Live Coronavirus in the US Updates

In a call with governors, Trump suggests some states should reopen schools before the end of the academic year.

President Trump suggested to the nation’s governors on Monday that some should move to reopen their public schools before the end of the academic year, an indication that he is growing impatient with the widespread closures to curb the coronavirus outbreak.

“Some of you might start to think about school openings,” Mr. Trump said on a conference call with the governors, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. “The young children have done very well in this disaster that we’ve all gone through, so a lot of people are thinking about the school openings.”

Addressing Vice President Mike Pence, who was also on the call, Mr. Trump added, “I think it’s something, Mike, they can seriously consider and maybe get going on it.”

The president’s nudge on school openings runs counter to the advice of medical experts and came unbidden during a conversation about testing and respirator use. It is the latest sign of how torn he is on how states and localities should proceed as they weigh what to do at a time when deaths from the virus are still growing but the economy is reeling.

“People want to see these states open,” Mr. Trump said at the start of the call. “There is a thirst to get back to business.”

Mr. Trump reiterated his desire to see schools open Monday evening at the White House, saying, “I think you’ll see a lot of schools open up, even for a short period of time.”

At least one state was already moving forward with the possibility of reopening schools this year. Montana, which has among the fewest cases and deaths, will give schools the option to reopen starting May 7.

Earlier Monday, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said on CNBC that there was “a chance” schools in New Jersey might reopen in some fashion before the end of June.

In the portion of the recording obtained by The Times, no governor chimed in to agree or disagree with the president.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to “liberate” a handful of states with Democratic governors. But last week, he repeatedly criticized Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia for what he said was Mr. Kemp’s premature reopening of some Georgia businesses.

Mr. Kemp, a Republican, was on the call with the president and effusively thanked Mr. Trump for his leadership. The disagreement did not come up.

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican, was equally effusive in his praise. “Members of the press may never recognize your incredible leadership, but the people of Mississippi certainly recognize it,” he said.

To that, Mr. Trump responded: “I agree with you, it probably will never be recognized. But maybe it will, you never know.”

After costly delays, the Trump administration pledges to help states conduct more tests.

After governors repeatedly warned that the lack of testing was hampering their efforts to ease restrictions, the Trump administration released a blueprint on Monday aimed at helping states ramp up testing.

The goal, according administration officials who detailed it on the condition of anonymity, is for states to be able to test at least 2 percent of their populations every month. But that number was not included in a document released by the White House Monday evening outlining the plan.

The blueprint said that the states would still be primarily responsible for testing, and that Washington would be “a supplier of last resort.” Rather than the more comprehensive surveillance testing sought by many public health experts, the administration is focused on a more limited goal of “sentinel” testing at targeted sites that are particularly vulnerable, like nursing homes and inner-city health centers, the document said.

“We want to get our country open, and testing is not going to be a problem at all,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Monday evening, where he spoke in broad terms about increasing testing.

The plan was met with swift criticism from Democrats, including Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who said in a statement that it said “nothing new and will accomplish nothing new.”

“It doesn’t set specific, numeric goals, offer a time frame, identify ways to fix our broken supply chain or offer any details whatsoever on expanding lab capacity or activating needed manufacturing capacity,” said Ms. Murray, the senior Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, whose state suffered one of the earliest and most severe outbreaks.

“Perhaps most pathetically, it attempts to shirk obviously federal responsibilities by assigning them solely to states instead,” she said.

In the past, the Trump administration has sometimes promised large increases in testing that it has failed to deliver. Asked at the news conference Monday about why an earlier promise that four million tests would be available by March had not materialized, Mr. Pence said he had merely been talking about the number of tests that could be sent out — not completed.

In the seven weeks since Mr. Trump promised that anyone who needed a test could get one, the United States has conducted about 5.4 million tests, far more than any other country, but still the equivalent of about 1.6 percent of the total population. It is a small fraction of what public health experts say is necessary to ensure a safe and gradual reopening of schools, businesses and other public venues.

Governors and public health officials warn that without more tests, they will be unable to identify, track and contain new outbreaks.

A group of experts convened by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has called for five million tests a day by early June, ramping up to 20 million per day by late July.

Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from New York University, has called for 25 million tests per day, with the capacity to test twice that many in “surge” situations.

Mr. Romer said testing 2 percent of the population was “not enough to test everyone in health care even once, let alone to keep retesting them every day, which is what it would take to keep those who do get infected from going on shift and infecting their colleagues.”

While the United States has made strides over the past month in expanding testing, its capacity is nowhere near the level Mr. Trump suggests it is. It has proved difficult to increase production of reagents — sensitive chemical ingredients that detect whether the coronavirus is present. Physical components of test kits, like nasal swabs, are largely imported and have been hard to come by amid global shortages. And labs have been slow to add people and equipment needed to process the tests.

The administration had resisted a full-scale national mobilization, instead intervening from time to time to allocate equipment on an ad hoc basis.

But during a call with governors on Monday, Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the administration would begin making weekly shipments to states to get them the equipment they need, with plans to send out 12.7 million swabs in May.

“We’re going to be resourcing you on a weekly basis to achieve your plan,” Admiral Giroir said, responding to complaints from Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington about a lack of swabs to conduct tests, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times. “Every week, you’ll get a shipment in your state for further distribution, and that will have all the swabs.”

Texas, the nation’s second most-populous state, moves to reopen.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Monday announced the reopening of the state’s businesses in phases starting Friday and said he was allowing the stay-at-home order he put in place this month to expire as scheduled on April 30.

Mr. Abbott had previously lifted some restrictions, including on retail shopping and state parks. But his announcement on Monday brought the country’s second-most populous state to the brink of a complete reopening.

His move gave Texas one of the shortest stay-at-home orders in the country: It will have been in effect for 28 days when it expires on Thursday. “That executive order has done its job to slow the growth of Covid-19,” Mr. Abbott told reporters at the State Capitol on Monday.

In the first phase, which begins on Friday, all retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters and malls will be able to reopen with occupancy limited to no more than 25 percent. Capacity can later expand “so long as Covid-19 remains contained,” he said.

Mr. Abbott has struggled to find a middle ground in the heated political, economic and public health issue of when and how to reopen the state.

Democrats have criticized his handling of the crisis and urged him to slow the reopening. Many Republicans, including some of Mr. Abbott’s colleagues on the right and conservative activists, have urged him to loosen the restrictions and have protested outside the Texas Capitol and the governor’s mansion in Austin.

Some states have banded together in regional pacts as they develop reopening plans, but Texas has resisted, an unsurprising move for a fiercely independent state that is the only one in the continental United States that has its own power grid.

Barr tells prosecutors to look out for unconstitutional state and local virus orders.

Attorney General William P. Barr on Monday asked federal prosecutors around the country to look out for emergency state or local orders issued to contain the pandemic that could also violate “constitutional rights and civil liberties,” and to fight them in court if needed.

“If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of Covid-19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court,” Mr. Barr wrote in a memo.

Matthew Schneider, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, will work with Eric Dreiband, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, to oversee and coordinate the effort.

Mr. Barr has signaled for weeks that he will combat shutdown orders that violate the Constitution. The Justice Department filed a motion this month in support of a Baptist church in Greenville, Miss., that sued the city and its mayor for outlawing the congregation’s drive-in church services even as the city allowed drive-in restaurants to serve customers. The city fined churchgoers but later withdrew the fines, and Greenville has since changed its order. Lawyers for the church said that the legal matter would most likely be dropped.

As more states let businesses reopen, challenges persist.

Businesses in states including Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota and Mississippi tried to navigate the new rules allowing some of them to reopen beginning Monday.

“I couldn’t sleep last night because I was so confused,” Jose Oregel, who owns a barbershop in Greeley, Colo., said on Monday morning, an hour before he was expecting his first customers, who will get haircuts from barbers wearing masks and gloves.

In Georgia, where Mr. Kemp’s decision to let restaurants reopen to eat-in diners on Monday despite an uptick in deaths drew criticism from Mr. Trump, many Atlanta establishments decided not to do so. One restaurant that tried was Rocky Mountain Pizza Company, near the Georgia Institute of Technology. It opened its doors Monday morning, but as of 12:30 p.m., no one had come to sit down for lunch.

“I cannot imagine myself going to a pub or a restaurant right now,” said Filippos Tagklis, 30, a graduate student at Georgia Tech, as he walked his dog by the restaurant.

In the week since Mr. Kemp outlined his plans to let businesses in the state reopen, the death toll in Georgia has risen by more than 200, to 942, according to the state’s Department of Public Health. Public health officials and mayors criticized the plan.

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz lifted restrictions for certain employees in industrial, manufacturing and office settings, a move that his office said would allow 80,000 to 100,0000 people to return to work Monday even as cases and deaths continued to grow. But it was unclear how many people returned to work, as some employers decided it was safer not to rush.

And in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine announced a cautious reopening plan on Monday that included resuming health care appointments on Friday and the reopening of retail stores starting May 12. But he said many other businesses would have to wait. “We’re not quite there yet,” he said.

More governors and businesses across the country are facing increasingly complicated choices about reopening this week, with several stay-at-home orders set to expire on April 30.

Kentucky will permit more health care services, such as radiology and outpatient care, to resume on Monday.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has not yet released a plan for broad reopening, though one is expected in the next few days. “There’s probably going to be some people that think this is too slow,” he said at a news conference in Tampa on Monday. The mayors of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties in Southeast Florida announced that they will reopen parks, golf courses and marinas on Wednesday. (Beaches will remain closed.)

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday laid out a broad outline for a gradual restart of the state that would allow some “low risk” businesses upstate to reopen as soon as mid-May. He did not speculate when restrictions would be eased in New York City and surrounding suburbs. The governor said Monday that 337 more people had died in the state on Sunday, the lowest single-day death toll since March.

In New Jersey, Mr. Murphy said Monday that he would need to see four things before he would consider reopening businesses and schools: a prolonged decline in hospitalization and infection rates, expanded testing, more contact tracing and places for those who were sick with the virus to remain in isolation.

The known death toll in the U.S. exceeds 50,000.

More than 50,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the United States, which has seen more confirmed cases and deaths than any other nation in the world, according to a tally by The New York Times.

And as the outbreak spread, the nation’s total number of confirmed cases continued to climb toward one million, reaching more than 983,000.

The tally does not include more than 5,200 people in New York City and smaller numbers in other states and U.S. territories who died and are believed to have had the virus. Many of those patients were not tested, a consequence of a strained medical system and a persistent lack of testing capacity.

Even as case numbers have stabilized in some hard-hit cities, including New Orleans and Seattle, other places have seen sustained growth.

The counties that include Los Angeles and Chicago added more than 1,000 new cases on several recent days. In Massachusetts, numbers surpassed 54,000 on Sunday, up from 38,000 a week earlier. And across the Midwest and Great Plains, production at meatpacking plants had slowed or stopped because of large outbreaks, including one that sickened more than 1,000 people in South Dakota.

In New York, hundreds of deaths are announced each day, though those numbers are far below their peak earlier this month. Now, 60 percent of voters in New York City say they personally know someone who tested positive, and 46 percent know someone who died of the virus, according to a poll by the Siena College Research Institute.

Although the United States has the highest number of deaths on a global scale, deaths per capita remain lower than those in many European countries, notably Italy and Spain. The global toll has surpassed 200,000, though at least 36,000 more people have died in the past month than the official counts report, according to a review of mortality data in 12 countries.

Congress plans to return to session next week despite stay-at-home orders.

Congressional leaders announced on Monday that the House and Senate would both return to session in Washington next week despite an ongoing stay-at-home order from the city’s mayor and similar restrictions around the country.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said that his chamber would “modify routines in ways that are smart and safe,” but that Americans expected senators to be working just like other essential workers.

House leaders said they would also convene on Monday but told lawmakers to anticipate a scaled-back voting schedule and more emphasis on restarting work by committees that will conduct oversight of the Trump administration’s virus response and other routine business.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, said the House would vote next week with or without Republican support to change its rules to allow proxy voting and virtual committee meetings — abilities that could allow the chamber to operate more fully on a remote basis in the weeks ahead.

Still, some Democratic lawmakers were uneasy about packing back into the Capitol at a time when health experts have repeatedly warned against travel and group gatherings. On a Democratic conference call Monday evening, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, called the plan to return dangerous, according to two people on the call who described the private discussion on the condition of anonymity.

Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, said she had heard similar concerns from fellow freshmen in districts where the spread of the virus was near its peak, according to another person on the call.

Amid high demand for small-business aid, the website for processing loans crashes.

Less than an hour after the Small Business Administration on Monday morning resumed taking requests for another $310 billion in emergency aid for small businesses, its computer system for processing the loan applications crashed.

“It’s obvious the system is simply flooded right now,” said Craig Street, the chief lending officer at United Midwest Savings Bank in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s been very stop and start, with no real way to know whether it is working other than to keep hitting the submit button.”

It was a rocky resumption for the Paycheck Protection Program, a stimulus initiative that offers small companies forgivable loans to cover their payrolls. The program began early this month, but its initial round of funding — $342 billion — was depleted in 13 days and the agency stopped accepting requests, leaving hundreds of thousands of borrowers frozen out until Congress provided a new funding round last week. The government began accepting applications for it at 10:30 a.m. on Monday.

Officials at the Small Business Administration, which is managing the program, did not immediately respond to questions about the technical problems that lenders were reporting with E-Tran, the agency’s computer system for processing loans.

“Our member banks across the country are deeply frustrated at their inability to access @SBAGov’s E-Tran system,” Rob Nichols, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, a trade group representing banks of all sizes, said in a tweet on Monday. Until the problems were fixed, he added, “#AmericasBanks will not be able to help more struggling small businesses.”

A New York Times investigation found that dozens of large but lower-profile companies with financial or legal problems had received large payouts under the program, according to an analysis of the more than 200 publicly traded companies that have disclosed receiving a total of more than $750 million in bailout loans. Some companies, including Potbelly Sandwich Shops, the Los Angeles Lakers, and Shake Shack said they would return their loans.

California’s governor pleads with residents to stay inside as data shows an increase in movement.

“This virus doesn’t go home because it’s a beautiful sunny day around our coasts,” he said.

New data showed an increase in movement across the state, he said. In the San Francisco Bay Area, toll operators have reported steady but incremental increases in people using bridges.

“The likelihood of having a virus-free world is not realistic in the next number of months,” he said.

The governor said he would present more details on reopening the economy on Tuesday but stressed that any relaxation of the state’s shutdown would be contingent on definitive evidence of a decline in hospitalizations and a ramped up ability to test for the virus, among other conditions.

His comments came as six counties in the Bay Area that put in place the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders in March announced that the orders would be extended through the end of May. The counties are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara.

Health officers said in a statement Monday that a new order to be made public later this week would largely keep the current restrictions in place but would include “limited easing of specific restrictions for a small number of lower-risk activities.”

At the same time Mr. Newsom has come under pressure to ease restrictions in areas of the state less affected by the pandemic. On Friday, politicians in six Northern California counties urged the governor to allow the reopening of their economies.

In a letter to the governor, state lawmakers and local officials from those counties said they had only 69 total cases and were seeing declines in new cases. Keeping economies shut could “cause dire public health issues of their own,” the letter said.

Oil prices are collapsing again.

Oil prices plunged on Monday, with the American benchmark hurtling toward the $10 a barrel mark, as fears about a global glut in crude continued to weigh on energy markets.

But the S&P 500 rose more than 1 percent, and European benchmarks rose 1 to 3 percent after a broadly higher day in Asia.

Since last week, investors have been panicked about oil storage facilities running out of capacity as producers continued to pump oil even as demand collapsed. That concern is most acute in the United States, where storage facilities in Cushing, Okla., are expected to reach capacity in May.

It is one reason the collapse in futures of American crude has been so much sharper than the global benchmark. On Monday, West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, was down about 27 percent at a little more than $12 a barrel. At the same time, Brent crude, the global benchmark, was down about 9 percent to just above $19 a barrel.

One factor behind the difference in price is that the Cushing facilities are landlocked, reachable only by pipeline, whereas Brent supplies can be reached by boat and either stored there or placed at facilities around the globe. Investors betting on an eventual rebound in oil prices are filling oil tankers up — with as much as two million barrels per vessel — and parking them out at sea, The Times’s Stanley Reed reported.

“I can send a boat to the Brent field; I can’t send a boat to Cushing,” said Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Redburn, a market research firm.

Analysts say the unprecedented collapse of American crude prices into negative territory on April 20 spooked investors.

Global cuts in oil production are set to start on Friday, after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with Russia and other producers, agreed to reduce daily output by 9.7 million barrels a day, which is close to 10 percent of global output, to address a glut as demand for crude crashed.

The C.D.C. expands its list of symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has added six possible symptoms of coronavirus to its list, a step that reflects the broad variation and unpredictability of the effects of the illness.

Echoing the observations of doctors treating thousands of patients, the federal health agency this month changed its website to cite chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell as possible indicators of Covid-19.

The C.D.C. had listed just three symptoms: fever, cough and shortness of breath. The agency made no public announcement when it added the six new symptoms to its website on April 18, and it did not immediately respond to questions about the revised list.

The revised C.D.C. list differs somewhat from the symptoms described by the World Health Organization on its website: fever, dry cough and tiredness. “Some patients may have aches and pains, nasal congestion, sore throat or diarrhea,” the W.H.O. says. “These symptoms are usually mild and begin gradually.”

At least 47 people aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer have tested positive.

Cases of the virus aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer rose over the weekend with at least 47 crew members testing positive, the Navy said on Monday.

The destroyer — the U.S.S. Kidd, which has roughly 300 crew members — is part of a counternarcotics mission and is the second deployed American warship affected by the coronavirus.

Two sailors aboard the destroyer, which was deployed to the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, have been evacuated to the United States and the ship is returning to port. More than a dozen sailors have been sent to a nearby warship for monitoring. So far, nearly 50 percent of the crew have been tested for the virus.

The Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier that is currently docked in Guam, has 955 active cases of the virus, according to the Navy, and is set to return to its deployment in the western Pacific in the weeks to come.

Preliminary results for an arthritis drug as a treatment for Covid-19 are disappointing.

Doctors around the world, trying to save patients who are seriously ill with the virus, have been giving them arthritis drugs that can squelch immune responses. The theory was that many were dying because their immune systems went into overdrive, creating a fatal storm that attacked their lungs.

But now, preliminary results on treatments with one of these drugs, sarilumab, which is made by Sanofi-Regeneron, indicate that it does not help patients who are hospitalized but not using ventilators.

Sanofi-Regeneron immediately started a clinical trial that randomly assigned 457 hospitalized patients to receive 400 milligrams of sarilumab, 200 milligrams or a placebo. The patients fell into two groups — “severe,” meaning they required oxygen but did not need a ventilator or so-called high-flow oxygen, and “critical,” who needed a ventilator or high-flow oxygen or were in intensive care.

Although the drug reduced c-reactive protein, which rises in severe inflammation, it did not help the severely ill patients, the companies reported on Monday. Many of those patients recovered on their own. Eighty percent were discharged from the hospital, regardless of whether they got the drug. Ten percent remained hospitalized, and 10 percent died.

The results for the critically ill patients are not conclusive, but there is a hint that they might be helped. The study will continue with only critically ill patients; more than 600 have been enrolled, and results are expected in early June.

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Follow updates on the pandemic from our team of international correspondents.

Reporting was contributed by Pam Belluck, Katie Benner, Alan Blinder, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Michael Cooper, Stacy Cowley, Jesse Drucker, David Enrich, Nicholas Fandos, Manny Fernandez, Thomas Fuller, David Gelles, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Jack Healy, Shawn Hubler, Kate Kelly, Gina Kolata, Jonathan Martin, Patricia Mazzei, Sarah Mervosh, David Montgomery, Roni Caryn Rabin, Katie Rogers, Jonathan Rothwell, Marc Santora, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Eileen Sullivan, Neil Vigdor and David Yaffe-Bellany.