up border checkpoints to spot non-local license plates.
“It seems not everyone shares the sense of crisis,” said Kazunobu Nishikawa, a disaster prevention official in Musashino city, which oversees Kichijoji. “Many people understand the risks of this infectious disease,” he said, but “others seem to think COVID-19 is nothing more than a common cold and don’t care as long as they don’t catch it.”
Abe declared the state of emergency on April 7, as virus cases surged. It initially covered only Tokyo and six other areas but later expanded to include the whole country.
Abe did not ask non-essential businesses to close. But Koike, the Tokyo governor, fought and prevailed in requesting that schools, movie theaters, athletic clubs, hostess bars and other such businesses in the city be asked to close. Most restaurants and pubs still can operate from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., and grocery and convenience stores and public transport remain open as usual.
The government has rolled out an unprecedentedly huge economic package of 108 trillion yen ($1 trillion) that included loans for small businesses and other coronavirus measures. Responding to criticism he was neglecting individuals and families in dire need of cash to survive, Abe belatedly announced cash payouts of 100,000 yen each to all residents of Japan.
Survey data show the 80% social distancing target has roughly been met during weekends, with the numbers of nightlife goers and commuters noticeably lower. But parks and popular outdoor spots in Japan’s densely crowded cities are still bustling with people, said Hiroshi Nishiura, a Hokkaido University professor and expert of epidemiological analysis.
Tokyo reported 47 newly confirmed cases on Wednesday, with the total across the nation just over 14,000, though limited testing means the number of infections is likely much higher.
Call center employee Mayumi Shibata is among the many Japanese who cannot fully work from home, partly because much paperwork in this modern nation is still not computerized and most documents must be stamped in person using ink seals.
“I will commute as long as I can keep my job,” Shibata said while standing outside the busy downtown Shinagawa train station one recent morning.
With the trains slightly less crowded, conditions for commuting are better, and she tries to take her lunch break outside, if it’s not raining, to get some fresh air. “I’m trying not to get infected,” she said.
___
AP video journalists Emily Wang and Haruka Nuga contributed to this report.
New top story from Time: Amazon Says It May Lose Money During Coronavirus as It Increases Spending on Logistics and Worker Safety
Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos normally uses the company’s earnings report to extol the virtues of Alexa or the benefits of Prime. On Thursday, he told investors to hold on tight as his company navigates “the hardest time we’ve ever faced.”
The largest U.S. online retailer saw profit shrink and said it may incur a loss in the current quarter as it boosts spending to keep logistics operations running smoothly during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit,” Bezos said Thursday in a statement reporting Amazon’s results. “But these aren’t normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on Covid-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe.”
Operating income could range from $1.5 billion to a loss of $1.5 billion in the quarter ending in June, the Seattle-based company said.
Forecasting a potential loss added a dour note to financial results that showcased the success of a company built to thrive when online shopping is the only option for many shoppers. Unit sales, a closely watched metric, surged 32% in the first quarter. That’s the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2012.The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating long-term trends in favor of Amazon and online shopping, while further weakening brick-and-mortar stores. The company, which has prioritized stocking essential goods, is one of the few large retailers that have continued to operate relatively normally during the crisis.
And, as expected, sales increased 26% to $75.5 billion in the quarter that included the outbreak of Covid-19 in the U.S. Net income was $5.01 per share. Analysts, on average, estimated $73.7 billion in revenue and earnings of $6.27 a share, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The company, the second-largest private sector employer in the U.S. after Walmart, has faced criticism from employees, unions and politicians that it isn’t doing enough to protect workers. Amazon took the rare step in its earnings statement of recapping the safety measures it has enacted during the pandemic — and its contributions to food banks, students and health care workers — before its typical list trumpeting the quarter’s new products and services.
Bezos said the coronavirus effort included spending on personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of warehouses and stores and operational changes to promote social distancing.
“Providing for customers and protecting employees as this crisis continues for more months is going to take skill, humility, invention, and money,” he said. “If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small.”
Amazon spokesman Dan Perlet declined to disclose the number of Covid-19 cases in the company’s ranks.
Amazon and other large web retailers have a sense of duty because they’re so ingrained in people’s lives as a result of the pandemic, said Martin Garner of CCS Insight. “They have a clear role in society to help. Amazon has also taken a lot of negative publicity recently, so this massive Covid-19 spend should help address that,’” he said.
Amazon’s big investments, in new data centers to expand its cloud-computing business and warehouses to expand its e-commerce capacity, have historically paid off for investors by leading to increased revenue, but it’s not clear that will be the case with spending in response to the pandemic, said Brian Yarbrough, analyst at Edward D. Jones & Co. Amazon is hiring people, buying Covid-19 tests and cleaning facilities, which can be ongoing costs without providing any long-term gains, he said.
The company had previously said that a hiring binge beginning in mid-March and a temporary $2 an hour hazard pay raise for its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers would ultimately cost some $700 million. On a conference call with reporters, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said 175,000 additional jobs had been filled to help meet demand and take the place of workers sheltering at home.
Amazon’s fulfillment costs surged 34% to $11.5 billion from the period a year earlier. Shipping costs rose 49% to $10.9 billion.
“They’ve got a choppy history and investors have given them a lot of leeway because they’ve harvested the benefits of those investments later, but this one is a little more tricky,” Yarbrough said. “Some of these costs seem like they’re going to stick around, which brings the profitability of the company into question.”
Sales in Amazon’s physical stores category, which is almost entirely Whole Food Market stores, rose 8% to $4.6 billion in the quarter, the largest increase since Amazon bought the organic grocer in 2017. That tally doesn’t include online sales from Whole Foods, which surged in March as people stocked up and overwhelmed Amazon’s food delivery infrastructure. Olsavsky didn’t offer a combined revenue growth rate for Amazon’s grocery business, but said the company had expanded grocery delivery capacity by 60% during the quarter.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit that in recent years has accounted for most of the company’s operating income, posted sales of $10.2 billion, up 33%, and just below analysts’ estimates.
Amazon shares declined about 4.5% in extended trading after the results. The stock closed at $2,474 in New York and has jumped more than 33% in 2020.
New top story from Time: How the Trump-China Rivalry Has Hampered U.S. Intelligence on COVID-19
In mid-November, U.S. military and intelligence analysts began to suspect that something might be wrong in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. The CIA was getting reports from the city that there was an outbreak of pneumonia. High resolution spy satellite photographs showed activity around medical centers and diminishing traffic in the streets. National Security Agency eavesdropping detected an increase in what appeared to be medical calls within the city, in the surrounding Hubei Province, and between Wuhan and government offices in Beijing.
For about a month, there was no way to assemble the scattered bits of intelligence into any confident assessment of what was happening, say four U.S. intelligence and defense officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the raw reports. But as the activity increased and the reports from the city continued, some officials at the CIA and the National Center for Medical Intelligence began musing about whether something more serious than pneumonia or a seasonal flu might be spreading. Maybe something worse – something even more contagious.
More than five months and 225,000 deaths later, the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts to piece together the early spread of COVID-19 has been clouded by politics and self-interest in both China and the U.S., two of the countries that have suffered the most from the pandemic. Rather than doing all they could to share information to minimize the virus’ spread, both China and the U.S. have all too often focused on blaming the other for starting it.
Early in January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) started including a warning in many of President Trump’s daily intelligence briefs, say two of the officials who helped compile it. The president, they say, was uninterested. So were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and other senior officials, the officials say, who routinely receive copies of the PDB and generally avoid confronting the president. What the intelligence officials and health experts could not tell the President— and still cannot today — is where the virus came from.
Politicians in Washington and Beijing have been quick to fill the vacuum. On Jan. 23, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton told a Senate hearing that the Chinese government might have developed the bug as a bioweapon in a “superlaboratory” in Wuhan, and had been “lying about it from the very beginning.” That triggered a burst of conspiracy theories shared widely on social media, including by Patriots for Truth, a self-described patriotic organization that claimed on Jan. 28 there was “definitive proof the Coronavirus is a globalist bioweapon.”
China’s ambassador to the U.S. has called the theory “harmful and “dangerous,” and on March 13, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian escalated the conspiracy theory war with a series of tweets charging that the disease actually had first traveled to Wuhan with American soldiers who had participated in the October Military World Games there. That, too, took on a life of its own, the Army Times reported, powered in part by Russian and Chinese websites and social media.
The U.S.-China feud briefly subsided for a few weeks in late March and early April as both sides appeared to recognize the danger of escalation during a pandemic that was claiming thousands of lives. Trump stopped referring to the disease as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.” High-ranking Chinese officials distanced themselves from Lijian’s accusation, and he eventually retreated.
But as the pandemic further accelerated and the economy sharply contracted in the U.S., Trump’s administration has returned to blaming China. During the last two months, he and other top officials have pressed intelligence and medical officials to press their investigations into whether the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in Wuhan where Chinese virologists study diseases carried by bats and other animals, according to U.S. officials. Reports of that pressure first appeared in the New York Times on Thursday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has charged that by concealing what it knew about Covid-19’s origins, China poses a threat to the entire world. “The Chinese Communist Party now has a responsibility to tell the world how this pandemic got out of China, causing such global economic devastation,” Pompeo told Fox News on April 29. In an interview with NBC News the same day, Chinese Executive Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng blamed the U.S. for responding to the threat too slowly. “Some political figures are politicizing this COVID-19,” he said. “They’re using this virus to stigmatize China.”
U.S. intelligence officials have investigated and dismissed claims that the virus was “manmade or genetically modified,” according to an April 30 ODNI statement, and neither spies nor scientists have found sufficient evidence to support some U.S. officials’ public suggestions that the virus escaped from a Chinese government laboratory. Details of the intelligence community’s early investigations appeared first in the Washington Post and New York Times.
Intelligence officials say satellites, human sources, communications intercepts, and other tools have not detected unusual activity at or around the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention that would suggest a cleanup, a lockdown, an official investigation, or a purge. “The Chinese are adept at concealment, so we haven’t ruled anything out, but we don’t have an indictment, either,” said one of the officials.
It also may be impossible to prove that the virus did not escape from a lab in Wuhan. Even the most secure labs, called Biosafety Level 4, are not immune to leaks. In 2019, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute at Ft. Detrick, Maryland stopped doing high-level research after the CDC found security lapses there, the Frederick News-Post reported after obtaining the CDC reports under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Two U.S. intelligence officials said the administration’s persistent efforts to pin the blame on a Chinese government lab remind them of the Bush Administration’s demands for intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “It was a mistake to bow to political pressure then, and it would be a mistake now,” said one of the officials.
Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.
Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today
By BY PATRICK J. LYONS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2xrrh9q
New top story from Time: The Parks and Recreation Reunion Was a Sweet, Slight Dispatch From an Alternate Universe
Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.
But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.
And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.
Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.
Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”
Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.
Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.
Two Arrested in Killings of Transgender Women in Puerto Rico
By BY MICHAEL LEVENSON AND SANDRA E. GARCIA from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2YnU3CH
New top story from Time: Joe Biden Expected to Face Questions About Sexual Assault Allegation on Friday
(WASHINGTON) — A sexual assault allegation is Joe Biden’s first big challenge as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, fueling Republican attacks and leaving many in his own party in an uncomfortable bind.
Biden’s campaign has denied the allegation from his former Senate staffer Tara Reade, who has said Biden assaulted her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s. But the story garnered fresh attention this week after two of Reade’s associates said she previously told them about elements of her allegations.
Republicans worried about President Donald Trump’s increasingly precarious political standing are seizing on the allegation to portray Democrats as hypocrites who only defend women who allege wrongdoing against conservatives. They are digging in despite the fact that it could renew attention on the multiple sexual assault allegations lodged against Trump.
Democrats, meanwhile, are in an awkward position of vigorously validating women who come forward with their stories while defending the man who will be their standard-bearer in what many in the party consider the most important election of their lifetimes.
The tension is heightened because Biden himself has said nothing about the allegation.
Like many Americans, he has spent the past several weeks at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Biden has participated in a handful of local and national interviews, during which he wasn’t asked about the allegation. He will be interviewed Friday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and is expected to face questions about the accusations.
Ahead of that appearance, Democrats urged a more forceful response.
“The campaign has issued statements, but he hasn’t issued any statements in his own voice,” said former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile. “It’s not helping, it’s just damaging — not only to the person who has come forward, but it’s also damaging the candidate.”
Lis Smith, a top strategist on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, also called on the Biden campaign to speak up.
“These accusations have not been found to be credible, so it’s in the Biden campaign’s interest to nip this in the bud directly and do it quickly,” she said.
The November contest between Biden and Trump will be the first presidential race of the #MeToo era, which has led numerous women to come forward with allegations of sexual assault. Trump has been accused of assault and unwanted touching by numerous women, allegations he denies.
Women are a core constituency for Democrats, and Biden has a mixed history. While he wrote the Violence Against Women Act as a senator, he also came under heavy criticism for his handling of Anita Hill’s Senate testimony in the 1990s. Just before he launched his 2020 campaign, several women accused him of unwanted touching, behavior for which he apologized.
Biden has pledged to pick a woman as a running mate, and the allegation has left those thought to be in contention in a tough spot.
Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia Democratic governor candidate, said, “I believe Joe Biden,” citing a New York Times investigation that she said exonerated him.
“Women deserve to be heard,” she said, “but I also believe that those allegations have to be investigated by credible sources.”
That echoed talking points issued by the Biden campaign to surrogates last week that were obtained by The Associated Press. They pointed to investigations by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the AP that found no other allegation of sexual assault and no pattern of sexual misconduct.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also defended Biden. Speaking on CNN, she said she was “satisfied with how he has responded,” even as she acknowledged “it’s a matter that he has to deal with.”
Some Democratic donors and fundraisers say the issue has not come up in calls with party financiers. Others worry that it could be used against Biden, much as Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the activities of the Clinton Foundation were wielded against her by Trump.
Some, most notably women, say they are paying close attention to the allegations, which gave them pause.
Alex Sink, a donor and former Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, said she was “not happy” to read about the allegations against Biden. While she still plans to vote for him, she worried his campaign was too quick to categorically deny Reade’s story.
“They put themselves immediately out on a limb by saying, ‘It didn’t happen, we categorically deny it, it’s not true,’” Sink said.
Some female Democratic operatives expressed concerns the allegation is particularly damaging because it’s an indictment of Biden’s central campaign rationale: that he provides a moral counter to Trump and that the election is a “battle for the soul of America.”
“The stakes could not be higher for defeating Donald Trump — but at the same time, I think we have to apply a consistent standard for how we treat allegations of sexual assault, and also be clear-eyed about how Donald Trump will use these allegations in the general election campaign,” said Claire Sandberg, who worked as Bernie Sanders’ organizing director.
The silence from the Biden campaign has given Republicans an opening on an issue that was, in 2016, more fraught for the GOP, when Trump was asked to answer for the more than two dozen women who alleged varying levels of sexual assault and harassment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News on Thursday that Biden will “have to participate in releasing all the information related to” the allegation, a stance he didn’t take when Trump faced misconduct accusations.
The GOP argues Democrats aren’t being consistent, pointing to aggressive questioning and coverage of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when he faced an allegation of sexual assault.
Speaking about the allegation for the first time on Friday, Trump said Biden “should respond” before proceeding to criticize the treatment of Kavanaugh as “an absolute disgrace to our country.”
Steve Guest, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said “the left, and their media allies, has one standard for Republicans and another standard for Democrats like Joe Biden.”
“The double standard,” he said, “is appalling.”
___
Associated Press writers Brian Slodysko in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Coronavirus Live Updates: Pandemic Sends World’s Poor Scrambling
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Flynn Lawyers Seize on Newly Released F.B.I. Documents
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Markets in Asia Rise After Wall Street Rally: Live Updates
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Quotation of the Day: Pandemic Is Further Eroding France’s Trust in Central Government
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New top story from Time: Elon Musk Decries ‘Fascist’ Stay-at-Home Orders During Tesla Earnings Call
Elon Musk went on a profane rant during another emotive Tesla Inc. earnings call, excoriating stay-at-home orders that are putting the electric-car maker’s red-hot run at risk.
“This is fascist. This is not democratic, this is not freedom,” the chief executive officer said after reporting Tesla’s first-ever profit to start a year. “Give people back their godd— freedom.”
Tesla is worried about being able to resume production in the San Francisco Bay area, where authorities have extended a stay-home order to the end of May. The Model 3 maker’s only assembly plant in the U.S. still produces the vast majority of the company’s cars and has been idlesince March 23.
Investors shrugged off the outburst, with Tesla shares finishing the late trading session up 8.7%. The company’s third straight quarterly profit and revenue of almost $6 billion beat analysts’ estimates, extending an advance for a stock that’s already the biggest gainer on the Nasdaq 100 Stock Index this year.
“It was vintage Elon. I wish he hadn’t done it,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures, said by phone. “But most investors don’t care. It doesn’t change the reality, which is that Tesla is making meaningful progress toward being a major player in the auto industry.”
The stock surge Musk, 48, has engineered by producing and delivering more cars than expected early this year has positioned him to receive the first set of stock options from a pay package that set moonshot goals two years ago.
By continuing to build up the shares, bulls are overlooking uncertainty about how soon the company will be able to resume production at its sole U.S. vehicle-assembly plant in Fremont, California, or how eager consumers will be to purchase Tesla cars once health orders are loosened and lifted.
“We are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay area, and that should be identified as a serious risk,” Musk told an analyst. He said shelter-in-place orders are “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights” and “breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong.”
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies,” Musk added. “While Tesla will weather the storm, there are many small companies that will not. Everything people have worked for their whole life is being destroyed in real time, and we have many suppliers that are having super-hard times, especially the small ones. It’s causing a lot of strife to a lot of people.”
During the debut quarter for the new Model Y crossover, automotive gross margin improved to 25.5%, the highest in a year and a half.
While Tesla stopped short of restating its January forecast for deliveries to “comfortably” exceed 500,000 vehicles this year, the company said it believes it can achieve industry-leading operating margins and profitability.
“Gross margin was mostly the thing that sticks out to me on the positive side,” Ben Kallo, an analyst at Robert W. Baird with the equivalent of a hold rating on Tesla, said by phone. “On the question-mark side, I have to wonder why they didn’t talk about demand at all.”
Tesla managed to build about 14,000 more vehicles than it handed over to customers in the quarter, despite being forced to suspend production at its factory in California late last month. Inventory build-up led the company to burn through about $895 million in cash during the period. Tesla still ended March with $8.1 billion on its balance sheet after raising money through a stock offering in February.
Musk will postpone initial deliveries of Tesla’s Semi truck again to 2021 — roughly two years later than initially planned — as the company prioritizes starting output of the Model Y crossover in Shanghai and building a factory in Germany from which it aims to begin shipping cars in the middle of next year.
“Tesla investors are looking past the June quarter,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst who rates the stock a hold, said by phone. “The bulls could take this and run.”
New top story from Time: Why We Still Don’t Know Which Businesses Are Getting Coronavirus Relief
When the government’s wildly popular program to cover small businesses’ overhead costs during the coronavirus pandemic came back online on Monday, thousands of Main Street businesses were lined up for the 10:30 a.m. starting pistol.
By 1 p.m. on Tuesday, banks had shoveled $52 billion dollars in federally backed small business loans out the door. By the close of business on Wednesday, more than $90 billion had been doled out. Struggling companies’ intense need for capital has had bankers across the country working around the clock to process loan applicants’ paperwork — and fighting government servers that keep crashing under the demand.
The small-business program, branded the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), is one of the biggest cash injections to the U.S. economy in history. The program’s first $349 billion in funding ran out in 14 days, and the second tranche of $310 billion, approved last week, is on track to do the same. The money is being loaned out by 5,300 separate banks without much direction from Washington other than to get the cash moving.
And yet as of today, the taxpayers footing the historic tab have no way of knowing who is getting the cash. Though some large firms that were recipients have been identified by their Securities and Exchange Commission filings — and shamed or bullied into giving back their loan money — the government body overseeing the enormous fund has yet to release any comprehensive list of beneficiaries. Though now-dated information is available on what sectors and states were the program’s biggest winners during the first funding round, it may be months before any complete public accounting takes place for who got what cash and to what end.
“We are missing a critical moment. All this money is going out the door,” says Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s a really live question what oversight is being done at this moment.”
The Paycheck Protection Program offers eligible businesses with fewer than 500 employees, non-profits and self-employed individuals loans from private lenders that will be forgiven if the firms keep their payrolls steady. In other words, companies can carry unneeded workers for free, a measure aimed at stopping the spiraling unemployment numbers of 26 million and counting.
The loans that went out under the program’s first pot of money came under fire for excluding smaller banks and minority communities. When Congress restocked the fund last week, those concerns yielded carve-outs to help smaller banks participate and offset potential favoritism of banks toward bigger, better-resourced customers. On Wednesday, the program also announced that only banks with assets of less than $1 billion could submit after-hours paperwork between 4 p.m. and midnight, giving smaller banks another advantage and the computer servers a break.
But without any real-time visibility into who is getting the funding, it is impossible to know whether the second tranche of money is avoiding the pitfalls of the first. Immediate disclosures of how the money is being spent was not part of either deal Congress struck for the first or second round of spending. The government, after all, had plenty on its plate and there were legitimate worries that rapid disclosure could put thumbs on the scale of competition. Some borrowers have been identified through SEC filings, but the mom-and-pop shops that were envisioned to be the core beneficiaries of the program aren’t regulated there.
“We know they have to make it public at some point. But they have not made it easy so far,” says Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a progressive watchdog group.
For now, the most recent public accounting of the program, posted on the Treasury Department’s website, tracks money through April 16. It breaks down the dispersed loans by state and sector, but it does not identify loan recipients, and it only identifies the biggest lenders under the program by a number. (For instance, an unnamed Lender One had an average loan amount of $515,000.) The Small Business Administration (SBA), the federal agency that’s on the hook for reimbursing the banks, offers a little more information about the size of the banks that are lending from the latest funds, but not who’s getting it.
Ultimately, the best source of solid information about the spending is likely to be the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a panel established in the broader law that set up the Paycheck Protection Program. After President Donald Trump sidelined the panel’s first leader in a bureaucratic swing, it has an interim chairman, the top watchdog at the Justice Department, and this week hired a top staffer to get work started. Anyone receiving help under any part the relief packages has to report back quarterly to the pandemic panel details about the money and what it’s being used for. The panel in turn will have 30 days to post that online for public review. But the quarter doesn’t end until June 30. The soonest disclosures could happen might be late July or early August for some of the first businesses to access the small business aid.
Congress also created the Office of the Special Inspector General at the Department of Treasury, a new watchdog dedicated to tracking where the pandemic dollars are going. The post, however, requires a Senate confirmation. Trump has selected White House lawyer Brian D. Miller, a former federal prosecutor and previous inspector general. But he faces a tough crowd in the Senate; last year, Miller told the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the White House was done cooperating with its investigation into the withholding of security aid to Ukraine — the event that is central to Trump’s impeachment and acquittal earlier this year.
If Miller wins confirmation, he will have to build his office from scratch. Congress did not include any emergency language for the new watchdog to oversee a separate $500 billion fund that help businesses that fall outside the SBA loan program. That means Miller or anyone else running the office will face routine bureaucratic hurtles for hiring staff. Miller won’t be able to simply bring his inner-circle with him and the positions will have to be posted widely.
The prolonged process will inevitably mean missed opportunities for lawmakers and policy wonks to tinker with the programs as they figure out the most beneficial and effective way to pump more money in the beleaguered economy. Right now, Congress is considering another relief package, but hasn’t yet seen what the first two pots of small business cash has yielded.
“The bottom line is that this pandemic is going to be with us for a very long time,” says Austin Evers, the founder of American Oversight, a liberal group that has peppered the Trump Administration with requests and litigation for public records. “It’s unlikely this is the only financial support that businesses and individuals are going to be receiving. If we can’t see the data for how the first tranche has been spent, we don’t have the tools we need in the future.”
Some in Washington are ready to start cutting checks directly to local relief funds and pull back from the lenders. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, have worked with Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., on a $50 billion proposal that would give to local pools of money, with the goal of helping small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and those with 50 employees of less in poor neighborhoods.
“Oversight makes programs work better,” says Kildee. “These administrations and these banks will achieve their goals more effectively when they know someone is watching and measuring. If no one’s watching and measuring, things get sloppy.”
Others take a longer view. Former GAO assistant director John Kamensky notes that Congress has already set aside $280 million in oversight for the pandemic response so far and boosted the GAO budget by $20 million, in addition to creating the Treasury’s Special Inspector General position and the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. On top of that, there’s talk of a 9/11 Commission-style panel, House Democrats’ own inquiry and the already robust oversight operations on the Hill.
“Transparency is going to be there, I think,” says Kamensky, who spent eight years advising former Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative and now is a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government. “It’s a matter of getting it timely and getting it clean.”
Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.
New top story from Time: Italy Says App Tracing Contacts of People Infected With COVID-19 Will Be Anonymous
ROME — The Italian government has decreed that the data provided through an app to facilitate tracing of persons who come in close contact with someone positive for COVID-19 will be completely anonymous and that all data will be destroyed by year’s end.
Premier Giuseppe Conte’s Cabinet, at a meeting that ended early Thursday, approved a law, in the form of the decree, that guarantees that those who decide not to use the app won’t suffer limits on their movement or other rights.
Health authorities are encouraging Italians to use the app as a key tool to prevent the rate of contagion to rise again in Italy. The app, which uses Bluetooth, won’t geo-localize users, and data will only be mined for purposes of containing the virus or for epidemiological study, the government said Thursday.
The Cabinet also stipulated that any bid to release to house arrest prison inmates convicted of terrorism or Mafia crimes due to COVID-19 concerns must seek the opinion of prosecutors, or in the case of top organized crime bosses must run the request by Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor. Prosecutors have expressed concern mobsters can exploit the pandemic to get out of prison.
New top story from Time: Police Say Bodies in Vehicles Connected to Brooklyn Funeral Home
(NEW YORK) — Police were called to a Brooklyn neighborhood Wednesday after someone reported human bodies in vehicles, which officers determined were connected to a nearby funeral home.
The New York Police Department said the call to 911 came in just before 11:30 a.m., and officers responded to Utica Avenue.
The vehicles were determined to be connected to the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home nearby, police said.
The NYPD notified the state Department of Health, which oversees funeral homes. The department did not respond to an email seeking comment.
When a call was made to the funeral home, a person on the other end picked up and then hung up. Subsequent calls went to voicemail, which was full.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams went to the scene on Wednesday evening. He told the Daily News, “While this situation is under investigation, we should not have what we have right now, with trucks lining the streets filled with bodies.”
He said “it was people who walked by who saw some leakage and detected an odor coming from a truck.”
Irrfan Khan: Mira Nair Remembers Her ‘Namesake’ Star
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Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today
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New top story from Time: President Trump Erupts at Campaign Team as His Poll Numbers Slide
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.
As the virus takes its deadly toll and much of the nation’s economy remains shuttered, new surveys by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign pointed to a harrowing picture for the president as he faces reelection.
While Trump saw some of the best approval ratings of his presidency during the early weeks of the crisis, aides highlighted the growing political cost of the crisis and the unforced errors by Trump in his freewheeling press briefings.
Trump reacted with defiance, incredulous that he could be losing to someone he viewed as a weak candidate.
“I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,” he repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.
The message to the president was sobering: Trump was trailing the former Democratic vice president in many key battleground states, he was told, and would have lost the Electoral College if the election had been held earlier this month.
On the line from the White House, Trump snapped at the state of his polling during a series of calls with campaign manager Brad Parscale, who called in from Florida; RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, on the line from her home in Michigan; senior adviser Jared Kushner; and other aides.
Echoing a number of White House aides and outside advisers, the political team urged Trump to curtail his daily coronavirus briefings, arguing that the combative sessions were costing him in the polls, particularly among seniors. Trump initially pushed back, pointing to high television ratings. But, at least temporarily, he agreed to scale back the briefings after drawing sharp criticism for raising the idea that Americans might get virus protection by injecting disinfectants.
Trump aides encouraged the president to stay out of medical issues and direct his focus toward more familiar and politically important ground: the economy.
Even as Trump preaches optimism, the president has expressed frustration and even powerlessness as the dire economic statistics pile up. It’s been a whiplash-inducing moment for the president, who just two months ago planned to run for reelection on the strength of an economy that was experiencing unprecedented employment levels. Now, as the records mount in the opposite direction, Trump is feeling the pressure.
“We built the greatest economy in the world,” Trump has said publicly. “I’ll do it a second time.”
Trump’s political team warned that the president’s path to reelection depends on how quickly he can bring about a recovery.
“I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again,” Kushner told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. But other aides, business leaders and economists predict a far longer road toward recovery.
Representatives for the RNC and the Trump campaign did not comment on the polling or last week’s phone calls.
According to people familiar with the incident, Trump vented much of his frustration at Parscale, who served as the bearer of bad news.
Trump has long distrusted negative poll numbers — telling aides for years that his gut was right about the 2016 race, when he insisted that he was ahead in the Midwest and Florida. At the same time, Parscale and other Trump aides are talking up the sophistication of their data and voter outreach capabilities this time.
The president and some aides have had simmering frustrations with Parscale for a while, believing the campaign manager — a close Kushner ally — has enriched himself from his association with Trump and sought personal publicity. Trump had previously been angered when Parscale was the subject of magazine profiles. This latest episode flared before the campaign manager was featured in a New York Times Magazine profile this week.
Aides have grown particularly worried about Michigan — which some advisers have all but written off — as well as Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Trump announced Wednesday that he will visit Arizona next week — his first trip outside Washington in a month — as he looks to declare that much of the nation is ready to begin reopening after the virus.
The president has mocked Biden, his presumptive general election rival, for being “stuck in his basement” in his Delaware home during the pandemic.
Trump said Wednesday that he hopes to soon visit Ohio, a battleground state that Trump carried handily in 2016 but that aides see as growing slightly competitive in recent weeks.
Aides acknowledged that the president’s signature rallies would not be returning anytime soon. Some have privately offered doubts that he would be able to hold any in his familiar format of jam-packed arenas before Election Day, Nov. 3.
___
Lemire reported from New York.
The Trump Administration’s Legal Moves to Prevent a Meat Shortage, Explained
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Trump Seeks Push to Speed Vaccine, Despite Safety Concerns
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Tuesday, April 28, 2020
New top story from Time: Trump Says U.S. Will Run 5 Million Daily Virus Tests ‘Very Soon.’ His Testing Chief Says That’s Impossible
President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that the U.S. will be able to carry out five million coronavirus tests per day, but the top official overseeing testing strategy told TIME earlier in the day that goal wasn’t feasible given current technology.
Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health who is in charge of the government’s testing response, said during an interview on Tuesday morning that “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests a day.”
Since the beginning of the year, the Administration has conducted 5.7 million tests in total, he said. And while the government has made strides in increasing the number of tests being performed in recent months, the White House’s new “blueprint” for testing, rolled out on Monday, currently plans to double current COVID-19 testing. Giroir plans to hit 8 million per month by next month.
The tally would still fall short of what a Harvard University study said is necessary to safely restart public life. The 56-page “roadmap” published last week by a group of experts said the U.S. needed to be capable of carrying out at least 5 million tests a day by early June, and 20 million per day by late July, in order to reopen the economy. Giroir called the assessment “an Ivory Tower, unreasonable benchmark,” that wasn’t needed, based upon current modeling projections, and that couldn’t be supported by current technology.
Five hours later, when a reporter asked Trump at the White House if the country would reach five million daily tests, as the Harvard study recommended, Trump responded: “We’ll increase it, and it’ll increase it by much more than that in the very near future.” Asked to clarify if he meant the U.S. would “surpass 5 million tests per day”, Trump said, “We’re going to be there very soon.”
The largest number of tests conducted by the U.S. in a single day was 314,182, according to Covid Tracking Project data. Trump didn’t offer how his Administration was going to account for the 1,500% increase, but assured those at the briefing: “If you look at the numbers, it could be that we’re getting very close.”
Trump’s assertion was the latest in a series of inaccurate and misleading statements made by the president about the COVID-19 crisis that have often placed him at odds with the experts advising him. On Feb. 28, speaking about the new coronavirus, he declared “like a miracle, it will disappear.” On March 6 he said that “anybody that wants a test can get a test”. Last week, bizarrely, he speculated that “ultraviolet” light or the injecting of disinfectants might serve as treatments.
In the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment of the new coronavirus, testing is a crucial element in any plan to allow Americans to return to their normal lives, experts say. Trump’s apparent lack of familiarity with his own Administration’s testing plans is the latest of a series of costly missteps on that front. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed hundreds of faulty diagnostic test kits. Then in February, the Federal Food and Drug Administration was too sluggish in approving tests developed by hospital, university and private laboratories, creating a bottleneck.
The Administration has been able to streamline those processes over the last two months and build up capacity, but as labs and states now compete for the same equipment, a new problem has emerged: a scarcity of supplies.
The White House has repeatedly celebrated advances in boosting U.S. testing capacity and expressed confidence about states’ ability to do more in hopes of getting closer to Trump’s foremost goal: a phased reopening of the economy. As state and local governments consider re-opening, public health experts agree it will take meticulous and widespread testing to identify people who might be infected, trace their contacts, test those individuals who came in contact with an infected person and isolate them from the public to reduce the chances they will spread the virus.
The 5.7 million tests conducted in the U.S. so far are much more than any other country, but represent less than 2% percent of the total U.S. population. The Administration’s testing blueprint, announced Monday by the President in the White House Rose Garden, outlines how the federal government aims to help all 50 states.
Giroir, a pediatric critical care specialist who previously served in roles at the Defense Department, said all states require a tailored strategy and that their individual testing plans will be dependent on a range of factors, including the “virus circulating within their states as well as the particular demographics.” The goal is for each state to be able to screen at least 2% of their residents, he said.
The Administration works with states on a weekly basis to discuss their specific needs, review the testing strategies, and follow-up on any additional requests they may need. “If we do testing in a smart way, like all those who were symptomatic and contact-traced and you targeted asymptomatic screening, that’s really the way to go,” Giroir said.
Experts say the U.S. has not done enough testing to yield an accurate and actionable picture of the epidemic for states to come up with effective plans. “If a state misjudges its true underlying infection trajectory, it may suffer large flare-ups of the disease, necessitating a long and painful lockdown again,” wrote Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “Yet most states are long way from adequate testing—and the tracing of contacts that must follow.”
The U.S. has increased the number of tests as commercial testing companies increase production and the Food and Drug Administration continues to approve tests using different types of samples, including ones from the nose and saliva, as well as blood. States are responsible for developing their own plans to secure those tests from companies, Giroir said, while the federal government should be the “supplier of last resort.”
“It’s horribly inefficient to say that the government is going to buy all the supplies, recreate a distribution center, do 5,000 hospitals, maybe 10,000 laboratories in academic centers,” Giroir said. “What we really want to do is use the commercial supply chain.”
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Health Committee, took issue with this aspect of the Administration’s testing blueprint because individual states are already fighting with one another to obtain much needed medical supplies. The Trump approach doesn’t “identify ways to fix our broken supply chain, or offer any details whatsoever on expanding lab capacity or activating needed manufacturing capacity,” she said in a statement on Monday. “Perhaps most pathetically, it attempts to shirk obvious federal responsibilities by assigning them solely to states instead,” she said.
Governors from the hardest-hit states say they’re locked into counter-productive bidding wars with one another to acquire certain supplies, including tests. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan was so desperate for diagnostic testing kits, he bought half a million kits from a South Korean company. Politicians, medical professionals and hospital officials have criticized Trump’s reticence to ease the supply shortage by using presidential authorities under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to compel U.S. private production capacity to manufacture the supplies.
Giroir said that kind of criticism is “based on very little knowledge of how this works.” For instance, testing swabs have been in short supply since March. The swabs—which resemble oversized Q-tips and are inserted into the nose to sample mucus at the top of the throat—are manufactured in northern Italy and China, where production was decimated due to coronavirus outbreaks. “Like if you were relying on one swab type that’s only made in Italy, because that’s what the FDA does, it doesn’t matter what I do [in the U.S.] until you open the market and have different swab types,” Giroir said.
Due to the scarcity of key testing components like swabs, chemical reagents and tubes, Giroir acknowledges that the federal government needs to help steer some critical parts of the supply chain to increase the number of tests being done. In May and June, the federal government plans to purchase the components necessary to meet all the states’ plans and distribute them to central locations in each state.
“For swabs and tubes, it’s really the heaviest hand of the federal government,” he said. “We buy it, we procure it, we know it’s there, we ship it. But over the course of the summer, by July, we think we’re going to move even the swabs and the tubes into a more directed traffic-controlled free market system, where we don’t buy it, but we assure the states can purchase what they need for every single line.”
Come this summer, he said, “We’ll be swimming in swabs.”
When reached after the President’s comments, Giroir’s staff said the Administration is always looking for ways to ramp up testing but maintained that—barring technological breakthrough—5 million tests could not be supported.
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