Coronavirus Live Updates: White House Says Task Force Will Wind Down

The White House will wind down the coronavirus task force in the weeks to come.

President Trump said on Tuesday that the White House’s coronavirus task force would be shut down and replaced with “something in a different form” as the country moved into what he called Phase 2 of a response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 70,000 Americans.

“We will have something in a different form,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he toured a Honeywell mask manufacturing plant in Arizona, where he wore safety goggles but no mask. The president praised the work of the task force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, but said it was time to focus on safety and reopening the country.

“I think we are looking at Phase 2, and we’re looking at other phases,” Mr. Trump said after he was asked whether it was a good idea to shut down the task force while the virus was still spreading through the country. He said that Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the virus response coordinator for the task force, and other top public officials would still be involved in the efforts to address the pandemic after the task force disbanded.

“They will be, and so will other doctors, and so will other experts in the field,” he said, adding, “We are bringing our country back.”

Administration officials have been telling staff members of the task force that the White House plans to wind down the operation in the weeks to come, despite growing evidence that the crisis is still raging.

The news that the White House was planning to end the task force came as the rate of new infections and deaths was falling in New York but was continuing to rise in much of the rest of the country. A number of projections suggest that deaths will remain at elevated levels for months and are likely to increase as states ease their stay-at-home orders.

The task force’s demise would only intensify questions about whether the administration is adequately organized to address the complex, life-or-death decisions related to the virus and give adequate voice to scientists and public health experts in making policy.

After The New York Times reported that the administration was thinking of winding down the task force, Mr. Pence acknowledged that the White House was “having conversations” about it.

“We’re having conversations about that, and about what the proper time is for the task force to complete its work and for the ongoing efforts to take place on an agency-by-agency level,” Mr. Pence told reporters, adding that the task force could wrap up its work by early June.

While the task force’s advice has sometimes been swept aside by Mr. Trump and its recommendations for criteria on reopening businesses was defied by a number of states, it has served as the closest thing the White House has for running a centralized response to the pandemic.

While the task force met Tuesday at the White House, a meeting on Monday was canceled, and a Saturday session, a staple of recent months, was not held. Mr. Trump has stopped linking his news briefings to the task force’s meetings.

It was not clear exactly what might replace the task force. A group led by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been functioning as something of a shadow task force. That group is likely to continue working; among other issues, Mr. Kushner is said to be discussing a new role for someone to oversee development of therapeutic treatments.

From its start in January, the task force has been rived with divisions. Health Secretary Alex M. Azar II has been criticized for excluding key administration officials and was ousted as the leader of the group; he was replaced by Mr. Pence in late February. Mr. Trump took over the public briefings, often turning them into 90-minute to two-hour moments to air grievances, praise his own handling of the crisis and offer up his own prescriptions.

A federal scientist said he was pressured to steer contracts to clients of a well-connected consultant.

A federal scientist who says he was ousted from his job amid a dispute over an unproven coronavirus treatment pushed by President Trump said Tuesday that top administration officials repeatedly pressured him to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a well-connected consultant.

Rick Bright, who was director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his removal in April, said in a formal whistle-blower complaint that he had been protesting “cronyism” and contract abuse since 2017.

Questionable contracts have gone to “companies with political connections to the administration,” the complaint said, including a drug company tied to a friend of Jared Kushner’s, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. It said Dr. Bright was retaliated against by his superiors.

The 89-page complaint, filed with the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers, also said Dr. Bright “encountered opposition” from department superiors — including Alex M. Azar II, the Health and Human Services secretary — when he pushed as early as January for the necessary resources to develop drugs and vaccines to counter the emerging pandemic.

The report provides a window into the inner workings of BARDA, a tiny agency created in 2006 as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks. It partners with industry in developing “medical countermeasures” that can be stockpiled by the federal government to combat biological or chemical attacks and pandemic threats.

BARDA has spent billions of dollars on contracts with dozens of different suppliers, including major pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotechnology firms.

Comparing recent deaths to historical figures hints at real toll in each state.

As the coronavirus pandemic cuts through the country, it is leaving behind large numbers of deaths that surpasses those of recent history. A New York Times analysis of state data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention begins to offer a picture of just how many lives have been lost, both as a result of the coronavirus and fears about using an overwhelmed health care system.

A handful of states account for the bulk of the death surge across the United States, the analysis found. In New York City, for example, since mid-March there have been 23,000 more deaths than normal. Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey have also seen more than 1,000 deaths more than the usual figure between March 15 and April 11.

In a larger group of states, including California, Florida and Texas, the increases in deaths were more modest during the early phase of the pandemic, but death rates are still higher than normal.

In other states, including Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri, deaths are actually below the expected trend. That may be because of lags in data reporting. But it could also be that stay-at-home orders have lowered death rates from those caused by car crashes or the flu.

An Amazon worker on Staten Island dies of virus complications.

An employee at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island died after contracting the virus, the company said on Tuesday, weeks after the building was the scene of a protest over what workers said were inadequate safety precautions.

The unidentified employee, who was in his late 60s, was last at work at the warehouse on April 5, the company said. He was confirmed to have the virus six days later and had been in quarantine since then.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of an associate at our site in Staten Island, N.Y.,” Kristen Kish, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues.”

The Staten Island worker is at least the third Amazon employee who the company has confirmed died of complications of the virus. The others worked in Hawthorne, Calif., and Tracy, Calif. Amazon said that an unspecified number of other workers at the Staten Island warehouse had tested positive for the virus.

The Verge, which first reported the death of the Staten Island employee, said that at least 29 workers at the warehouse had become sick.

Amazon has faced pressure over whether it has done enough to protect its hundreds of thousands of workers from being exposed to the virus as they continue to pack and ship products to millions of Americans during the pandemic.

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, informed Amazon last month that her office was investigating whether the company had violated federal worker-safety laws and New York’s whistle-blower protections by firing an employee at the Staten Island warehouse who challenged the company over its response to the outbreak.

As outbreaks shutter meatpacking plants, meat is scarcer in grocery aisles and drive-throughs.

Hundreds of Wendy’s restaurants have run out of hamburgers. Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, is limiting the amount of ground beef and pork that customers can buy at some stores. And Costco, where shoppers typically buy in bulk, has placed a three-product cap on purchases of fresh beef, poultry and pork.

Over the past month, dozens of meatpacking plants across the country have shut down because of outbreaks, raising concerns about the U.S. meat supply. Now, the effects of those disruptions are reaching customers at grocery stores and fast-food drive-throughs, where certain types of meat are becoming harder to find.

On Monday, nearly one in five Wendy’s restaurants — a total of 1,043 locations — were completely sold out of beef products, including burgers, according to an analysis by the financial firm Stephens, which examined every Wendy’s online menu in the United States.

“Some of our menu items may be temporarily limited at some restaurants in this current environment,” a Wendy’s spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is widely known that beef suppliers across North America are currently facing production challenges.”

At the same time, some grocery stores have announced limits on meat purchases. In addition to Costco and Kroger, Hy-Vee said on Tuesday that it would restrict customers to four packages of fresh beef, ground beef, pork and chicken.

Stores are also anticipating that certain products may become more difficult to find. A Wegman’s spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the chain “may not have every product cut or variety available for the next few weeks.”

The reality of the virus in the U.S. is an unrelenting crush of cases and deaths.

While the worst-hit parts of the United States have seen new infections recede and hospitalizations drop after strict social distancing measures were put in place, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere in the country, providing a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections.

Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith and Amy Harmon report that any notion that the threat is fading appears to be magical thinking, at odds with what the latest numbers show.

Coronavirus in the United States now looks like this: More than a month has passed since there was a day with fewer than 1,000 deaths from the virus. Almost every day, at least 25,000 new cases are identified, meaning that the total in the United States — which has the highest number of known cases in the world with more than a million — is expanding by 2 percent to 4 percent daily.

Rural towns that one month ago were unscathed are suddenly hot spots. The virus is rampaging through nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons, killing the medically vulnerable and the poor. New outbreaks keep emerging, an ominous harbinger of what a full reopening of the economy could bring.

A panoramic view of the country reveals a grim and distressing picture.

“If you include New York, it looks like a plateau moving down,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. “If you exclude New York, it’s a plateau slowly moving up.”

It is not just the major cities. Smaller towns and rural counties in the Midwest and South have suddenly been hit hard, underscoring the capriciousness of the pandemic.

Dakota County, Neb., which has the third-most cases per capita in the country, had no known cases as recently as April 11. Now the county is a hot zone.

Still waiting on your stimulus payment? Here’s what to do.

It’s been weeks since people started receiving coronavirus relief payments. You’ve checked and rechecked your eligibility, just to be sure. But still, no $1,200 stimulus payment — or anything else — has arrived in your bank account or your mailbox.

Tens of millions of people have already received their payments, but many other Americans are still waiting or wondering where their checks are. There are a lot of reasons you could be among those still waiting, even if the government has removed some of the hurdles it initially set up.

So what do you do if your money hasn’t arrived? Ron Lieber of The Times has some tips, from updating your banking information to searching in old accounts to, yes, concerns about fraud. You can run through his checklist here.

Wisconsin’s top court sounds skeptical of the state’s stay-at-home order.

Members of Wisconsin’s top court on Tuesday sounded skeptical of the state health secretary’s authority to issue a stay-at-home order, a possible sign that the court may strike down sweeping restrictions at the request of the Republican-controlled Legislature.

At a hearing conducted over video chat on Tuesday, members of the seven-person court’s conservative majority asked tough questions of the lawyer defending Andrea Palm, the state’s top health official who had issued the order last month that forbade most travel, closed schools and ordered Wisconsin residents to stay in their homes except for permitted reasons.

Colin Roth, an assistant attorney general, was able to finish just one sentence in defense of the order before one of the justices started in on his claims.

“Isn’t it the very definition of tyranny for one person to order people to be imprisoned for going to work, among other ordinarily lawful activities?” asked Justice Rebecca Bradley, who was appointed by Scott Walker, the Republican former governor, before she was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Later, Justice Daniel Kelly, who is serving out the end of his term after losing an election to a liberal challenger last month, got Mr. Roth to concede that he was arguing for Ms. Palm, the state’s acting health secretary, to have broad authority.

“Your position is: The secretary can identify behavior that is not otherwise criminal, and she can — all by herself — sit down at her computer keyboard, write up a description of behavior, and make it criminal, correct?” Mr. Kelly asked. Mr. Roth said this was indeed true, though he argued that the Legislature had given her that power.

The case is being closely watched, as it could be the first statewide stay-at-home order to be struck down by a court. Many states have begun to ease restrictions in response to growing unrest among residents about the economic fallout from the coronavirus and states’ response. A poll conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that a majority of Americans oppose reopening most businesses.

Tensions ran high at the 90-minute hearing, with Mr. Roth, the lawyer, arguing that “people will die” if the justices strike down the order and nothing replaces it. It is not clear when the justices will make a ruling in the case, but they met in a closed session after the public arguments.

Republican members of the Legislature filed the lawsuit on April 21. Their lawyer, Ryan J. Walsh, asked the judges to invalidate Ms. Palm’s order, saying that she had overstepped her authority and that its bans and exemptions were arbitrary, even if the health agency’s goal was a noble one.

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack closed the hearing by thanking the lawyers for their insightful arguments.

“We are in the middle of a pandemic, which all sides agree on,” Ms. Roggensack said.

The governor of Texas told lawmakers he expected the virus to spread as businesses reopened.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas told lawmakers in a phone call last week that he expected the virus to continue spreading after the state reopened, and that the goal had never been to get infections down to zero, according to a recording of the call released by progressive activists on Tuesday. The remarks outraged Democrats, who said the comments were a sign that the governor knew he was putting Texans at risk as he pushed to restart the economy.

Mr. Abbott, a Republican, had the call with state legislators and members of Congress on Friday, the same day he ended the state’s stay-at-home order and allowed shopping malls, restaurants and other businesses to reopen at a limited capacity.

In a portion of the leaked audio, Mr. Abbott says, “How do we know reopening businesses won’t result in faster spread or more cases of Covid-19?”

He continues: “Listen, the fact of the matter is, pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that whenever you have a reopening, whether you want to call it a reopening of business or just a reopening of society in the aftermath of something like this, it actually will lead to an increase in spread. It’s almost ipso facto. The more that you have people out there, the greater the possibility there is for transmission. And so the goal never has been to get transmission of Covid-19 down to zero.”

The governor’s remarks echo similar statements he has made about containing the spread of the virus. They are also in line with comments from public health experts, who have repeatedly said that as the state reopens and as social distancing eases, the number of cases will go up. Some experts say that can be managed through testing and case monitoring; others say Texas is reopening too soon.

“Governor Abbott finally admitted that prematurely opening Texas is going to lead to more cases and more deaths,” Manny Garcia, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott defended his approach.

“I think everybody recognizes — it’s been said frequently — that as a society does begin to open up again, it could lead to increased infections,” the governor said. “And that’s exactly why we have this surge team in place. And that is, if infections get out of control, we will be able to quickly respond to it.”

The governor on Tuesday expanded the list of businesses allowed to reopen, saying that hair and nail salons, barbershops and tanning salons could resume operations with restrictions on Friday, and gyms on May 18.

The expansion represented a shift by the governor, who had previously said he wanted to see two weeks of data to ensure there were no flare-ups before reopening any of those businesses.

“The trajectory in Texas looks good,” Mr. Abbott said.

As social restrictions begin to ease, hear from the health care workers who are still on the front lines.

Health care workers across the country continue to risk their lives to care for virus patients. The Times has collected stories from nurses, doctors and E.M.T.s from around the world about what keeps them up at night and what inspires them to keep fighting.

More than 1,600 previously undisclosed deaths were reported at nursing homes in New York.

By May 3, according to the new data, 4,813 people had died of the virus at nursing homes. The data did not include nursing home residents who died in hospitals.

The number of deaths of nursing home residents, either at homes or in hospitals, was 3,025 on April 28, and approximately 100 more people died at nursing homes from April 29 to May 2, according to state figures.

A spokesman for the department said officials had revised the state’s system for gathering and evaluating data from homes, and figures would probably continue to be revised.

The hardest-hit homes have been in New York City and its suburbs. David C. Grabowski, a Harvard University researcher who studies nursing homes, said that when the final data was in, nursing homes would probably account for about half of all Covid-19 deaths in every state, as they already do in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, among others.

Nursing homes long fought against the release of death counts for individual facilities, arguing that a high death count might not indicate poor infection control and might scare families unnecessarily. In New York State, even with the new probable deaths added, nursing homes now account for only about 25 percent of the state’s fatalities. On Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo reported 230 more deaths overall in the state.

In New Jersey, more than half of the virus-related deaths have involved people living in long-term care facilities, the governor said on Tuesday.

As schools weigh when to reopen, new research suggests children can transmit the virus to adults.

Fewer children get infected than adults, and most of those who do have mild symptoms, if any. But answering the question of whether they transmit the virus to adults is key to deciding whether and when to reopen schools, a step that President Trump has urged states to consider before the summer.

Two new studies offer compelling evidence that children can transmit the virus. Neither proved it, but the evidence was strong enough to suggest that schools should be kept closed for now, many epidemiologists who were not involved in the research said.

Reopening schools may nudge the epidemic’s reproduction number — the number of new infections estimated to stem from a single case — to dangerous levels in many U.S. communities, epidemiologists warned after reviewing the results from the new studies.

In one study, published in the journal Science, a team analyzed data from two cities in China — Wuhan and Shanghai — and found that children were about a third as susceptible to infection as adults were. But when schools were open, they found, children had about three times as many contacts as adults, and three times as many opportunities to become infected, essentially evening out their risk.

Based on their data, the researchers estimated that closing schools is not enough on its own to stop an outbreak, but it can reduce the surge by about 40 to 60 percent and slow the epidemic’s course.

The second study, by a group of German researchers, was more straightforward. The team tested children and adults and found that children who test positive harbor just as much virus as adults do — sometimes more — and so, presumably, are just as infectious.

In New York City, 15 children, many of whom had fallen ill with the virus, have recently been hospitalized with a mysterious syndrome that doctors do not yet fully understand but that has also been reported in several European countries, health officials announced on Monday night. Many of the children, ages 2 to 15, have shown symptoms associated with toxic shock or Kawasaki disease, a rare illness in children that involves inflammation of the blood vessels, including coronary arteries, the city’s health department said.

A virus protest at Michigan’s Capitol prompted an effort to ban guns.

The Michigan State Capitol Commission searched for a way to ban guns from the statehouse after armed protesters gathered inside last week to protest the governor’s stay-at-home order, but the commission determined on Tuesday that it cannot supersede state law.

“We do not like seeing guns brought into the building — loaded guns — and I’m a Second Amendment advocate,” John Truscott, a Republican and the vice chairman of the commission, said in a radio interview.

Mr. Truscott told WWJ NewsRadio that a decision to ban guns would have to come from the Legislature or by voter initiative. It is legal to openly carry a firearm in public in Michigan. The six-member commission believes that a 1931 state law allows people to carry concealed weapons inside the building with a license, Mr. Truscott told The Detroit News.

The debate comes after hundreds of people gathered outside the Capitol on Thursday, demanding an end to Michigan’s state of emergency and stay-at-home order. A state senator shared a photo of protesters carrying guns in the Senate public gallery.

“Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” State Senator Dayna Polehanki wrote on Twitter. “Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them.”

Pfizer and BioNTech said their experimental vaccine began human trials on Monday.

Two of the many projects underway to develop a vaccine announced that they had taken significant steps forward, with both using a nontraditional approach based on genetic technology.

They aim to use the patient’s own cells as factories to churn out a protein that will stimulate the immune system.

Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech said their experimental vaccine began human trials in the United States on Monday. If the tests succeed, the vaccine could be ready for emergency use as early as September.

Researchers at two Harvard-affiliated hospitals reported that, based on promising results in mice, they have two vaccine candidates being manufactured for use in human trials that may begin later this year.

Unlike traditional vaccines that use killed or weakened viruses to provoke an immune response, these methods use genetic material that directs the patient’s cells to make a protein found on the virus. That protein should set off alarms in the immune system and train it to fight.

The Pfizer-BioNTech approach injects messenger RNA, which contains a blueprint for a virus protein.

The other method, developed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and the Massachusetts General Hospital, uses a harmless virus to carry DNA with instructions for making a virus protein into the patient’s cells.

Racing against the virus, researchers say many approaches are needed and that ideally, multiple efforts will succeed, because many manufacturers will be required to meet the urgent global need for a vaccine.

Quarantine Diaries: Giving birth during the pandemic.

Are there more symptoms to be aware of?

Dermatologists say that painful red or purple lesions on your toes should prompt testing for the virus, even though many patients have no other symptoms. Here’s what you need to know about chilblains and other symptoms.

The virus reached France in December, doctors say, rewriting the epidemic’s timeline. Read more from our global team.

Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Katie Benner, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Julie Bosman, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Michael Crowley, Catie Edmonson, Nicholas Fandos, Manny Fernandez, Joseph Goldstein, Maggie Haberman, Amy Harmon, Lara Jakes, Cecilia Kang, John Leland, Ron Lieber, Neil MacFarquhar, Jesse McKinley, Zach Montague, Heather Murphy, Andy Newman, Elian Peltier, Alan Rappeport, Simon Romero, Marc Santora, Michael D. Shear, Knvul Sheikh, Jeanna Smialek, Mitch Smith, Matt Stevens, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Vanessa Swales, Jim Tankersley, Noah Weiland, Michael Wilson and Carl Zimmer.