Coronavirus US live: Trump reportedly knew pandemic was likely in January

New York governor Andrew Cuomo said officials would look ahead to restarting the economy, but the governor noted the state is not there yet because coronavirus deaths are still happening at a high rate.

Cuomo said the determination of when and how to restart the economy would depend on testing, particularly testing to confirm if people have coronavirus antibodies in their system and are likely immune to the virus.

The governor said New York would need to scale up its testing capacity to test a large number of residents and announced the state would invest in testing companies working to expand capacity.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is holding his daily briefing on the state’s response to coronavirus.

The governor noted the three-day average of hospitalizations is down, indicating the state is “reaching a plateau in the total number of hospitalizations.”

But the New York death toll continues to steeply rise. The state has now recorded 5,489 deaths, up from 4,758 a day earlier. Those 731 deaths represent the highest single-day increase in the death toll since the crisis started.

New York also still has the highest number of cases of any US state, with 138,836 cases of coronavirus already confirmed.

Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary who has not yet held a briefing, is reportedly leaving her role after about nine months.

CNN reports:

[Grisham] is returning to the East Wing as first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff as President Donald Trump’s new chief of staff Mark Meadows shakes up the communications team in the West Wing.

Meadows is currently considering several candidates for the press secretary job, including Trump campaign spokesman Kayleigh McEnany. The new chief of staff is also considering hiring Alyssa Farah, the current spokeswoman for the Defense Department, for a communications role, among others, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN.

Grisham was frequently criticized for refusing to hold White House briefings, which were a daily feature of past administrations but started becoming less and less frequent under Graham’s predecessor, Sarah Sanders.

Surgeon general Jermone Adams said he “never saw” a Jan. 29 memo from Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, warning the coronavirus outbreak could become a pandemic.

Adams defended the White House’s response to the pandemic, saying, “We’ve been saying for decades that this is a possibility. … Many people at all levels just did not expect something like this to happen at this magnitude.”

When NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie pressed him on that last point, saying the memo proved some White House advisers were aware of how bad this situation could get, Adams said, “There were preparations going on the entire time.”

Trump has been repeatedly criticized for incorrectly predicting coronavirus would miraculously “disappear” without affecting many Americans, and reports of Navarro’s memo have intensified accusations that the president mishandled the government’s early response.

The Guardian’s Daniel Strauss reports:

Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon, endorsed former vice president Joe Biden for president on Tuesday morning.

“I’m delighted, very pleased, very happy, and very honored to take the time to endorse a friend, a man of courage, a man of conscience as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” Lewis said of backing Biden during a call with reporters. “It is my belief that we need Joe Biden now more than ever before.”

Lewis’s endorsement comes as most Democratic lawmakers and the majority of the party’s voters fall in line behind Biden. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is still running against Biden in the Democratic primary, but his path is increasingly narrow.

Lewis, in endorsing Biden, urged him to pick a woman as his running mate if the former vice president wins the nomination.

“It would be a good to have a woman of color,” Lewis said. “It would be good to have a woman who looks like the rest of America – smart, gifted, a fighter, a warrior and we have plenty of able women. Some are black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American. I think the time is long past for making the White House look like the whole of America.”

During a recent debate Biden said if elected president, he would nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court and would pick a woman as his running mate.

Other influential lawmakers, including South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, have said that Biden should pick a woman of color as his running mate.

In an interview with the Financial Times Clyburn name checked California senator Kamala Harris and former Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice (which he called a “sleeper”) as possible running mates for Biden.

…and welcome to another day of coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US. Figures, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, first:

• Cases confirmed: 368,036
• Deaths: 10,982
• Cases in New York, the worst-hit state: 131,815
• Deaths in New York: 4,758

Other states are struggling too, of course: there have been more than 1,000 deaths in New Jersey and Michigan, California and Louisiana are also particularly hard hit. And case and death numbers will no doubt increase today.

There are all sorts of news lines out there of course, perhaps the biggest being British prime minister Boris Johnson’s admission to intensive care. Here’s the latest report from our London office. And here’s the UK live blog with constant updates.

In the US, Julia Carrie Wong has an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s support for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19 but which the president wants Americans to take:

The president pushed the drug again at his White House briefing on Monday, a briefing which was also, by the by, attended by Chanel Rion, a correspondent from One America News Network whose presence at briefings and leading questions to Trump have caused consternation in the mainstream media. Here’s Adrian Horton’s write-up of what John Oliver had to say about that and OAN in general on Sunday night.

We have a lot more this morning, of course, including:

• Michael Sainato on Amazon workers who say the company values profit over their safety amid the pandemic.
• A devastating report from Oliver Laughland in Reserve, Lousiana, aka Cancer Alley but now home to a new foe.
• Another dispatch from a frontline nurse: The ER Diaries: ‘I have come to embrace that we’re at war’.

The Axios website, meanwhile, is out with a major scoop: Democrats including Nancy Pelosi have consciously echoed the famous Watergate question – What did the president know and when did he know it? – when investigating the White House’s lagging response to the emerging threat of Covid-19.

On Monday night, Axios published memos from trade adviser Peter Navarro which warned Trump of a likely pandemic in January. Axios’s newsletter headline on Tuesday morning? “POTUS Knew!”

Ed Pilkington will have more on that shortly…