Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Foments Anti-Restriction Protests, Alarming Governors

Trump tweets call to “LIBERATE” states where people are protesting virus restrictions.

President Trump on Friday began openly fomenting right-wing protests of social distancing restrictions in states where groups of his conservative supporters have been violating stay-at-home orders, less than a day after announcing guidelines for how governors could decide on an orderly reopening of their communities.

In a series of all-caps tweets, Mr. Trump declared “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” — two states whose Democratic governors have imposed social distancing restrictions that have shut down businesses and schools and forced people to remain at home. He also tweeted “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

Mr. Trump’s tweets were a remarkable example of a president egging on demonstrators. Earlier this week, more than 1,000 protesters organized by conservative groups created a traffic jam on the streets around the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., to complain that the restrictions were bad for small businesses. Other protesters, not in vehicles, waved banners in support of Mr. Trump and protested Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been a target of his ire, by chanting, “Lock her up.”

In St. Paul, Minn., a group calling itself “Liberate Minnesota” held a protest Friday in violation of stay-at-home orders in front of the home of Gov. Tim Walz. Hundreds showed up, according to news reports. The group’s Facebook page says that “now is the time to demand Governor Walz and our state legislators end this lock down!”

Mr. Walz was asked about the tweet at a news conference Friday. “I just don’t have time to figure out why something like that would happen,” he said, adding that he had tried calling both the president and the vice president and had yet to hear back.

”I just have to lead,” said Mr. Walz. “If they’re not going to do it, we’re going to do it, and I don’t mean that critically.”

As he spoke, protesters gathered outside his mansion.

Mr. Trump’s tweets began just moments after a Fox News report by Mike Tobin, a reporter for the network, about protests in Minnesota and elsewhere. The report featured a protester from Virginia saying “those of us who are healthy and want to get out of our house and do business, we need to get this going again. It’s time.”

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, where there was an early outbreak, said the president’s tweets could lead to violence and an increase in infections. “The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted,” Mr. Inslee, a Democrat, said in a statement.

At a news conference on Friday afternoon, Ms. Whitmer said she hoped the president’s comments would not incite more protests. “There is a lot of anxiety,” she said. “The most important thing that anyone with a platform can do is try to use that platform to tell people, ‘We are going to get through this.’”

“There is no one more eager to start re-engaging sectors of our economy than I am,” she added. “We are going to do this safely so we don’t have a second wave.”

And when Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was asked about the president’s comment at a virus news briefing Friday, he said: “I do not have time to involve myself in Twitter wars.”

On a phone call between Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Democrats, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia asked why Mr. Trump was trying to incite division in the middle of pandemic, in reference to Mr. Trump’s tweets, according to a person familiar with the call. When Mr. Pence said that the administration was working respectfully with governors, Mr. Kaine noted that the tweets were not respectful.

An administration official familiar with the phone call described it as far more heated than a similar one last week, and noted that the call included representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. Deborah L. Birx. The official said that when Mr. Kaine asked about Mr. Trump’s tweets, Mr. Pence said that the president was an effective communicator and was not going to stop talking to the American people.

The message of support Mr. Trump sent to the protesters was radically different from the one he delivered at a White House briefing a night earlier. Asked about the protesters, the president expressed sympathy for people affected by the restrictions, saying that “it’s been a tough process.” But he ducked the question of whether he would urge the protesters to listen to local authorities.

Behind the protests are some prominent conservatives and donors.

The protests in Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere calling for easing the restrictions were reminiscent of the early days of the Tea Party movement, when angry activists stormed town hall meetings of Democratic members of Congress to protest President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. Both featured impassioned demonstrators on the ground — and the behind-the-scenes involvement of prominent conservatives and donors.

The chairman of one of the groups behind Michigan’s protest on Thursday, the Michigan Freedom Fund, is Greg McNeilly, a close longtime associate of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Mr. McNeilly has denied any involvement by Ms. DeVos or others in her family, which has long financed conservative causes in Michigan.

Others organizing protests have been open about the involvement of outside donors.

Speaking on a YouTube program called “Freedom on Tap,” the Trump-allied economics commentator Stephen Moore said he was “working with a group in Wisconsin that wants to do a drive-in,” which he equated to the sit-ins of the civil rights era, only this time in protest of the restrictions put in place by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. “We need to be the Rosa Parks here,” Mr. Moore said, “and protest these government injustices.”

Speaking of the planned Wisconsin rally, he said that he had “one big donor in Wisconsin” who had told him “‘Steve, I promise, I will pay the bail and legal fees of anyone who gets arrested.’”

“So this is to be a great time, gentlemen and ladies, for civil disobedience,” he said.

Mr. Moore serves on Mr. Trump’s coronavirus economic advisory group and has helped start another group urging a faster reopening of the economy, called Save Our Country.

Mr. Trump had briefly considered Mr. Moore last year for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, but Mr. Moore’s past comments about women, including that they should not earn more than men, drew criticism. After some Republican lawmakers expressed reservations, the president said he would not nominate Mr. Moore for the post.

The audience for the “Freedom on Tap” program in which he appeared had only registered 310 views as of Friday, but the video was spotted and shared with The New York Times by True North Research, a progressive group.

“There are parallels here with the origins of the Tea Party, where there was one story of this completely spontaneous uprising and then another story about how it was really supported and moved along quickly by some really big donors,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, who has long followed conservative groups and their donors.

In an interview, Mr. Moore declined to name that donor he was referring to, but described him as “so upset about what’s happening with the abridgment of freedom.”

Likening the latest protests to the Tea Party, he said that to focus on donors is to miss true wellsprings of anger among everyday people. “These are people coming to us, but we’re not coming to them,” he said. “All we’re trying to do is just encourage people to participate.”

He said he had not spoken with Mr. Trump about the protests but said he had urged the president during a task force meeting to make haste. “I said to him, ‘Mr. President, if you can get the economy open — so we’re really getting going — by May 1, there’s a chance we could have recovery by late summer, early fall,’ ” Mr. Moore said.

Trump and Cuomo spar over the federal response to the outbreak.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Mr. Trump traded barbs on Friday for more federal assistance to help the state fight the virus, the latest escalation between the two. Mr. Trump lashed out on Twitter telling him to “spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining.’”

Mr. Cuomo said another 630 people died of the virus in New York on Thursday, according to official state figures, bringing the total confirmed death toll to 12,822.

The daily number of deaths, Mr. Cuomo said, “refuses to come down dramatically,” adding that the toll was “breathtaking in its pain and grief and tragedy.”

“Stop talking!” Mr. Trump wrote as he cited the federal assistance New York has already received — “far more money, help and equipment than any other state.”

Mr. Cuomo hit back mid-briefing and criticized the president for dismissing the need to give help to the states, especially when it comes to the magnitude of tests states need to safely lift restrictions.

Mr. Cuomo said again that the state could not fully reopen its economy without more widespread testing, which would require both supplies and an operational capacity that the health system did not currently have. “We cannot do it without federal help,” he said.

As it is now, he said, “We don’t have a testing system that can do this volume or that can be ramped up to do this volume.”

Mr. Cuomo, who has extended the state’s broad shutdown until at least May 15, made his daily appearance hours before the start of a mandate for people in New York to wear face coverings in public places where they cannot keep six feet away from others. In buses and subways as well as in for-hire vehicles, everyone, including the driver or operator, must wear a covering, he said. The rule also applies to children as young as 2 years old.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people wear cloth face coverings to protect those around them, a move that came after research showed that many people were infected but did not show symptoms. (Public health officials have warned against buying or hoarding the N95 masks needed by health care workers.)

Health officials have urged people to combine face coverings with social distancing, suggesting that one tactic did not replace the need for the other.

In New Jersey, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Friday that another 323 people had died of the virus, pushing the state’s recorded deaths to more than 1,400 in the last four days. The state has seen a sharp climb in virus-related deaths over the last week as the death toll has nearly doubled, from 1,933 to 3,840.

At least 7,000 people in the U.S. living in or connected to nursing homes have died of the virus.

The first warning of the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak inside American nursing homes came in late February, when residents of a facility in suburban Seattle perished, one by one, as families waited helplessly outside.

In the ensuing six weeks, large and shockingly lethal outbreaks have continued to ravage nursing homes across the nation. Now a tally by The New York Times has found the number of people living in or connected to nursing homes who have died of the coronavirus to be at least 7,000, far higher than previously known.

In New Jersey, 17 bodies piled up in a nursing home morgue, and more than a quarter of a Virginia home’s residents have died. At least 24 people at a facility in Maryland have died; more than 100 residents and workers have been infected at another in Kansas; and people have died in centers for military veterans in Florida, Nevada, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.

Overall, about a fifth of deaths from the virus in the United States have been tied to nursing homes or other long-term care facilities, The Times review of cases shows. And more than 36,000 residents and employees across the nation have contracted it.

Covid-19 is on track to kill far more people in the United States this year than the seasonal flu, but determining just how deadly the new virus will be is a key question facing epidemiologists, who expect resurgent waves of infection that could last into 2022.

The virus is known to be more deadly to aging, immune-compromised people, and small, confined settings like nursing homes, where workers frequently move from one room to the next, are particularly vulnerable to spreading infection. But oversights and failures also have contributed to the crisis.

In interviews with more than two dozen workers in long-term care facilities as well as family members of residents and health care experts, a portrait emerged of a system unequipped to handle the onslaught and disintegrating further amid the growing crisis.

Governors in Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Idaho and other states are looking to ease restrictions, despite inadequate testing.

Texas will let all stores in the state open next week for “retail-to-go,” permitting pickup and delivery but not in-store shopping. Minnesota will allow golf courses and driving ranges to reopen this weekend. Vermont will let its farmers’ markets reopen on May 1.

Around the country, governors began announcing plans to ease restrictions in their states on Friday, even as cases continue to surge in some parts of the country and inadequate testing will make it difficult for them to identify and contain future outbreaks.

They are taking action as Mr. Trump, who has been impatient to restart the economy, issued a set of guidelines Thursday offering suggestions of when and how to reopen.

The governors are grappling with mounting economic damage and hardship caused by the pandemic. But their moves to tentatively let some businesses reopen is getting underway as the national death toll remains high. Public health experts are warning against acting too soon, fearing new waves of outbreaks that will be difficult to identify early on unless testing is significantly ramped up. But many states and localities are beginning to ease restrictions.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, outlined his plans Friday for “retail-to-go” shopping, and also said that he would lift restrictions on some medical procedures and reopen state parks while requiring masks and social distancing.

But Mr. Abbott announced that the group working to reopen Texas — which he described as a “strike force” — had determined that it would be unsafe for children to return to school, so schools will remain closed for the remainder of the school year. The governor said that he would announce more reopening April 27, and still more in May.

In Minnesota, Mr. Walz, a Democrat, said Friday that golf courses and driving ranges could reopen Saturday morning, and many other outdoor activities could resume, too, including boating, fishing, hunting, and hiking. Some businesses that support those activities, including bait shops, shooting ranges and game farms, can also open. But campgrounds, recreational equipment rental, charter boats, and guided fishing will remain closed.

In Michigan, Ms. Whitmer, who imposed one of the strictest stay-at-home orders in the nation, said Friday that she hoped to loosen the regulations in two weeks’ time, on May 1.

Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat who has faced criticism from some residents and business leaders, said that any decision would depend on what the data on infections says as that date approaches. Her state trails only New York and New Jersey in the number of residents whose deaths have been tied to the virus.

“It’s two weeks away, and the information and the data and our ability to test is changing so rapidly, it’s hard to predict precisely where we’ll be in a week from now, let alone two weeks,” the governor said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” days after thousands of demonstrators, who mostly remained in vehicles, protested outside the State Capitol in Lansing and accused Ms. Whitmer of going too far.

Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont, a Republican, said Friday that he would allow some businesses in the state to reopen by Monday, provided that they involve very low contact and involve no more than two people.

The governor gave the green light to a handful of businesses — property managers, real estate agents and some construction crews — but said they must comply with safety guidelines, such as social distancing and wearing a mask. The state will open its farmer’s markets on May 1st. So far, the state has registered 779 cases and 35 deaths.

Mr. Evers, a Democrat of Wisconsin, said on Thursday that golf courses could open with certain restrictions and that for-hire lawn care could be carried out if it was performed by one person. Stores selling materials to make face masks can open for curbside pickup, he said.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, has said businesses that were once deemed nonessential, such as craft stores, candle shops or dog groomers, could open to allow for curbside or delivery services until at least the end of the month. He noted that they should prepare to reopen altogether in May with social distancing and sanitation rules in place.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks frequently with Mr. Trump and has faced criticism for his initial piecemeal approach to tackling the virus, said on Friday that he would refer to the White House guidelines on reopening but not necessarily abide by everything they propose.

“We will obviously use that as a kind of baseline,” Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference in Fort Lauderdale. “It doesn’t mean Florida is going to do every single thing they say or not say.”

As of Friday morning, Florida had more than 24,000 cases and nearly 700 deaths.

Some local leaders in Florida are beginning to tiptoe toward reopening. Mayor Lenny Curry of Jacksonville announced on Thursday that beaches and parks in Duval County will reopen at 5 p.m. on Friday, for limited hours, and restricted to social distant recreational activities.

But just as much of the country entered life under quarantine in a patchwork fashion, it is poised to ease restrictions the same varied way, responding to the local needs to fight the virus.

In Maryland, where cases and deaths continue to rise, Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said at a news conference Friday that four things must be “solidly in place” before he moves to lift restrictions: expanded testing, increased hospital capacity for a surge in patients, more personal protective equipment, and a robust contact tracing operation. He said that he would give an update on the progress in those areas, and detail the state’s plans, next week. State officials said that schools there would remain closed through at least May 15.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced a bipartisan economic advisory committee on Friday that includes all four of the state’s living former governors and some of the nation’s leading corporate executives including the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook, and the chairman of Disney, Robert A. Iger, as well as the former head of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen.

More than 22 million Americans have lost their jobs in recent weeks — a toll that roughly matches the entire cumulative work force of 23 states — and many governors, as well as Mr. Trump, fear the mounting economic repercussions of sustained shutdowns.

But tackling the economic catastrophe requires getting a handle on the public health crisis.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s virus response coordinator, told CNN on Thursday night that surveillance to give communities early warning signs of local transmission would need to be enhanced, diagnostic testing capabilities expanded and contact-tracing efforts bolstered.

“Any one piece by itself will not be able to accomplish what we need,” she said.

A South Dakota mayor wrestles with the need for a stay-at-home order amid a local outbreak.

Mayor Paul TenHaken of Sioux Falls, S.D., has abandoned his effort to put in place a stay-at-home order in his city, which is at the center of a coronavirus outbreak that shut down a Smithfield pork processing plant.

He told the City Council on Friday that new data showed that local hospitals were able to handle an influx of coronavirus patients, The Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported.

Earlier this week, Mr. TenHaken, a Republican, said in an interview that he was frustrated by his inability to convince Sioux Falls residents to stay in their homes. He had unsuccessfully petitioned Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, for a countywide stay-at-home order.

“We’re starting to become a poster child for a lack of response,” he said, noting that hundreds of people in his city had tested positive for the coronavirus, many of whom worked at Smithfield.

The people in his city were deeply divided over his efforts to institute a stay-at-home order. “I have half the city saying, ‘Shut this entire place down and tell me when to come out,’” he said. “And I have the other half saying, ‘Don’t you dare.’”

The lack of testing presents a serious challenge to reopening, health experts say.

To give people a sense of security as states begin to ease restrictions requires an expanded testing capacity, health experts say, and the country is far behind in conducting enough tests to responsibly inform these decisions.

The ultimate goal is to separate the sick from the healthy so that Americans feel safe returning to a somewhat normal life and the virus does not sweep through communities again, which requires more widespread testing.

The capacity for such testing has been growing, but not fast enough, public health experts say. Supplies continue to run out and some areas are only testing people who present specific symptoms. Tests to determine whether someone has already had the virus are slowly rolling out and most have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration.

Without widespread testing and surveillance, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, “we won’t be able to quickly identify and isolate cases in which the patients are presymptomatic or asymptomatic, and thus community transmission could be re-established.”

Mr. Trump, whose administration has been criticized for its slow rollout of tests as the virus took hold in the United States, has sought to portray testing as a state responsibility, even as many governors are pleading for more federal help. “The States have to step up their TESTING!” Mr. Trump wrote in a Twitter post on Friday, as Mr. Cuomo, of New York, asked for more help from the federal government to produce tests on a larger scale.

A phone call between Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Democrats grew heated as Democrats pressed Mr. Pence on the lack of testing.

Senator Angus King, the independent senator from Maine, said during the call that “I have never been so mad about a phone call in my life” and called the lack of national testing a “dereliction of duty.”

“My problem was also offloading to the governors the responsibility for testing, which governors are not in a position to execute on,” Mr. King, a former governor, said in an interview. “All they can do is fend for themselves in the private sector.”

Reopening before those issues are resolved, though, risks endangering the few places that have managed to avoid the worst effects of the virus, and would be accompanied by other significant scientific concerns:

Waiting periods of 14 days are required. States wishing to loosen rules are asked to meet certain criteria every two weeks, but that leaves open the possibility that someone infected toward the end of the 14th day could end up seeding an outbreak as restrictions were lifted.

Shortages of protective equipment persist. Among the greatest fears in reopening parts of the economy is that communities with less restrictions will be at a greater risk for outbreaks, which will create new demands for medical supplies already spread thin.

Piecemeal reopenings are risky. While Mr. Trump suggested that the relaxing of restrictions may occur in a fragmented way, even county by county, that does not work with the contagious nature of the virus. Even in rural regions where the population is less dense, large clusters of infections — even hundreds in a single workplace — have erupted in states that had seen relatively few cases. Recent history in South Dakota — where hundreds of infections have been traced to a single pork processing plant — shows that a single site can ignite a firestorm of cases.

Doctors are prescribing hydroxychloroquine, but don’t know if it works.

For weeks doctors around the country have been giving hydroxychloroquine to patients at various stages of their illness related to Covid-19, and as a preventive measure to some if they’ve been exposed by family members or in health care settings.

But even after treating hundreds of patients with the antimalarial drug, doctors interviewed did not report clear results or remarkable recoveries that can be traced to the drug.

At Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, most Covid-19 patients who are not on the verge of dying receive a five-day regimen of hydroxychloroquine, the long-used malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted as a “what have you got to lose” remedy. While his own top health officials are more cautious — noting there is limited evidence about the drug’s benefits — doctors across the country have been prescribing the drug for weeks.

Dr. Bushra Mina, the chief of pulmonary medicine at Lenox Hill, doesn’t know if the hydroxychloroquine is helping his patients. He is well aware that there are no rigorous clinical trials showing that the drug works. But he can’t wait for the evidence to come in, he said, when people are dying.

“I think it’s a battle, and your options are very limited,” Dr. Mina said. “You’re really looking for what you can do with whatever evidence you have.”

Hydroxychloroquine and a related drug, chloroquine, have been used for decades to treat and prevent malaria, and hydroxychloroquine has been used by people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis because it is known to calm the immune system. In laboratory tests, it has been shown to block the coronavirus from invading cells, although it hasn’t been proven in human trials. The drugs are not recommended for people who have abnormal heart rhythms because it can make them worse.

Here’s a guide for those in need of financial help.

If your income has fallen or been cut off completely, we’re here to help. Here is some basic information you’ll need to get through the current crisis, including guides to government benefits, free services and financial strategies.

Those we’ve lost: Israel Sauz, gas-station worker and new father, dies at 22.

Israel Sauz of Tulsa, Okla., couldn’t wait to see his first child, a baby boy named Josiah. And he couldn’t wait for the world to see him, too. So he got in close and took a picture for Facebook of his son, fast asleep in a green onesie, shortly after the boy came into the world one Sunday last month.

Just 21 days later, on April 5, Mr. Sauz was dead. He was 22.

The cause was complications related to Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to family friends and the school district where he attended high school.

Many in Tulsa may not have recognized his name, but they knew the smiling face — he was an assistant night manager at a busy QuikTrip gas station and convenience store about a mile east of downtown Tulsa. He was still a teenager when he first started working for QuikTrip, a popular chain based in Tulsa.

He lived in the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow. He and his wife, Krystal, had celebrated their first wedding anniversary two weeks before Josiah was born.

Homemade or more professional: Which mask is best for you?

Face masks have become an emblem in the fight against the virus, with officials in the United States and elsewhere recommending — and in some cases mandating — that people wear them to help slow the spread of the deadly outbreak.

Figuring out what to wear is not so easy. N95 and medical masks, which offer the most protection and are heavily in demand, should be reserved for health care workers who are regularly exposed to infected patients.

Here’s a look at some of the types of masks you might encounter, how they work, what to consider when making your own and the level of protection they could provide.

Here’s what else is happening around the world.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper, Alan Blinder, Eileen Sullivan, Ellen Barry, Emily Cochrane, Mitch Smith, Michael D. Shear, Zach Montague, Dionne Searcey, Michael Gold, Andy Newman, Kate Taylor, Marc Santora, Matt Stevens, John Leland, Amy Julia Harris, Tracey Tully, Emily Flitter, Roni Caryn Rabin, Knvul Sheikh, Manny Fernandez, Adeel Hassan, Peter Baker, Alyson Stamos, Meiying Wu, John Ismay, Julie Bosman and Michael Schwirtz.