US coronavirus live: New York governor Andrew Cuomo says 'this is war time'

My colleague Richard Luscombe has news on one of the final states without a stay-at-home order.

Asa Hutchinson, the Arkansas governor, has been explaining why he is still refusing to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, one of only a handful of states yet to do so.

There’s no point, he says, because everybody would ignore it.

“You have a stay-at-home order, tomorrow 600,000 Arkansans will still go to work,” he told Chuck Todd, host of NBC News’ Meet the Press.

“So it’s more important the message that, do your social distancing, don’t gather in groups of more than 10 people and bring a mask with you.”

Hutchinson said advice this week from Jerome Adams, the US surgeon general, that federal coronavirus guidelines amounted to a national stay-at-home order, were “great comments”. He went on to suggest that his state was ahead of the game.

“We’re doing everything that the surgeon general has outlined, plus more,” he said. “We have a targeted approach that is very strict. We’ve closed bars, restaurants, schools, some of our park lodges. We’re emphasizing the social distancing and we will do more as we need to.”

He said he “applauded” federal recommendations that citizens should wear masks in public.

“We just had last night, a breakout in one of our federal prisons here in Arkansas that has 10 inmates that tested positive and four guards. That’s a federal facility, but stay-at-home doesn’t help there,” he said.

“You’ve got to have the masks and our state prison is producing masks that we can utilize in our state prison environment. “

Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country with a key role on Trump’s coronavirus task force, says “this is going to be a bad week”:

“We’re going to continue to see an escalation,” Fauci told host Margaret Brennan of CBS News’ Face the Nation. “Also, we should hope that within a week, maybe a little bit more, we’ll start to see a flattening out of the curve and coming down…

“Things are going to get bad and we need to be prepared for that. It’s going to be shocking to some and it certainly is really disturbing to see that… just buckle down…

“We’ve got to get through this week that is coming up because it’s going to be a bad week”.

Fauci said that states without statewide stay-at-home orders are “putting themselves at risk.”

“I will not say we have it under control, we are struggling to get it under control,” he says, but social distancing and other mitigation measures were showing some signs of success:

My colleague Richard Luscombe has news on tension between the governor of Illinois and the vice-president.

JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, is challenging Mike Pence’s calculations that his state needs only 1,400 ventilators.

“I pray that the vice-president was right, but let me tell you where I think he got his numbers. He looked at a University of Washington model that’s out there that people are accessing to look at every state,” Pritzker said on CNN’s State of the Union.

“The problem is they didn’t put that model out there for resource allocation reasons. If you look at the model there’s a central point that shows Illinois needs only 1,400 or fewer… but there’s also a worst-case scenario that shows we would need five, or six, or seven thousand more.

“We’re looking at all of the numbers, and everybody is taking an educated guess because we really don’t know.”

He added: “This virus is unpredictable. Our guess is we need a few thousand more than we have now, up to 4,000. That’s what we’ve asked the federal government for, and over time they’ve given us 450 total.

“We’re looking everywhere and anywhere across the world to get ventilators. Here’s the problem, the president didn’t enact or use the defense production act until just recently.”

Pritzker said he was worried it would lead to a shortage of ventilators nationwide, because he thought New York would still be at its peak at a time the need became greatest elsewhere and unable to share its supply.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams has warned the country of a devastating week ahead in the fight against coronavirus.

“The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment. It’s going to be our 9/11 moment. It’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives,” Adams told host Chuck Todd of NBC News’ Meet the Press.

Todd asked Adams what his advice would be for the nine governors who have not yet issued statewide stay-at-home orders.

“The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment. It’s going to be our 9/11 moment,” Adams responded, continuing:

It’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives, and we really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part. Ninety percent of Americans are doing their part, even in the states where, where they haven’t had a shelter in place. But if you can’t give us 30 days, governors, give us, give us a week, give us what you can, so that we don’t overwhelm our healthcare systems over this next week. And then let’s reassess at that point. We want everyone to understand you’ve got to be Rosie The Riveter you’ve got to do your part.

In his interview on ABC Biden also weighed in on the controversial dismissal of Navy Captain Brett Crozier, calling it “close to criminal”.

Crozier was removed from his command after he wrote a memo about concerns for his crew on an aircraft carrier with coronavirus cases aboard. Donald Trump on Saturday slammed Crozier for writing the letter.

“It’s close to criminal the way they’re dealing with this guy,” Biden said Sunday. “The idea that this man stood up and said what had to be said, got it out that his troops, his Navy personnel were in danger. … Look how many have the virus. I think…he should have a commendation rather than be fired.”

Prospective presidential nominee Joe Biden has floated a proposal for a ‘virtual’ national Democratic party convention this summer.

“We’re going to have to do a convention,” Biden tells ABC News. “We may have to do a virtual convention. I think we should be thinking about that right now. The idea of holding a convention is going to be necessary but you may not be able to put 10, 20, 30,000 people in one place, and that’s very possible. Again, let’s see where it is.”

The Democrats had previously postponed their convention from July to August. The national conventions bring party officials from across the country together to nominate a presidential candidate. Delays in state primary contests owing to the coronavirus crisis have muddied the process this year. In the nominating race, Biden is currently leading senator Bernie Sanders by a seemingly insurmountable 500 delegates and holds a prohibitive advantage in polls of states that have yet to vote.

… to another day of coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US.

• Confirmed US cases of Covid-19: 312,085
• US deaths: 8,499
• New York cases: 114,174
• New York deaths: 3,565

Those figures, from Johns Hopkins University, will of course grow during the day, one key point being the usual briefing by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state is by far the hardest hit though the numbers in New Jersey, Michigan and Louisiana, and elsewhere, are rising worryingly swiftly.

At the time of writing, there is no White House coronavirus task force briefing on the president’s public schedule. Let that sink in… then think of what happened at Saturday’s briefing, an angry, rambling and averagely incoherent affair.

Trump warned of “one of the toughest weeks” to come, and said: “There’s going to be a lot of death, unfortunately. There will be a lot of deaths.”

But he also repeatedly recommended Americans concerned about Covid-19 take hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug which some (including many Fox News hosts) say works in relation to this coronavirus but which has not been clinically tested, a fact to which Trump’s own public health experts, standing next to him at the podium, repeatedly point.

One of those experts, Dr Deborah Birx, told the briefing the next two weeks would be key to slowing the virus by following federal social distancing guidelines and keeping most of the country shut down. “This is the moment to do everything you can to keep your families and friends safe,” she said.

Trump did not seem to be listening. As well as insisting the economy would have to reopen soon, after attacking governors including Cuomo and of course the media, and after saying Republican-led states which have not implemented shutdowns did not need to because “big land, few people”, the president returned again and again to the supposed need for hydroxychloroquine.

“Take it,” he said. “I really think they should take it.” Trump also said he “may” take hydroxychloroquine himself … “but I’ll have to ask my doctor about that.”

The president’s message? “Trust me, I’m not a doctor. And also, I’ll ask my doctor before I do what I think you should do. But trust me.”

Here is what the Food and Drug Administration says about using hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. And here’s Oliver Milman’s look at why you shouldn’t listen to Trump.

The first order of the day here in the US will be the political talk shows, of course. Governors of hard-hit states will appear: John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Jay Inslee of Washington. All Democrats. A governor of one of Trump’s “big land, few people” Republican states, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, is due on NBC.

On CBS, Dr Anthony Fauci may face questions about Trump’s fondness for hydroxychloroquine. And on ABC, Joe Biden appears as reports circulate of Bernie Sanders’ imminent exit from the Democratic presidential race.

While we wait for that, and any presidential tweets of course, here’s some further reading:

Tom McCarthy on Jared Kushner and his shadow coronavirus task force. What is the president’s son-in-law up to?

Columnist Robert Reich on Trump’s coronavirus power grab.

…and Lloyd Green reviewing a new book by ABC News chief White House correspondent Jon Karl which was written before the pandemic, of course, but which makes fascinating reading from an author who has known Trump for 25 years. Also, Lloyd quotes Gladiator. Book reviews that quote Gladiator are the best book reviews*.

*Editor’s own opinion, not legally binding.