Coronavirus US live: White House briefing on Covid-19 to begin shortly

Trump has complained again about the media coverage of ventilators, saying, “Ventilators, ventilators, ventilators! … It was all ventilators … We did a great job with the ventilators.” He said “at some point soon”, the US would be helping Mexico and Italy with ventilators.

It is true that some states, so far, have ended up with more ventilators than they originally projected they would need. California has loaned 500 ventilators to states like New York. California hospitals managed to increase their stock from 7,500 machines to more than 11,000, according to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. “That has put less strain and pressure on the state’s effort to procure additional ventilators,” Newsom said.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a national shortage. The US has roughly 173,000 ventilators, according to the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. Experts from Harvard Medical School predict that the US could end up needing 31 times that number to treat coronavirus patients.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine published on Wednesday 25 March categorically concluded that the US does not have enough ventilators to treat patients with Covid-19 in the coming months.

The authors, American public health experts, wrote: “There is a broad range of estimates of the number of ventilators we will need to care for U.S. patients with Covid-19, from several hundred thousand to as many as a million. The estimates vary depending on the number, speed, and severity of infections, of course, but even the availability of testing affects the number of ventilators needed…. current estimates of the number of ventilators in the United States range from 60,000 to 160,000, depending on whether those that have only partial functionality are included. The national strategic reserve of ventilators is small and far from sufficient for the projected gap. No matter which estimate we use, there are not enough ventilators for patients with Covid-19 in the upcoming months.”

Read more:

Trump said New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, is coming to the White House tomorrow, and also implied Cuomo praised him today and that states like New York have the supplies they need.

The governor of New York, however, said in a late March briefing that the Trump administration had forced the states into a bidding war: “You have 50 states competing to buy the same item,” he said.

“We all wind up bidding up each other and competing against each other, where you now literally will have a company call you up and say, ‘Well, California just outbid you.’ It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator.”

Yesterday, Trump played misleading clips of a Cuomo press conference:

Trump claimed at the start of the press conference that the coronavirus death rate was better in the US than many other places in the world.

While the death rates in the US, both in comparison to the number of confirmed cases and in comparison to the population, are relatively good, they are not the best in the world (as Trump has said several times at recent briefings), based on the most reliable available data – which even experts agree may not be all that reliable.

Research by the US’s Johns Hopkins University showed that as of April 13, the death rate in the US was 4% of cases and 6.73 deaths per 100,000 population. That is significantly better than rates in hard hit countries such as Italy, Spain, the UK and France, and similar overall to Iran, which was also an early hotspot. But death rates are higher in the US than Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and many other countries.

The death rate in China had been recorded as 4% of cases and 0.2 deaths per 100,000 population. That was before the Chinese government increased the official death toll from Wuhan, the original base of the outbreak, by 50%. And there are ongoing questions about all of China’s reported numbers in relation to the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has published a long and useful article detailing the enormous difficulties in pinpointing death rates in different countries and even different areas and populations within countries.

The virus swept in so quickly and is still so relatively new that we are only now grasping that there may be huge numbers of people who have or had Covid-19 without showing symptoms, have not been tested or who died at home or in a care home without that death every being verified as resulting from coronavirus.

The New York Times gives a rough rule of thumb that, according to various unofficial Covid-19 trackers that calculate the death rate by dividing total deaths by the number of known cases, about 6.4% of people infected with the virus have now died worldwide.

The president is at the podium now, talking about his guidelines for reopening the country.

While we wait for the White House briefing to begin, here’s some quick non-coronavirus news: a number of former Bernie Sanders’ supporters in Congress have officially endorsed Joe Biden:

Here’s my colleague Lauren Gambino’s report from the weekend on the questions of whether progressive favorite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will endorse Biden:

Republican officials said the party’s national convention was going “full steam ahead”, CNN reports:

“We do not think at this time we have to switch to an alternative plan, but of course, we will monitor circumstances and adjust accordingly,” said the GOP chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel. The convention is currently scheduled for August in North Carolina.

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, has just announced that he plans to allow gyms, barbers, and hair stylists to reopen on Friday and that theaters and restaurants will be allowed to reopen the following week:

He said bars, nightclubs and performance venues would remain closed, and that elderly and at-risk populations should continue sheltering. At a press conference, he said the businesses should encourage precautions such as masks and social distancing.

His move to quickly reopen a wide range of public businesses is in sharp contrast to many other states that are continuing to do lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. The announcement has caused swift backlash and concerns that it will exacerbate the public health crisis:

Kemp recently faced scrutiny after admitting he had newly learned about the possibility of asymptomatic transmission, even though experts have warned about this from the start of the pandemic.

In Los Angeles, officials have released results of a key antibody study, estimating that 4.1% of the county’s population could have antibodies to coronavirus:

That estimate is significantly higher than the official number of Covid-19 cases in the county, which has suffered a substantial outbreak, and could mean the death rate and hospitalization rates are much lower than initial projections. It would also mean that more people recovered from coronavirus without getting tested or without knowing they were infected.

The study suggests that the fatality rate in LA county could be between .09% and 0.15%, as opposed to current estimates of 4%, one LA Times reporter noted. There are, however, some important caveats to the data, and more research is needed:

A similar study in northern California last week also suggested the number of people infected with coronavirus may be tens of times higher than previously thought. Here’s my colleague Kari Paul’s report on this Stanford research: