Coronavirus US live: New York governor Andrew Cuomo holds briefing

New York governor Andrew Cuomo opens Saturday’s daily coronavirus briefing with the latest numbers:

• Covid-19 cases in New York City: 63,606 (up 6,147 from Friday)
• Covid-19 cases in New York state: 113,704 (up 10,841 from Friday)
• Total people tested (283,621)
• Total people hospitalized: 15,905 (up 1,095 from yesterday)
• Total ICU admissions: 4,126 (up 395 from yesterday)

A woman is Florida is seeking to gain sole custody of her two-year-old son during the Covid-19 pandemic because the boy’s father works in the emergency services.

According to court papers, Tabatha Sams currently shares custody with her son’s father, Stephen Thilmony, who is a firefighter and emergency medicine technician. Thilmony’s fiancee, meanwhile, is an emergency room nurse.

“As Covid-19 has spread throughout the United States, medical professionals and first responders have been subjected to coronavirus at a higher rate, due to their increased exposure to individuals testing positive for the virus,” Sams said in the court papers.

In the papers, Thilmony is quoted as saying he is not endangering his son. “We are taking proper measures to protect ourselves and him,” Thilmony said.

The Daily Show has put together clips of politicians and media figures giving their views on Covid-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. Let’s just say some of the quotes have not aged well:

There has been plenty of concern about the potential for mass casualties in US jails during the Covid-19 pandemic. A public health expert has also warned outbreaks that start in jails could pose risks for the wider community.

“The prison population in and of itself has a fairly sizable, vulnerable population within that, have a lot of chronic conditions, other types of infections,” Dr Barun Mathema, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, told CNN. “We should also ensure that what happens in a prison, or a jail for that matter, does not pose an undue risk to the community. In this case, we know we have ample examples from many infectious diseases.”

As fatalities rise in the United States, the shortage of space to store bodies is becoming a concern. It’s a problem that authorities had to confront in countries hit by the Covid-19 epidemic earlier than the US: for example, in Spain a Madrid ice rink was used to store bodies before burial. Med Alliance Group, a medical distributor in Illinois, has reported being inundated with requests for refrigerated trailers.

“They’re coming from all over: From hospitals, health systems, coroner’s offices, VA facilities, county and state health departments, state emergency departments and funeral homes,” Christie Penzol, a spokeswoman for Med Alliance, told the Associated Press. “It’s heart-wrenching.”

Penzol added that the company has already rented out all its trailers and there is an 18-week wait for the materials needed to build new ones.

Probable Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has issued a statement calling for Donald Trump to appoint a “supply commander” to “co-ordinate critical materials for all 50 states and US territories”.

Biden has been seeking a call with Trump to discuss the coronavirus response. No word that it’s happened yet.

Marc Caputo of Politico, meanwhile, makes a wry point: MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called for essentially the same thing last night.

Here’s some further reading: Washington bureau chief David Smith again – busy lad – with a look at where the 2020 election stands with the nation in the grip of Covid-19:

Biden finds himself holed up in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware, struggling to break into the national conversation through TV interviews and virtual campaign events. Trump has been denied the lifeblood of rallies but switched to his other favourite medium – television – with daily coronavirus taskforce briefings from the White House. Polls suggest he is benefiting moderately from a “rally around the flag effect”

Still no sign of the president, whose thumbs would often have twitched towards his iPhone by this time of a Saturday.

Over at the Washington Post, meanwhile, media columnist Margaret Sullivan has an interesting take this morning on Andrew and Chris Cuomo’s developing coronavirus double act, in which the New York governor and his CNN anchor (and Covid-19 patient) brother regularly conduct interviews full of endearing brotherly bickering.

“Not everyone approves of the Cuomo Brothers show,” Sullivan writes.

This is something I cannot wrap my head around,” Fabian Reinbold, Washington bureau chief for a large German news organization, told me in an email this week. “It would be considered highly inappropriate and corrupt back home.”

He was particularly taken aback by Chris Cuomo’s choice to actually participate in Thursday’s [New York governor’s] news conference, piped in via videoconference to hold forth to the gathered press corps. He wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the name of his CNN show, “Cuomo Primetime,” further blurring the roles of brother and anchor.

That moment may have proved too much for competitors Fox News and MSNBC, who cut away from the New York governor’s briefing soon after.

Others have questioned the journalistic propriety of repeatedly interviewing one’s brother on prime-time TV, as Chris Cuomo has been doing for weeks.

Jon Allsop at Columbia Journalism Review, for one, disapproves. He reasonably suggests a less fraught approach: “There are plenty of ways Chris Cuomo could communicate about his health with CNN viewers while also taking time to recuperate. While he’s out, a colleague could talk with his brother.”

All that said, Sullivan also points out that in a nation grown used to the open nepotism of the Trump administration, where the president’s daughter and son-in-law double as his chief advisers, perhaps the Cuomo Show is relatively small beer.

It also seems necessary to say, again, that it really is quite endearing: