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Updated
Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
11:23
Bernie Sanders suspends presidential campaign
11:02
White House confirms Kayleigh McEnany will become press secretary
10:20
Projection shows expected US death toll falling to 60,000
09:25
Intelligence community issued warning on coronavirus in November – report
09:06
Trump says mail-in voting ‘doesn’t work out well for Republicans’
08:46
US sees deadliest day yet in fight against coronavirus
11:25
Bernie Sanders said he would address supporters via livestream in about 20 minutes to formally announce he is suspending his campaign.
Bernie Sanders
(@BernieSanders)Please join me at 11:45 a.m. ET for a special message to our supporters, live on our social media and https://t.co/vreIiWfeoS.
April 8, 2020
11:23
Bernie Sanders suspends presidential campaign
Bernie Sanders is suspending his presidential campaign, making Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Lauren Gambino
(@laurenegambino)BREAKING: Sanders is suspending his campaign. He just told campaign on an all staff conference call.
April 8, 2020
11:17
Trump said he believed the coronavirus crisis would end “sooner rather than later,” as experts express cautious optimism about the effects social distancing has had on the number of cases.
“Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!”
The president also once again bragged about viewership of his daily White House briefings on the coronavirus response, saying “the ratings are through the roof.”
Trump mocked some of his critics who have called on networks to stop broadcasting the briefings because the president has repeatedly made false statements during them.
11:02
White House confirms Kayleigh McEnany will become press secretary
The White House has released a statement confirming that Kayleigh McEnany will replace Stephanie Grisham as press secretary, a day after Grisham’s role change was announced.
Alyssa Farah will also become the White House’s new director of strategic communications after serving as press secretary of the defense department.
Trump’s reelection campaign, where McEnany most recently worked as national press secretary, released a statement on her move. “Kayleigh McEnany is a first class professional who will serve President Trump and the American people well,” said campagin manger Brad Parscale.
But a number of critics have raised concerns about McEnany’s past comments on a number of issues, including the coronavirus pandemic. McEnany incorrectly said in February that coronavirus would not affect America because of Trump’s leadership.
“This president will always put America first. He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. We will not see terrorism come here,” McEnany said on Feb. 25. “And isn’t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?”
10:48
Latinx and black New Yorkers are dying of coronavirus at a disproportionately high rate, according to newly published data on the city’s fatalities.
The data shows 521 Latinx New Yorkers have died of the virus, as well as 428 black New Yorkers. Put together, the two groups account for 61% of New York’s coronavirus deaths, even though they account for roughly half of the city’s population.
Mark D. Levine
(@MarkLevineNYC)BREAKING: New York City publishes racial breakdown for coronavirus deaths.
And it paints the picture that we feared it would. pic.twitter.com/qiLxOyaaT5
April 8, 2020
Other major cities, including Detroit and Chicago, have also seen disproportionately higher death rates among people of color, as the Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn has reported:
10:37
Local leaders and health experts are warning that the Washington metropolitan area is “an emerging hotspot” in the coronavirus crisis.
Nearly 9,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the region, according to the Wasington Post, and at least 189 people have died of the virus.
Governor Larry Hogan
(@GovLarryHogan)As of this morning, Maryland has 5,529 confirmed cases of #COVID19, an increase of 1,158 cases since yesterday. This virus continues to spread in every jurisdiction, and as I have been saying for weeks, the Baltimore-Washington corridor has become an emerging hotspot.
April 8, 2020
Dr Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, has repeatedly named the DC region as an area of concern for the next round of hot spots.
“We are concerned about the metro area of Washington and Baltimore,” Birx said this morning.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser expressed frustration Monday about residents ignoring social distancing guidelines after photos surfaced of a crowd gathering at a local fish market, which was promptly shuttered.
“We had to close that market because the social distancing requirements were not being met,” Bowser said. “We cannot express enough that staying at home is every individual’s responsibility to save lives.”
10:20
Projection shows expected US death toll falling to 60,000
A commonly cited model of the US coronavirus crisis now predicts that 60,000 Americans will die of the virus by early August, marking a significant decrease from past projections.
Reuters reports:
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model is one of several that the White House task force has cited.
It now projects U.S. deaths at more than 60,000 by Aug. 4, down from the nearly 82,000 fatalities it had forecast on Tuesday.
The White House coronavirus task force has previously projected 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could die.
The institute also moved up its projected peak in the number to U.S. deaths to this Sunday, when it predicted 2,212 people will succumb to the disease. The revision moves forward the projected peak by four days, suggesting the strain on the country’s healthcare system will begin to abate a little sooner than previously expected.
Surgeon general Jerome Adams similarly said yesterday that he expects the death toll to fall below the 100,000 to 240,000 range previously predicted by the White House, thanks to Americans practicing social distancing.
“That’s absolutely my expectation, and I feel a lot more optimistic, again, because I’m seeing mitigation work,” Adams said.
10:08
Dr Anthony Facui predicted schools would be able to reopen in the fall, as early evidence indicates that social distancing is having a positive effect on the country’s number of coronavirus cases.
“Bottom line is, no absolute prediction, but I think we’re going to be in good shape,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said during the White House briefing yesterday.
While emphasizing there is still great uncertainty around how the coming months will unfold, Fauci said he expects that “by the time we get to the fall … we will have this under control enough that it certainly will not be the way it is now, where people are shutting schools.”
Many schools across the country are currently closed, and governors in several states have said schools will not reopen during this academic year.
09:56
The New York Times front page today includes a startling graphic on the city’s coronavirus death toll.
The newspaper used bars on a map to demonstrate the number of people who have died of the virus in each major city. The bar for New York goes past the newspaper’s masthead.
Anne Cronin
(@annecronin)New York’s deaths are so high they broke through the @nytimes masthead pic.twitter.com/dEaaP4GRaC
April 8, 2020
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that Monday was the deadliest day yet for the state since the coronavirus crisis started.
New York reported 731 deaths on Monday, bringing the state’s total death toll to 5,489. Most of those deaths have been concentrated in the New York Cirty area.
09:40
The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports on how coronavirus is disproportionately affecting African Americans:
The disparity is especially stark in cities like New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit, where high concentrations of African Americans live.
Louisiana has the fourth largest number of Covid-19 cases in the country, and the majority of the Covid-19 deaths are in New Orleans, where black Americans constitute 60% of the population. “Slightly more than 70% of [coronavirus] deaths in Louisiana are African Americans,” the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, said in a press conference on Monday. “That deserves more attention and we’re going to have to dig into that to see what we can do to slow that down.”
African Americans face a higher risk of exposure to the virus, mostly on account of concentrating in urban areas and working in essential industries. Only 20% of black workers reported being eligible to work from home, compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Experts also point to initial research showing a high prevalence of Covid-19 among those suffering from obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes – risk factors more common among black Americans. The virus is known to take a harsher toll on those with underlying health issues, and many hospitals are only testing those admitted for critical care.
Critics note that those risks are significantly exacerbated by racial inequities in healthcare, including facility closures and caps on public health insurance plans like Medicaid and Medicare. African Americans are twice as likely to lack health insurance compared with their white counterparts, and more likely to live in medically underserved areas, where primary care is sparse or expensive.
Unconscious racial bias can also contribute to unequal health outcomes, especially when health professionals are inexperienced with the culture of the community they serve, according to the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Governor JB Pritkzer of Illinois acknowledged racism’s role in the state’s response to the outbreak, but he called it “a much broader problem” that won’t be solved in a matter of weeks. “It’s hard to make up for decades, maybe centuries, of inequality of application of healthcare to people of color,” he said.
09:25
Intelligence community issued warning on coronavirus in November – report
US intelligence officials were warning of a virus sweeping through the Wuhan region of China as early as November, according to an ABC News report.
ABC News reports:
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
‘Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,’ one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. ‘It was then briefed multiple times to’ the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.
This news follows reports that Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, wrote memos starting in late January warning of a potential coronavirus pandemic with catastrophic consequences for Americans’ health and finances.
The president claimed yesterday that he had never seen Navarro’s memos, but their existence undermines his defense of the federal government’s early response to the pandemic, which has been widely criticized.
09:06
Trump says mail-in voting ‘doesn’t work out well for Republicans’
Trump urged Republicans to “fight very hard” against mail-in voting as Democrats work to expand absentee voting options amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting,” Trump tweeted. “Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
Voter fraud is actually extremely rare, and many voters have been hesitant to cast their ballots in person out of fear of catching coronavirus at a polling site, as demonstrated by yesterday’s chaotic primary in Wisconsin.
Trump has previously suggested that mail-in voting could hurt Republicans’ chances in November, presumably because it would increase voter turnout.
During deliberations over the stimulus package, House Democrats pushed to give states $4 billion in election assistance, but the final bill included only $400 million.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said of the Democratic proposals last week. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
08:46
US sees deadliest day yet in fight against coronavirus
Good morning, live blog readers.
The day is beginning with a grim statistic: yesterday was the deadliest day yet in the US since the start of the coronavirus crisis.
According to the Washington Post, at least 1,939 Americans died of coronavirus yesterday. That is the largest single-day death toll reported by any country since the pandemic began.
Overall, nearly 13,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, and health experts have warned this could be the worst week yet for the death toll.
However, there are also encouraging signs that Americans practicing social distancing is already having an effect on the number of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday that the state’s three-day average of hospitalizations is down, and surgeon general Jerome Adams predicted the overall US death toll would fall below 100,000, which was previously viewed as the lowest possibility.
“I know it’s hard, but we have to keep doing it,” Cuomo said of social distancing. “And, to the extent it takes an effort, remember at this time it is about ‘we’, and it is not about ‘me’”.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
