Coronavirus Live Updates: House Passes $484 Billion Aid Package

A $484 billion coronavirus aid package is headed to President Trump’s desk after the House cleared it, 388-5, on a bipartisan vote.

The House on Thursday gave resounding approval to a $484 billion coronavirus relief package to restart a depleted loan program for distressed small businesses and provide funds for hospitals and coronavirus testing, and moved to increase oversight of the sprawling federal response to the pandemic.

President Trump said he was “grateful” for the action to refill the loan program and indicated he would sign the measure as early as Thursday evening. It was the latest installment in a government aid program that is approaching $3 trillion, which passed with broad bipartisan support even as some Democrats condemned it for being too stingy. But the fight over what should be included foreshadowed a pitched partisan battle to come over the next round of federal relief, which is likely to center on aid to states and cities facing dire financial straits.

Even as they dispensed with another nearly half-trillion taxpayer dollars, Democrats were moving to scrutinize the administration’s handling of the funds. Just before the aid package passed, they pushed through a measure creating a special committee to investigate the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and the array of federal spending measures enacted to address it, defying objections from Mr. Trump and Republicans.

The committee, which will have the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, is charged with examining the implementation of the coronavirus relief packages enacted over the last two months, and scrutinizing “preparedness for and response to the coronavirus crisis.”

The package passed on Thursday was an interim step after enactment of the $2.2 trillion stimulus law. It emerged after a flurry of negotiations between Democrats and the Trump administration after funding lapsed for the Paycheck Protection Program, a small-business loan program created by the stimulus plan that had been overwhelmed by demand as soon as it began.

The measure replenished that program, providing $320 billion for it, but at the insistence of Democrats who demanded additional funds and policy changes, it also included $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing — plus a mandate that the Trump administration come up with a strategy for helping states deploy and access tests across the country.

The vote took place in a House chamber transformed by the pandemic. It was an impassioned debate as lawmakers, most of whom covered their faces with blue surgical masks or homemade swaths of fabric in an array of colors, patterns and glitter, reflected on the effect of the pandemic on their individual districts. Speaker Nancy Pelosi at one point donned purple latex gloves to cast a vote.

Multiple lawmakers who had previously had to isolate outside of Washington after testing positive or being exposed to Covid-19 returned to vote. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, her voice cracking with emotion, said that she dedicated the bill to her sister, who was dying of the disease in a St. Louis hospital.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who has said the measure was far too small and should include aid to struggling states and cities, was the sole Democrat who opposed the bill. Four Republicans voted “no,” while Representative Justin Amash, the chamber’s lone independent, voted present.

As states face a downturn worse than the Great Recession, McConnell suggests they consider bankruptcy.

The current downturn is shaping up to be worse, and bipartisan groups of governors and mayors from around the country have been pleading with Washington for aid to help them keep workers on their payrolls as they grapple with a growing public health and economic crisis.

But Congress did not provide money for state governments in the $484 billion aid package passed by the House on Thursday, after Democrats failed to persuade Republicans to do so, setting up the next political battle over pandemic relief.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, made it clear that he was reluctant to give them federal aid, suggesting that some should consider bankruptcy.

“I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”

It is true that some states, including Illinois, were struggling with enormous pension fund shortfalls before the pandemic sent the markets plummeting, eroding the values of their funds and adding to their current budget woes. But many states and cities that were doing well before the virus hit are now seeing their tax collections fall off a cliff, which could force them to furlough and lay off workers and cut services as the crisis has driven needs higher than usual.

States now do not have the ability to declare bankruptcy to reduce their financial obligations, but Mr. McConnell raised the possibility of letting them do so.

“I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said.

The National Governors Association, a bipartisan group of governors from around the country, wrote federal officials this week pleading for $500 billion to help them make up for lost tax revenues during what they called “the most dramatic contraction of the U.S. economy since World War II.”

“These continuing losses will force states and territories not only to make drastic cuts to the programs we depend on to provide economic security, educational opportunities and public safety, but the national economic recovery will be dramatically hampered,” the group’s chairman, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, wrote with its vice chairman, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat.

Mr. Hogan said in an interview with Politico on Thursday that he thought Mr. McConnell would come to “regret” his remarks. “The last thing we need in the middle of an economic crisis is to have the states all filing bankruptcy all across America and not able to provide services to people who desperately need them,” he said. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a Democrat, was blunter, calling Mr. McConnell’s comments “nuts” in an appearance Thursday on ABC’s “The View.”

Mr. Trump gave ambivalent signals at his White House briefing on Thursday, suggesting that he might be open to offering aid to the states but also saying, “It is interesting that the states that are in trouble do happen to be blue.”

In New York State, where officials were forecasting a shortfall of between $10 billion and $15 billion, Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, wrote in a report this week that the crisis had left “greater uncertainty this year than ever before as to the level of funding the state will be able to provide for school districts, health care providers, local governments and others.”

Mr. McConnell’s staff issued his statement under the heading “Stopping Blue State Bailouts,” which suggested that the top Senate Republican was singling out heavily Democratic states such as California, Illinois and New York, which have been hit hard in the pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo accused Mr. McConnell of hyperpartisanship, calling the “blue-state bailout” label “vicious.”

“How ugly a thought,” Mr. Cuomo said Thursday. “Think of what he is saying. People died — 15,000 people died in New York, but they were predominately Democrats, so why should we help them?”

Wednesday was California’s “deadliest day,” with 115 deaths, though Pence predicts an end by Memorial Day.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said Thursday that the state had experienced its “deadliest day” since the start of the pandemic, with 115 Covid-19 deaths on Wednesday.

That brings the total number of those lost — each one representing an individual and a family “torn asunder,” as Mr. Newsom has repeated in his daily news briefings — to 1,469.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 68 new deaths on Thursday. “Covid-19 is rapidly becoming one of the leading causes of death among L.A. County residents,” Barbara Ferrer, the county’s director of public health, said in a statement.

According to The Times’s tracking, there have been 37,866 confirmed coronavirus cases in the state.

Nonetheless, the White House remains resolutely upbeat. Vice President Mike Pence predicted on Thursday that epidemic will be “largely … behind us” by Memorial Day, on May 25: “Honestly, if you look at the trends today, I think by Memorial Day weekend we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us,” he said on Geraldo Rivera’s Cleveland radio show.

“We’re getting there, America,” Mr. Pence said at the nightly White House news conference.

The California governor was more somber than that. While Mr. Newsom noted that hospitalizations and patients in intensive care had decreased slightly from the day before, he said the number of deaths should serve as a warning that even as the weather warms and Californians may be tempted to flock to beaches or gather outdoors, the virus was still an insidious force.

“Let’s not dream of regretting,” he said. “Stay home to the extent possible.”

He also urged patience for local leaders and other Californians who had asked when the state would ease orders to stay at home. “It’s not a date, it’s an indicator,” Mr. Newsom said, referring to the list of six broad measures his office laid out last week that would determine when it would be safe to loosen some restrictions.

One major issue is that the state will need to significantly ramp up testing capacity, which Mr. Newsom’s office and a state task force have been working on. Legions of contact tracers are also being trained to help track and halt any outbreaks.

Still, Mr. Newsom on Wednesday announced a first modest step in that direction: Hospitals would again be scheduling what are called elective procedures, a term that can include medically necessary procedures like tumor removals.

As another 4.4 million file for unemployment, help is slow to arrive.

Nearly a month after Washington rushed through an emergency package to aid jobless Americans, millions of laid-off workers have still not been able to apply for those benefits — let alone receive them — because of overwhelmed state unemployment systems.

Across the country, states have frantically scrambled to handle a flood of applications and apply a new set of federal rules even as more and more people line up for help. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that another 4.4 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week, bringing the five-week total to more than 26 million.

Nearly one in six American workers has lost a job in recent weeks.

“At all levels, it’s eye-watering numbers,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank Securities. Laid-off workers need money quickly so that they can continue to pay rent and credit card bills and buy groceries, he noted.

Yet according to the Labor Department, only 10 states have started making payments under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which extends coverage to freelancers, self-employed workers and part-timers. Most states have not even completed the system needed to start the process.

States manage their own unemployment insurance programs and set the level of benefits and eligibility rules. Now they are responsible for administering federal emergency benefits that provide payments for an additional 13 weeks, cover previously ineligible workers and add $600 to the regular weekly check.

In Florida, hundreds of thousands of unemployed people have been waiting for weeks for a check. It has taken some as long as that to file.

As Florida’s unemployment website became unusable under the weight of the traffic, the state agreed this month to accept paper applications, a tacit acknowledgment that the system was all but broken. Florida’s breakdown became a national symbol of distress, when footage of a snaking line for those applications outside the public library in Hialeah, a blue-collar city outside Miami, drew wide attention online.

The debacle has become an embarrassment for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. He called the system “cumbersome” last week and acknowledged that only 4 percent of 850,000 pending claims had been paid. He appointed an unemployment czar and signed executive orders waiving some requirements to ease the traffic on the website. The number of paid claims has slowly inched up.

“Florida is a terrible state to be an unemployed person,” said Michele Evermore, an unemployment insurance expert at the National Employment Law Project in Washington. “It’s hard to get in. Once you do it’s easy to get disqualified. The benefit level is way below average. And that was before the crisis.”

After Trump’s rebuke, Georgia’s governor signals he will stick with reopening plans.

Georgia’s Republican governor on Thursday appeared undeterred by a torrent of resistance, led by Mr. Trump, to his plan to allow many businesses to reopen this week.

Less than 24 hours after Mr. Trump said he opposed Gov. Brian Kemp’s strategy, saying that he thought he was acting “too soon,” Mr. Kemp used his Twitter account to publicize a list of frequently asked questions about how Georgia intended to relax its rules.

He gave no indication that he intended to reverse his decision, announced on Monday, for what he described as a measured process meant to bolster the economy. The governor’s plan gives permission to gyms, hair and nail salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors to reopen on Friday. Then, on Monday, restaurants are allowed to resume dine-in service, and movie theaters and other entertainment venues can reopen.

Mr. Trump rebuked Mr. Kemp even more strongly on Thursday evening.

“I wasn’t happy with Brian Kemp,” Mr. Trump said at the White House briefing, adding that while he had told Mr. Kemp to do what he thought was necessary, he believed that the governor’s plan to reopen Georgia’s businesses did not follow the federal guidelines that his administration detailed last week.

“I don’t want this thing to flare up because you are deciding to do something that is not in the guidelines,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Kemp’s decision was immediately assailed, as public health experts, the mayors of Georgia’s largest cities and others warned that it stood to have perilous consequences. Business owners who were otherwise eager to revive their livelihoods said they would hold off. Then Mr. Trump added his voice.,

The death toll in Georgia stood at 872 on Thursday, having risen by more than 100 since Mr. Kemp announced his reopening plans on Monday. And the state has now confirmed 21,512 cases, the Georgia Department of Public Health reported, up from 18,947 on Monday.

Mr. Trump’s head-spinning criticism of Mr. Kemp’s plan has sown confusion among Georgia Republicans, who saw Mr. Kemp, a full-throated Trump fan, win the governorship in 2018 on the strength of a presidential endorsement. It has also sent a confusing message to other Republican governors who are confronting politically fraught decisions over whether they should loosen their own restrictions in the coming days.

On Thursday, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, which borders Georgia, said he would extend his state’s stay-at-home order until May 8, saying on Twitter, “we need to slow the virus before we can ease restrictions.”

Mr. Kemp acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump in a series of Twitter posts after the president’s briefing. And while he praised Mr. Trump for his “bold leadership and insight,” he gave no indication he was reconsidering his decision.

“Our next measured step is driven by data and guided by state public health officials,” he wrote.

States around the nation have been trying to balance combating a public health crisis with the need to ameliorate a growing economic crisis. In some states, small protests — with the support of some conservative groups — have urged governors to ease restrictions. But polls have found that Americans are more fearful of easing restrictions too early than too late, and some business leaders have cautioned against moving too quickly to reopen.

On Wednesday, Mayor Carolyn Goodman of Las Vegas called for the city’s casinos, restaurants and other businesses to immediately reopen but declined to provide any guidance on social distancing measures that might protect employees and customers.

“They better figure it out,” she said in an interview on CNN, during which she said she had offered the city “to be a control group” for relaxing restrictions.

The mayor, an independent, does not have the power to reopen the city’s economy, but Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a Democrat, and the largest union representing Las Vegas casino workers swiftly condemned her comments. “I will not allow the citizens of Nevada, our Nevadans, to be used as a control group,” Mr. Sisolak said.

A remdesivir drug trial was terminated because of a lack of patients, contrary to initial reports.

An abstract published in error on the W.H.O. website suggested that an experimental drug, remdesivir, was not helping coronavirus patients in a trial conducted in China.

The abstract was quickly removed by W.H.O. officials, but not before Stat, a medical news site, reported the findings.

In fact, the trial was terminated because not enough patients could be enrolled and before any real conclusions could be drawn, Gilead said on Thursday.

“Because this study was terminated early due to low enrollment, it was underpowered to enable statistically meaningful conclusions,” said Chris Ridley, a company spokesman. “As such, the study results are inconclusive.”

The data had not been peer-reviewed and would undergo further revision, he added.

Remdesivir is under investigation in several trials as a treatment for Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. The study in China was supposed to enroll 453 patients, but just 158 were treated with remdesivir and 78 got a placebo.

When clinical trials are planned, investigators establish the number of participants required to see an intended effect. In this trial, outcomes were to include a number of measures, including hospital discharge and death.

The terminated study said there were no “clinical or virological benefits,” Stat reported. More than 11 percent of those taking remdesivir had to stop because of adverse events, compared with 5.1 percent of those taking the placebo.

As the pandemic emerged, many placed their hopes in remdesivir, which was designed as a broad-spectrum antiviral and was tested in the Ebola epidemic five years ago, with disappointing results.

Hundreds of patients have gotten the drug from Gilead outside of clinical trials, under legal exceptions for compassionate use. Two optimistic case reports have been published in the influential New England Journal of Medicine.

Other randomized trials are underway in the United States and China, including one by the National Institutes of Health. Early results are expected soon.

A lawmaker says she wants to hold hearings on the ouster of a key health official.

Representative Anna G. Eshoo, the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, said on Thursday that she planned to hold hearings into the forced departure of Dr. Rick Bright as the director of a key agency involved in developing a vaccine to combat the virus.

“I know that life is difficult for members to travel, but we can’t let that get in the way, and I’m sure that other members would want to be a part of a hearing as well,” Ms. Eshoo, Democrat of California, told Maggie Haberman of The Times. She helped create the agency that Dr. Bright oversaw, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Dr. Bright was abruptly pushed from his post this week, leading him to issue a remarkable public statement accusing the Trump administration of putting cronyism over science, especially in the promotion of two malaria drugs that the president has touted as “game changers” in the treatment of the virus.

Ms. Eshoo said she would like to hear from were the secretary of health and human services, Alex M. Azar II, and an assistant secretary, Dr. Robert P. Kadlec, who supervised Dr. Bright, among other witnesses.

“I think the American people deserve to know what happened here, because all of our collective fate rested on” the development of a vaccine, she said.

The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, formally requested that the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general also look into Dr. Bright’s removal and abrupt transfer to the National Institutes of Health.

“Removing Dr. Bright in the midst of a pandemic would raise serious concerns under any circumstances, but his allegations that political considerations influenced this decision heighten those concerns and demand full accountability,” Mr. Pallone wrote.

In his statement, Dr. Bright said, “Contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit. While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.”

Officials at H.H.S. have disputed Dr. Bright’s account and insisted there were problems with his management style. But they have so far refused to say so on the record.

A performance review dated last September and signed by Dr. Kadlec concluded, “Dr. Bright continues to lead change in BARDA with deftness and enthusiasm.”

Ms. Eshoo said that she had worked with Dr. Bright and that he is “a thoroughbred professional.”

“This is a terrible, swift sword that has come at science, and Dr. Bright,” she said.

More than one in five people who were tested for virus antibodies in N.Y.C. had them.

The results come from a state program that randomly tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State this week. Nearly 14 percent of those tests came back positive, he said.

If those numbers translate to the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.4 million people statewide, have already been infected. These numbers are far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus itself that the state has recorded.

Mr. Cuomo declined to speculate further on what the preliminary data might mean. He said its main use would to provide a baseline for tracking changes in the infection rate. (Supermarket customers do not constitute a random sample of the population.)

By the time New York City confirmed its first case on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city, according to a model of the disease by researchers at Northeastern University.

On Thursday, the governor said 438 more people had died, according to official state figures, a number that remained troublingly high as the state’s death toll hit 15,740. The number of virus patients entering hospitals has stayed around 1,350 per day for the last three days. That is down from around 2,000 per day last week.

He also announced that nursing homes in the state would be investigated to ensure that they were following strict rules put in place during the outbreak; facilities found to be in violation of those rules could be subject to fines, or lose their licenses entirely. More than 3,500 people have died in nursing homes, according to state data — roughly 20 percent of all the state’s deaths.

The findings are from a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the characteristics of thousands of Covid-19 patients admitted between March 1 and April 4 to a dozen hospitals in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County that are part of Northwell Health. The paper was written by scientists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research arm of Northwelll; the senior author cautioned that the study was observational in nature, and there was no comparison group with which to contrast frailties or outcomes.

Researchers found dozens of children and teenagers were hospitalized with the virus, but survived. Women showed a clear survival edge — fewer of them were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive. One in five of hospital stays ended in death. The mortality rate for those placed on ventilators, 88 percent, was higher than some other early case reports, which found death rates of 50 percent to almost 70 percent, have shown.

But given that the length of hospital stay for the Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it’s possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that they were unlikely to be helped by any treatment.

Like several other reports on smaller patient groups from area hospitals, it indicated that obesity, as well as high blood pressure and diabetes, were common risk factors for severe Covid-19 disease requiring hospitalization. One of the most striking findings was that a mere 6 percent of the hospitalized patients had no underlying health conditions at all.

840 crew members of the Theodore Roosevelt tested positive for the virus, the Navy said.

The Navy said Thursday that it had completed virus testing on all 4,938 crew members of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, with 840 people, or 17 percent, testing positive.

The Navy announcement comes as top Pentagon leaders are preparing to unveil a report on the handling of the virus on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which led to the removal of the ship’s captain, Brett E. Crozier, and the eventual resignation of the acting Navy secretary. The crisis aboard the Roosevelt gripped the Navy in recent weeks.

Of the total cases, 88 sailors have recovered and 4,234 have moved ashore, the Navy said. Four sailors are in the hospital with the virus. The ship is docked in Guam.

Here are tips on tending to your budget.

You may be wondering how to cut some expenses right now. One way is to figure out who owes you money from the many services you pay for but aren’t in business right now. Think day camps, gyms and airlines. But when is it fair to ask for your money back? Here are some guidelines to help.

What’s happening around the world? Check it out.

Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Peter Baker, Karen Barrow, Pam Belluck, Alan Blinder, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Patricia Cohen, Helene Cooper, Michael Cooper, Jill Cowan, Sheri Fink, Jacey Fortin, Thomas Fuller, Maggie Haberman, Jan Hoffman, Shawn Hubler, Carl Hulse, Lara Jakes, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gina Kolata, Patricia Mazzei, Andy Newman, Roni Caryn Rabin, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Dionne Searcey, Eileen Sullivan, Sabrina Tavernise and Neil Vigdor.