All Americans should wear masks, the CDC says, but President Trump said he wouldn’t.
A key adviser to the British government said the country lockdown would continue until the end of May.
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The Chinese government held a nationwide day of mourning on Saturday, the day of the annual Tomb Sweeping Festival, a traditional time for honoring ancestors. Flags flew at half-staff, and alarms and horns sounded for three minutes starting at am Xi Jinping and other leaders of the ruling Communist Party attended a ceremony in Beijing.
It will probably not be enough to soothe many families in the city of Wuhan, who have chafed against the state’s efforts to assert control over the grieving process.
The police in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, have been dispatched to break up groups on WeChat, a popular messaging app, set up by relatives of coronavirus victims. Government censors have scrubbed social media of images that showed relatives lining up at Wuhan funeral homes to collect ashes. Officials have assigned minders to relatives to follow them as they pick burial plots, claim their loved ones’ remains and bury them, grieving family members say.
Liu Pei’en, whose father died after contracting the coronavirus in a Wuhan hospital, said officials had insisted on accompanying him to a funeral home to pick up his father’s remains. Later, they followed him to the cemetery where they watched him bury his father, he said. Mr. Liu saw one of his minders take photos of the funeral, which was over in minutes.
“ My father devoted his whole life to serving the country and the party, ”Mr. Liu, 60, who works in finance, said by phone. “Only to be surveilled after his death.”
President Trump said on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was urging all Americans to wear a mask when they leave their homes, but he undercut the message by repeatedly calling the recommendation voluntary and saying he would not wear one himself.
“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing, ”the president said at the beginning of the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary. ”
“ Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens – I don’t know, ”he added, though he stopped receiving foreign dignitaries weeks ago. “Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”
Mr. Trump’s announcement, followed by his quick dismissal, was a remarkable public display of the intense debate that has played out inside the West Wing over the past several days as a divided administration argued about whether to request such a drastic change in Americans ’social behavior. Senior officials at the C.D.C. have been pushing the president for days to advise everyone – even people who appear to be healthy – to wear a mask or a scarf that covers their mouth and nose when shopping at the grocery store or while in other public places.
The president’s briefing was particularly contentious: He insulted reporters, jousted with his own administration and generally returned to pugilistic form.
At one point, he would not say, in response to a question, whether he was taking steps to ensure that the (presidential election would take place as scheduled, should the coronavirus still be present in November. But he insisted the election would not be postponed.
“I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in in voting, ”he said. “It should be, you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the office leading the US Government coronavirus response nationwide, is running short of employees who are trained in some of its most important front-line jobs, according to interviews with current and former officials.
At the same time, the agency has been forced to halt a major hiring initiative and has closed training facilities to avoid spreading the infection.
The number of available personnel qualified to lead field operations has fallen to from in less than six weeks, as many of those leaders have been assigned to run operations in states with virus- related disaster declarations. Additional staff members are also being pulled from responding to other disasters.
Training centers in Maryland and Alabama have been shuttered until mid-May, and an effort to recruit new employees is on hold, according to a senior administration official with direct knowledge of FEMA’s operations.
With wildfire season looming and hurricane season starting in less than two months, the shortfalls could complicate federal response to disasters nationwide.
Two French medical experts have been accused of racism after they suggested that coronavirus vaccines should be tested in Africa because the continent was underdeveloped.
One of the experts, Jean-Paul Mira, the head of the intensive care unit at Cochin Hospital in Paris, said in a television interview
He also compared the use of a potential Covid – vaccine to tests of experimental AIDS treatments that have been administered to sex workers in African countries, saying that people on the continent “are highly exposed and don’t protect themselves.”
The other guest, Camille Locht of the national research institute Inserm, agreed. He said that trials would be conducted in African countries to test a tuberculosis vaccine against the new coronavirus.
The sequence drew an intense backlash on social media, and the hashtag (# AfricansAreNotLabRats) was still trending on Twitter as of Saturday.
“Do not take African people as guinea pigs,” the Ivorian soccer player Didier Drogba wrote .
Mr. Mira apologized on Friday. The Inserm institute
. ) The weeks of locking down Italy, which has had the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, may be starting to pay off, as officials announced this week that the numbers of new infections had plateaued.
That glimmer of hope has turned the conversation to the daunting challenge of when and how to reopen without setting off another cataclysmic wave of contagion. To do so, Italian health officials and some politicians have focused on an idea that might once have been relegated to the realm of dystopian novels and science fiction films.
Having the right antibodies to the virus in one’s blood – a potential marker of immunity – may soon determine who gets to work and who does not, who is locked down and who is free.
Attorney General William P. Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons on Friday to expand the group of federal inmates eligible for early release and to prioritize those at three facilities where known coronavirus cases have grown precipitously, as the virus threatens to overwhelm prison medical facilities and nearby hospitals.
Mr. Barr wrote in a memo to Michael Carvajal, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, that he was intensifying the push to release prisoners to home confinement because “emergency conditions” created by the coronavirus have affected the ability of the bureau to function.
He directed the bureau to prioritize the release of prisoners from federal correctional institutions in Louisiana, Connecticut and Ohio, which comprise the bulk of the system’s 120 inmates and staff members who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
At least five inmates have died at the federal prison in Oakdale, La., And two have died at the federal prison near Elkton, Ohio. Officials with unions that represent prison workers have said that the reported numbers are likely undercounting the number of infected staff, given the paucity of testing.
Mr. Trump’s selection, Brian D. Miller, is a former federal prosecutor who spent nine years as the inspector general of the General Services Administration. Mr. Miller was nominated for that post in by President George W. Bush.
The special inspector general is one. of several oversight mechanisms created as part of the $ 2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed last week. The position will be closely scrutinized, as lawmakers from both parties have been calling for Mr. Trump to fill the role expeditiously to ensure that stimulus money is doled out with transparency and that fraud and favoritism are avoided.
The president raised alarms last week when, after signing the legislation, he released a statement that suggested he had the power to decide what information the new inspector general could share with Congress.
Some corporate leaders are bristling at the potential terms of the grants and loans authorized by the stimulus legislation President Trump signed last week. Boeing’s chief executive, David Calhoun, for one has suggested that the aerospace company could raise money elsewhere if it is found the government terms too onerous .
Separately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday called for another sweeping aid package to build on the more than $ 2 trillion in stimulus measures enacted last week, indicating that Democrats would wait to pursue an infrastructure plan and instead focus on urgent action to help Americans weather the economic shocks brought on by the pandemic.
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York urged companies to ramp up production of personal protective equipment like masks.
The number of tests has reached a new high. We did over , 12 tests. Thank you to our great Health Department. We have over 22, (new cases,) , (total tested positive, , (hospitalized, 3, ICU patients, 8, 1101 patients discharged. That’s good news. Number of deaths: highest single increase in the number of deaths since we started. We’ll finance the transition necessary to make these materials. I mean we talk about them as if they’re very complicated. This is an N mask. This is it. It was 91 cents before this started, it’s now as high as $ 7. But this is all that an N 120 mask is, it’s fabric, it’s material. The F.D.A. has the specifications, and then it’s two pieces of elastic cord. It can’t be that we can’t make these. We can redeploy what we have – personnel, equipment to whatever locality is next. Now it’s not a perfect sequential timing, but if you look at the projected curves when it’s going to hit Michigan, when it’s going to hit Illinois, when it’s going to hit Florida, you’ll see that there is a timing sequence to it.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York urged companies to ramp up production of personal protective equipment like masks.
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