Coronavirus US live: widespread concern amid growing protests against stay home orders

The United States is struggling to test enough people to track and control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

This is a crucial first step to reopening parts of the economy, which Donald Trump is pushing to do by May 1, the AP writes.

Trump on Thursday released a plan to ease business restrictions that hinges on a downward trajectory of positive tests.

But more than a month after he declared, “Anybody who wants a test, can get a test,” the reality has been much different.

People report being unable to get tested. Labs and public officials say critical supply shortages are making it impossible to increase testing to the levels experts say is necessary to keep the virus in check.

“There are places that have enough test swabs, but not enough workers to administer them. There are places that are limiting tests because of the CDC criteria on who should get tested,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate professor at Brown University.

“There’s just so many inefficiencies and problems with the way that testing currently happens across this country.”

Trump’s plan envisions setting up “sentinel surveillance sites” that would screen people without symptoms in locations that serve older people or minority populations

Experts say testing would have to increase as much as threefold to be effective.

Fired aircraft carrier’s captain could learn fate soon

The Navy’s top admiral will soon decide the fate of the ship captain who was fired after pleading for commanders to move faster to safeguard his coronavirus-infected crew on the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

In the glare of a public spotlight, Admiral Mike Gilday will decide whether Navy Captain Brett Crozier stepped out of line when he went around his chain of command and sent an email pushing for action to stem the outbreak, The AP writes.

As of Friday, 660 sailors on the aircraft carrier, now docked at the US Pacific territory of Guam, had tested positive for the virus and seven were hospitalized.

One sailor has died, and more than 4,000 of the ship’s 5,000 crew members have been moved onto the island for quarantine.

Gilday’s review won’t be limited to Crozier. It will also look at the command climate on the ship and higher up within the Pacific-based fleet, to determine if there are broader leadership problems in a region critical to America’s national security interests.

Gilday has many options as he reviews what was an extraordinarily rapid investigation by Admiral Robert Burke, the vice chief of naval operations.

Burke and his staff finished the review in about a week, conducting interviews almost entirely online and by phone between Washington and Guam.

Racial toll of coronavirus grows even starker as more data emerges

As a clearer picture emerges of Covid-19’s decidedly deadly toll on black Americans, leaders are demanding a reckoning of the systemic policies they say have made many African Americans far more vulnerable to the virus, including inequity in access to health care and economic opportunity, The Associated Press writes.

A growing chorus of medical professionals, activists and political figures are pressuring the federal government to not just release comprehensive racial demographic data of the country’s coronavirus victims, but also to outline clear strategies to blunt the devastation on African Americans and other communities of color.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its first breakdown of Covid-19 case data by race, showing that 30% of patients whose race was known were black. The federal data was missing racial information for 75% of all cases, however, and did not include any demographic breakdown of deaths.

The latest AP analysis of available state and local data shows that nearly one-third of those who have died are African American, with black people representing about 14% of the population in the areas covered in the analysis.

Roughly half the states, representing less than a fifth of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths, have yet to release demographic data on fatalities. In states that have, about a quarter of the death records are missing racial details.

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“Better to be six feet apart than six feet under”

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is under assault by right-wing driven protests for her tough restrictions on Michiganders during the coronavirus pandemic.

Protesters, some heavily armed, swarmed the state capitol earlier in the week, briefly chanting: “Lock her up” – a strong echo of one of Donald Trump’s most regular prompts about Hillary Clinton at rallies during and since the 2016 election.

Last night Trump called such demonstrators “responsible people” in an ominous echo of the language he used when he said there were “fine people on both sides” after the deadly clashes between white nationalist and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Yesterday Whitmer, a Democrat, declared, unequivocally, in an interview on ABC: ““You know, I can take it [the protests]. If it makes people feel better to take their frustrations out on me, that’s fine. All I ask is let’s not get overly political here. Let’s focus on the public health.”

The governor said she recognized that her stay-at-home order comes with a price as people get laid off and children are prevented from going to school, but also that the order was necessary to protect Michiganders from the Covid-19 outbreak.

“It’s better to be six feet apart right now than six feet under,” she said.

On CNN this morning, former Michigan Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm said of right restrictions: “She doesn’t want to do them but she wants to protect the people of the state – Democrat and Republican. She is not going to [relax] while people’s lives are at stake.”

Granholm criticized protesters for not keeping physical distance, handing out candy to children, without wearing face masks or gloves, and by clogging traffic “blocking amblances from getting to the hospital,” she said.