President Trump said Tuesday he would soon be speaking with all 50 governors to discuss with them plans for allowing them to relax pandemic restrictions, which he said in some cases would come sooner than May 1.
He also announced that he would be soliciting advice on reopening the economy from a range of business leaders, including bankers, farmers, retailers, and more.
“The plans to reopen the country are close to being finalized,” he said. He pledged, though, that he wouldn’t force any governors to ease restrictions against their judgment.
Separately, California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled six criteria the state must meet in order to reopen the state’s economy: the ability to monitor new cases all over the state through testing, contact tracing, and isolation, the ability to prevent infection in people at risk of contracting severe coronavirus disease, the ability of the state’s healthcare system to handle surges of new patients, the ability to develop treatments, the ability for schools and businesses to practice social distancing, and the ability to determine when to reinstitute certain restrictions such as a stay-at-home order, if necessary. “We are not out of the woods yet,” Newsom said, according to KCRA. “And we are not spiking the ball. But we also extend a recognition in that light that this can’t be a permanent state.”
The number of deaths due to the coronavirus in New York City surpassed 10,000 Tuesday, as the city health department will now include deaths likely caused by the coronavirus but never confirmed with a diagnostic test. The health department reported 6,589 confirmed deaths as of Tuesday, with an additional 3,778 probable cases. Meanwhile, the state’s tally of confirmed deaths differed, with 7,690 across all five boroughs.
At least 25,575 people in the United States have died due to the coronavirus, and over 602,900 cases have been confirmed, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.
Researchers at Harvard University reported Tuesday that “prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022” to prevent the seasonal resurgence of the coronavirus. “The authors are aware that prolonged distancing, even if intermittent, is likely to have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences,” authors of the study said. “Our goal in modeling such policies is not to endorse them but to identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approaches.”
Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. will halt funding to the World Health Organization while the administration reviews the mistakes it made managing the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, who has frequently criticized the public health group for being “China-centric,” said the WHO failed in its duty to report the truth about the growing outbreak and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission, all while pushing “misinformation” from Chinese health officials.
“So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” he said.
Two years before the 2019 coronavirus pandemic began, U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing raised the alarm in Washington that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting risky studies of infectious diseases, including coronaviruses. One of the “Sensitive but Unclassified” cables, obtained by the Washington Post, warned that the lab’s studies of bat coronaviruses and transmissibility in humans could cause another SARS-like pandemic,
“This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases,” embassy officials said. “From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
The U.S. did not send additional help to the labs in Wuhan despite the warnings that the lab was not equipped to safely conduct the research.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated.
The International Monetary Fund announced that government efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak had led to a global economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. The IMF projects the cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic could be around $9 trillion. “This makes the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis,” IMF economic counselor Gita Gopinath wrote in the revised World Economic Outlook.
Democrats on the Senate health committee are pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to make medication abortions more accessible as many abortion providers have been forced to shut down during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Patty Murray are asking the FDA to relax restrictions on dispensing the abortion medication mifepristone so that women can undergo a medication abortion through telehealth consultations followed by a trip to their local pharmacy to pick up the prescription. As of now, the FDA prohibits physicians from prescribing the medication for women to take at home.
