Coronavirus US live: Trump 'spooked' by White House cases as death toll nears 80,000

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy has reported at least 1,503 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the statewide total to roughly 138,532.

“We’ve tragically lost 140 more lives, pushing our total to 9,255 lives lost,” Murphy said on Sunday.

It marked the fourth straght day with fewer than 2,000 cases in the Garden State, although deaths from the virus remained up. New Jersey, with a population of approximately nine million people, remains a coronavirus hotbed with more cases and deaths than any US state besides New York.

That has led Murphy to proceed with extreme caution in the easing of coronavirus restrictions. While the governor has explored allowing a limited number of more essential businesses to reopen, he stressed during Saturday’s daily briefing that he won’t do so until satisfied by the data and public health officials.

“Nothing’s changed,” Murphy said on Saturday. “We’re under consideration. We’re all looking at what other steps we can take. We will let you know if nonessential retail is allowed to be open. It is not at the moment.”

“I hope it can change,” he added. “I hope it’ll change sooner than later. No one would be happier.”

A study of 5,754 employees of Major League Baseball found only 60 tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, a rate lower than what similar studies on the infection rate among the general population have found.

“I was expecting a larger number,” said Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at the University of Stanford and one of the study’s authors, told ESPN. “It shows the value of doing the science as opposed to guessing.”

Twenty-six of MLB’s 30 teams took park in the study, which required participants to use a pin prick to draw blood, test it themselves using a pre-shipped kit, then return a survey.

Of the 5,603 employees who took the test and submitted their results, only 39 (0.7%) returned positive results. MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that none of the people who tested positive have died from the virus.

MLB, like every other major US sports league, has remained on hiatus since spring training was shut down and opening day postponed indefinitely. But details of a restart plan expected to be submitted on Tuesday began to trickle out on Sunday. They include a truncated season of around 80 games beginning in early July exclusively against opponents in the same geographic regions and an expanded postseason format that would send seven teams from each league to the playoffs instead of the current five.

Donald Trump was back at it on Twitter on Sunday, seething over the Russia investigation more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges.

“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote amid a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”

“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”

The president did not immediately name anyone.

More than 1.3m people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and nearly 80,000 have died, according to publicly available data from multiple sources compiled by the Guardian.

New York senator Chuck Schumer has called on the Department of Veterans Affairs to explain why it allowed the use of hydroxychloroquine on veterans for the coronavirus despite scant scientific evidence it helped. The Senate’s top Democrat said the VA needs to provide more information about a $208,000 order of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug widely promoted by President Trump as a ‘miracle cure’.

The request comes on the heels of a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday by former Health and Human Services official Rick Bright alleging he was ousted from his position after raising concerns that the Trump administration wanted to “flood” coronavirus hotspots like New York and New Jersey despite the uncertain efficacy and potential for harm.

“There are concerns that they are using this drug when the medical evidence says it doesn’t help and could hurt,” Schumer said in an interview with the Associated Press. The senator added that VA secretary Robert Wilkie must address whether anyone at the department was pressured by anyone at the White House to use hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 in light of Trump’s persistent endorsements.

A VA spokesperson decried Schumer’s “preposterous” suggestion that any department official would make treatment decisions based on anything other than “the best medical interests of patients” in a statement on Sunday.

Saturday night saw a return to major, live sports in America as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the leading promotion in mixed martial arts, staged an event broadcast live on pay-per-view on ESPN+.

UFC’s president, Dana White, is a close ally of Donald Trump and the president recorded a message of support that was shown on the telecast before the event.

“Let’s play,” Trump said in the video. “You do the social distancing and whatever else you have to do. But we need sports. We want our sports back.”

One of the fighters had to drop out before the event after testing positive for Covid-19, but White said it had been a useful experiment as sports look to reopen during the pandemic.

“I knew we could do this,” he said following the event on Saturday night. “I knew we could figure it out. Even with all the hurdles that we had early on, this has been fun. It’s been challenging and it’s been fun.”

There was no live audience for the fights, which took place at Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida. Sports leagues across America, and the world, have been shut down during the pandemic. Although professional baseball is being played in Taiwan and South Korea, and Germany’s Bundesliga plans to return later this month.

The Covid-19 pandemic poses obvious immediate health risks but it could also place our longer-term well-being in jeopardy. If, as some forecasts predict, the unemployment rate rises to 20%, up to 43 million Americans could lose their health insurance. That could result in deaths with people unable to afford treatment.

“The status quo is incredibly inefficient, it’s incredibly unfair, it’s tied to employment for no real reason,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “This problem exposes a lot of the inadequacies in our system.”

You can read our full report on the subject here:

Dr Anthony Fauci will testify remotely before a Senate committee next week. The US government’s top infectious diseases adviser had been due to appear in person while observing social distancing and wearing a mask but the Washington Post reports he will now do so via videoconference.

Two other witnesses at the Senate Covid-19 hearing on Tuesday had already said they would testify remotely. CDC director Dr Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn are in self-quarantine after coming into contact with Vice-President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, who tested positive for Covid-19 last week.

“After consulting with Dr Fauci, and in an abundance of caution for our witnesses, senators, and the staff, all four administration witnesses will appear by videoconference due to these unusual circumstances,” Senator Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee said, in a statement on Sunday.

The Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr Brett Giroir, had also been due to appear in person, but joined Fauci in saying he would appear via video link.

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, says he will continue with plans to reopen the state despite the fact that cases and deaths of Covid-19 are not going down.

“We wish we were going down. We are not. We have been hit in Ohio, just like other states have been hit economically, so we’ve got to try to do two things at once, you know no one is underestimating how difficult this but, it’s something we have to do,” DeWine said in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

DeWine said that taking steps to reopen the Ohio economy is necessary as the state has taken a severe economic hit during the pandemic.

“We’ve been hit very hard. We’ve had over a million people apply for unemployment,” he said. “So we’re no different than most other states. I mean we’ve been hit exceedingly hard. And again, as we look to come back carefully, it’s not so much about at this point orders that I issue or my health director issues, it’s really about what people do and I emphasize that time and time again.”

DeWine said it was important for the state’s residents to observe safety rules. “The virus is still out there, it’s still very, very dangerous. We have to keep the distancing. People should wear masks, wash their hands. I mean, these are basic things that we have to do. We can’t let up,” he said.

More than 23,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Ohio and there had been 1,331 recorded deaths as of Sunday morning.

The Associated Press has spoken to Americans who have decided to sue China over the Covid-19 outbreak. So far at least nine lawsuits have been filed against China in the US, claiming the country did not do enough to control the pandemic and sought to hide the full extent of the outbreak. Many of the lawsuits are class action, filed on behalf of thousands of people and business. One was filed by the district attorney of Missouri, on behalf of the entire state.

“I do feel that they hid it from the world and from Americans,” Saundra Andringa-Meuer, one of the people pursuing legal action against China told the AP. “I don’t feel we had to have the loss of life. I don’t think we had to have the economy shut down. It disrupted all of American lives. I do believe we need to right some of these wrongs.”

Andringa-Meuer, 61, came down with the virus in March and was on a ventilator for 14 days.

Foreign governments cannot be sued in the US, apart from in exceptional circumstances. “We think it’s going to be an uphill battle for them to ultimately take advantage of those exceptions,” Robert Boone, a specialist in class-action lawsuits told the AP.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang described the Missouri lawsuit as “very absurd and [with] no factual and legal basis.”

Fears of a hot zone in the West Wing are mounting after a valet who handles food and beverages and the vice-president’s press secretary tested positive for Covid-19, a New York Times report citing multiple White House officials has revealed.

According to the report, Trump “was spooked that his valet, who is among those who serve him food, had not been wearing a mask” and “annoyed” to learn that Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller tasted positive.

“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”

He added: “It’s a small, crowded place. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit risky. But you have to do it because you have to serve your country.”

The discovery of the two infected employees has prompted the White House to ramp up its procedures to combat the coronavirus, including daily tests for some senior staff, increased usage of masks and more rigorous screening of people entering the complex.

The concern about an outbreak of the virus at the White House – and the swift testing and contact tracing being done to contain it – underscores the broader challenge for Americans as Mr. Trump urges them to begin returning to their own workplaces despite warnings from public health officials that the virus continues to ravage communities across the country.

Most restaurants, offices and retail stores do not have the ability to regularly test all their employees and quickly track down and quarantine the contacts of anyone who gets infected. At the White House, all employees are being tested at least weekly, officials said, and a handful of top aides who regularly interact with the president are being tested daily, they said.

“To get in with the president, you have to test negative,” Mr. Hassett said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

New York health commissioner Howard Zucker says the deaths of three young New Yorkers from inflammatory complications possibly linked to Covid-19 were in otherwise healthy children: two in elementary school and one adolescent. He says 30 to 40 people are reviewing charts of the 85 young people with the illness to “assess exactly what has happened to them”.

When asked if those who died had any underlying conditions, Zucker tells parents to call their doctor if their child is suffering from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, pallor or chest pains, which are common symptoms of the toxic-shock syndrome-like condition, and to “err on the side of caution”.

“You want to talk about Mother’s Day?” Cuomo says. “This is every mother’s nightmare.”

The New York governor is blasting the “corporate bailouts” embedded in the federal government’s coronavirus relief legislation. “You took care of corporate America,” Cuomo says, “but now you’re going to starve police and fire and hospitals and schools?”

“Going forward, let them fund working Americans because that’s the need,” the governor says. “You look at the past legislation: they funded hotels, restaurants, airlines, big corporations, public companies. Now it turns out they funded a tax break for millionaires in the Covid response legislation. And they didn’t fund state and local governments. Who do state and local governments fund? I fund police, fire fighters, nurses, school teachers and food banks.”

He ends with a warning, calling back to the much-criticized bailouts during the last financial crisis.

“Don’t make the same mistake twice,” Cuomo says. “Don’t do what this nation did after the 2007-08 mortgage crisis bailout where the government bailed out all these bankers and corporations that made a fortune running a mortgage scam.”

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, gave his sobering assessment of the pandemic on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying “we’re going to see 60 to 70% of Americans” infected with Covid-19.

“We have to understand that we’re riding this tiger, we’re not directing it,” Osterholm said. “This virus is going to do what it’s going to do. What we can do is only nibble at the edges, and I think it’s not a good message to send to the public that we can control this virus in a meaningful way. … What we have to tell people honestly, what they want to hear, they don’t want it sugarcoated and they don’t want it coated in fear. But somewhere between now and tomorrow, next year, we’re going to see 60 to 70% of Americans ultimately infected with this virus. What we have to do is to figure out how not just to die with the virus but also how to live with it. And we’re not having that discussion. As Lewis Carrol once said: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.’”

When asked whether the United States is ready to reopen the economy, Osterholm said it was “unclear” what that exactly means.

“When we say what we mean by opening the economy, that’s really unclear,” Osterholm said. “We have to, we can’t stay locked down for 18 months, but at the same time when you have cases increasing, deaths increasing, healthcare workers without adequate protective equipment, and we’re suddenly going back to what was once our normal lives, that’s not a safe place to be. We can’t do that and not expect to see a major increase in cases.”

Moving away from the coronavirus for a moment, the Democratic mayor of Atlanta has called the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed by two white men in February, a “lynching”.

Keisha Lance Bottoms also accused Donald Trump of inciting overt acts of racism.

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, the rising star within the Democratic party said the killing of Arbery, 25, was “heartbreaking”.

Father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael were charged with murder and aggravated assault on Thursday after video of a confrontation with an unarmed Arbery, who was African American, was made public.

Asked if the former county police officer and his son would have been charged had the video not been posted online, Bottoms said: “Had we not seen that video I don’t think they would have been charged.”

She added: “It’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African American man.”

The Guardian has disclosed that police in Glynn county, Georgia, where Arbery was killed while jogging in a quiet suburban street, failed to conduct a thorough investigation.

The idea that the incident was a lynching has also been expressed by the dead man’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr, in an interview with the Guardian.

Bottoms is an increasingly prominent voice in Georgia. As the black mayor of the state’s largest city, she has been talked about as a possible vice-presidential candidate for Joe Biden.

On Sunday she was sharply critical of Trump and the US justice department.

“With the rhetoric we hearing coming out of the White House in so many ways, I think that many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way we otherwise would not see in 2020,” she said.

Where local police forced fail to take action against alleged racial killings, she said, there used to be the justice department as a “backstop”, ensuring appropriate prosecutions.

“We don’t have that leadership at the top right now. It’s disheartening.”

Trump has commented on Arbery’s death, telling Fox News: “My heart goes out to the parents and the family and friends.”

“Justice getting done is the thing that solves that problem,” the president added.

On Sunday, Bottoms talked about her four children, three of whom are boys.

“They are angry and afraid,” she said. “It speaks to the need to have leadership at the top that cares about all our communities, not just in words but in deeds as well.”