Coronavirus Updates: Jobless Claims Surpass 16 Million; Aid Package Stalls in Senate

As millions more Americans lose their jobs, more federal aid is uncertain.

The harsh economic toll of the social distancing measures put in place to curb the spread of the pandemic was underscored on Thursday when the Labor Department reported that another 6.6 million people had filed for unemployment benefits last week.

That brought the number of Americans who had lost their jobs over the past three weeks to more than 16 million, which is more job losses than the most recent recession produced over two years. The dire figures suggested that Washington’s recent $2 trillion relief package was not working quickly enough to halt the economic devastation and the hemorrhaging of jobs in nearly every type of industry.

But efforts to bolster the relief package stalled in Washington. The Trump administration asked Congress to quickly approve $250 billion in spending to replenish a new loan program for distressed small businesses, but it hit a roadblock in the Senate on Thursday morning after Republicans and Democrats clashed over what to include.

Democrats want to double the size of the new emergency relief bill by adding $100 billion for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments, which are facing enormous shortfalls as the outbreak drives their expenses up and their tax collections down.

Republicans argued that the small business program had a more urgent need for funds, and that additional demands for aid could be addressed in future legislation.

With Congress in recess and lawmakers scattered around the country, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, tried to push through the small business loan funding during a procedural session, a maneuver that would have required all senators to agree. But Democrats objected.

The House, which is scheduled to convene Friday in a procedural session, is not expected to try to pass either party’s proposal.

With help from Congress uncertain, the Federal Reserve on Thursday took action on its own round of emergency measures to help the economy. The central bank said it would use Treasury Department funds to buy municipal bonds and expand its purchases of corporate bonds. The efforts are aimed at shoring up companies as well as state and local governments, whose budgets are strained.

Positive coronavirus tests rise with age, White House data shows.

The White House coronavirus task force released a breakdown of testing data on Thursday, revealing that older Americans who are tested for the virus are more likely to test positive than other age groups.

Among people who were tested:

• 11 percent of those under 25 were positive.

• 17 percent of those between 25 and 45 were positive.

• 21 percent of those between 45 and 65 were positive.

• 22 percent of those between 65 and 85 were positive.

• 24 percent of those over 85 were positive.

Tests for the coronavirus are provided if people show symptoms such as a dry cough, fever or shortness of breath. Women are slightly more likely to get tested than men, although men seem to be more susceptible to the coronavirus, said Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House. Among women who were tested, 16 percent were positive; 23 percent of men who were tested had coronavirus infections.

The data, while disturbing, does not come entirely as a surprise. Similar trends have been observed in China and Italy, where men were both infected and succumbed to the coronavirus at higher rates than women.

“To all of our men out there, no matter what age group, if you have symptoms, you should be tested,” Dr. Birx said.

But one American man did not seem all that excited about wide-scale testing: President Trump.

The president expressed reluctance to wait for comprehensive national testing before reopening the country for business and social life again. While he boasted that testing has increased drastically in recent days, he said it would be implausible to expect that the whole country could be screened for the virus as a condition of restoring normal life.

“Do you need it? No,” he said at his daily briefing. “Is it nice? Yes. We’re talking 325 million people. That’s not going to happen, as you can imagine.”

Even though more than 1,000 people are now dying every day in the United States, new infections have slowed in places where stringent measures have been in place for more than two weeks, offering some hope.

OPEC and Russia reach a deal to cut oil production amid lower demand.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and others including Russia on Thursday reached an agreement to temporarily cut large volumes of production, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

OPEC and the other oil-producing countries agreed to cut about 10 million barrels a day, or about 10 percent from normal production levels, in May and June, said this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made official.

Possible further trims could come from a meeting of the Group of 20 nations on Friday.

The Saudis have been engaged in a price war with Russia after Moscow refused to go along with a Saudi proposal in early March to trim output to deal with the effects of the pandemic. The spat threatened to swamp oil markets with vast oversupplies of crude.

Still, crude oil prices fell sharply on Thursday afternoon, in part because the production cuts were not expected to offset the fact that slowing economies and virus-related shutdowns have dampened demand for oil.

Stocks rose on Thursday after the Federal Reserve announced an expansion of its emergency lending powers in another bid to backstop the U.S. economy, but the gains faded in the afternoon after oil prices fell and shares of energy companies followed.

Still, the S&P 500 rose about 1.5 percent, bringing its gains this week to 12 percent. Markets in the U.S. are closed on Friday, ahead of Easter.

New York State and Pennsylvania set single-day records.

The number of patients hospitalized with the virus in New York State on Wednesday rose by only 200 from the previous day, the governor said Thursday, the smallest increase since before the statewide lockdown, even as he announced that 799 more people — another bleak record — had died.

The state’s fatality count increased to 7,067. For the second consecutive day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo compared the toll of the virus to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, calling the outbreak a “silent explosion that ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.”

Although the governor said that some data, like the shrinking number of hospital admissions, suggested that New York was making headway, he warned against relaxing compliance with restrictions.

“The moment you stop following the policies, you will go right back and see that number shoot through the roof,” Mr. Cuomo.

At the same time, other New York officials have begun to cautiously envision an eventual return to some normalcy.

With transmission still widespread, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said Thursday that he thought the city could move as early as mid-May to the next stage: one with low-level spread of the virus, in which cases could be more easily traced.

“We can say that it’s time to start planning for the next phase very overtly,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference.

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey on Thursday cited progress in the fight against the virus, even as he reported that another 198 people in the state had died.

In Pennsylvania, health officials on Thursday announced 1,989 new cases for a total of 18,228, the largest single-day jump so far. The number of cases in the state has doubled in a week, up from around 7,000 on April 2. The number of known deaths has also surged more than threefold in the same period, to 338 from 90.

At a White House briefing on Wednesday night, Vice President Mike Pence said Philadelphia had emerged as “an area of particular concern,” though local officials have pushed back against characterizing the city as a hot spot.

The outbreak spreads to the South, ‘a uniquely vulnerable population.’

With the virus spreading quickly across the South and expected to peak there in the next few weeks, public health experts said they were especially concerned about the toll it might take on an already vulnerable and at-risk population.

In the South, particularly in rural areas, dozens of hospitals have shuttered over the last decade. There are fewer insurance options for the poor, and the region has entrenched poverty and health issues, including high rates of diabetes and other ailments that worsen the effects of Covid-19.

Six of the nation’s poorest states are in the South, and the region is home to seven of the 10 unhealthiest states, according to the latest annual ranking by the United Health Foundation, which takes into account a mix of public health policy, environmental conditions and behaviors.

“I really don’t think we can say strongly enough that we are a uniquely vulnerable population here,” Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, said in a recent briefing.

Critics said governors who delayed issuing orders to keep residents at home created a disadvantage in confronting the pandemic. All but one of the southern states has since announced shelter-in-place orders, with Arkansas the lone holdout.

California’s governor defends his decision to send ventilators to other states.

California’s decision to ship hundreds of ventilators to other states this week has been met with alarm by some local officials, who expressed concern about a shortage.

Earlier this week, workers packed the equipment for heavily hit states like New York and New Jersey and wrote messages of support on the boxes. “Prayers from the West Coast,” one read.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said a total of 500 ventilators would be split among Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Nevada, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. He described the shipments as a loan.

But in places like Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, officials expressed concern about a “fragile” supply chain. Hospitals there were anxiously preparing for a shortage in ventilators, they said.

Riverside County has been among the hardest hit in California, with more than 1,100 cases, at least 32 deaths and an outbreak at a nursing home that forced evacuations this week after a beleaguered and sickened staff failed to show up two days in a row.

County officials said this week that the state had denied its request for ventilators, and that a second one was pending.

At his daily news briefing on Thursday, Mr. Newsom sought to allay those concerns and pushed back against the idea that the state was neglecting its own needs, although he did not name Riverside or Santa Clara Counties.

“It was the right thing to do, and it was the responsible thing to do as Americans,” he said. “We can’t just sit on assets when we could save lives in other states.”

Mr. Newsom also said he was encouraged by — but not drawing too many conclusions from — the state’s first drop in the number of coronavirus patients who were being treated in intensive care units.

He said there were 1,132 people receiving intensive care as of Thursday, a 1.9 percent decrease from the day before.

“One data point is not a trend,” he warned. “One data point is not a headline, so I caution anybody to read too much into that one point of data, but nonetheless it is encouraging and it just again reinforces the incredible work that all of you are doing.”

The modeling curve of coronavirus cases, he said, had been “bent” by the efforts of Californians who have been following suggested practices like staying indoors, avoiding other people and washing their hands.

A Louisiana lawmaker becomes the latest state legislator to die from the virus.

A Louisiana state representative died this week from the coronavirus, according to his son, the latest sign that the pandemic is making incursions into the nation’s state legislatures.

The representative, Reggie Paul Bagala, was elected last year to represent Jefferson and Lafourche Parishes.

Mr. Bagala, a conservative businessman who also worked in local government, had been on a ventilator at Ochsner St. Anne Hospital in Raceland, La., according to his son, Tristan Paul Bagala, who had chronicled his father’s battle with the virus on Facebook. He was 54, according to Nola.com.

Mr. Bagala was at least the second state lawmaker nationwide to die of the virus.

On April 3, Bob Glanzer, a Republican state representative from South Dakota, died at Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center in Sioux Falls. He was 74 and had served in the South Dakota House of Representatives since 2017, according to Gov. Kristi Noem.

Late last month, Isaac Robinson, a first-term Democratic state representative from Michigan, died at 44. A lawyer who had worked in the labor movement, he represented Hamtramck and parts of Detroit.

Mr. Robinson’s mother, Rose Mary C. Robinson, who was herself a former state representative, told The Associated Press that although no cause was given for her son’s death, she suspected he died of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. She said he had not been tested for the virus, but had been taken to the hospital for breathing problems.

Cruise ship passengers outside Miami face a 14-day quarantine at sea.

Thirteen cruise ship passengers who have been on board the Coral Princess for more than a month will have to spend two weeks in quarantine at sea with the crew, because travel restrictions in their countries of origin prevent them from going home, the cruise line said Thursday.

The authorities in Miami, where the ship has been docked since Saturday, have not allowed the passengers to stay in local hotels, the company said.

The Coral Princess, a ship owned by the Carnival Corporation, arrived in Florida last week with more than 1,000 passengers on board — two of them dead and at least a dozen with positive tests for the coronavirus. A third passenger waited hours on the dock for an ambulance and later died in a Miami hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention required the cruise company to arrange charter flights to get passengers home. But four countries that have closed their borders to stop the spread of the coronavirus — Colombia, Ecuador, Russia and Serbia — would not accept the passengers, even though they are their own citizens.

After everyone else evacuated the ship over the past four days, the remaining guests were to join the crew and depart Thursday night for a 14-day quarantine at sea.

On Thursday night, the C.D.C. modified and extended its so-called No Sail Order for cruise ships in ways that appeared to bring the industry to a halt in United States ports.

The order, the C.D.C. said, “ceases operations of cruise ships in waters in which the United States may exert jurisdiction” and requires them to develop a detailed, government-approved plan to monitor and address the pandemic’s effect on their operations. Operators are not allowed to disembark passengers or crew members at American ports, or return crew members to ships, without government approval “until further notice.”

European officials agree to spend more than a half-trillion euros on economic relief.

European Union finance ministers on Thursday agreed to the outlines of a loan package worth more than half a trillion euros to help the bloc’s nations relieve the severe economic blow from the pandemic.

The measures, which must be approved by the bloc’s leaders, could total up to €540 billion, or $590 billion, a show of solidarity as the economic and health crisis brought on by the virus strains bonds among the member countries.

The agreement includes €100 billion to fund unemployment benefits, €200 billion for loans to smaller businesses, and up to €240 billion lent by the Eurozone’s bailout fund to member states, to cover potentially crippling health care-related costs.

Some details, most notably on the terms and conditions of loans to countries from the bailout fund, were still unclear and could prove contentious. Countries like Italy that are likely to tap those loans want to ensure they don’t come with austerity conditions attached.

The ministers did not agree to issue bonds backed by the entire bloc, which had come to be known as “coronabonds,” in a defeat for Italy and Spain, the two worst-hit countries. Germany, the Netherlands and other richer northern European countries had staunchly opposed joint debt issuance.

In the race for virus drugs, a scientist on the front lines is urging caution.

Insistent calls and emails pile up each day for Dr. Andre Kalil at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Patients and their doctors are clamoring for untested virus treatments, encouraged by President Trump, who said that ill patients should have ready access to experimental medicines, like the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Kalil, 54, is a principal investigator in the federal government’s clinical trial of drugs that may treat the virus. It is starting with remdesivir, an antiviral drug. The first results will be ready within weeks.

Dr. Kalil has decades of experience grappling with questions about the use — and misuse — of experimental drugs, and he has rarely been more frustrated. He has seen what happens when desperation drives treatment decisions. “Many drugs we believed were fantastic ended up killing people,” he said in an interview. “It is so hard to keep explaining that.”

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, Dr. Kalil said, have never been found to work against any viral disease, including Ebola. (Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus.) And the drugs have side effects, some of which could be fatal.

The virus is sickening and killing low-wage workers in meat plants.

The virus has reached the processing plants where thousands of workers typically stand elbow-to-elbow to do the low-wage work of cutting, deboning and packing the chicken and beef that Americans savor.

Some plants have offered financial incentives to keep workers on the job, but the virus’s swift spread is causing illness and forcing plants to close.

Smithfield Foods’ pork plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., announced on Thursday that it would close temporarily, after more than 80 workers tested positive. Workers have come down with the disease in several poultry plants in the South, including in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, confirmed the death of one worker at a Colorado facility and shuttered a Pennsylvania plant for two weeks. Cargill this week closed a Pennsylvania facility that produces steaks, ground beef and ground pork. Tyson Foods halted operations at an Iowa pork plant after more than two dozen workers tested positive.

“How many more have to fight for their life, how many more families got to suffer before they realize we are more important than their production,” asked Tanisha Isom, 36, a deboner at a Tyson poultry plant in Camilla, Ga., where three workers have died in recent days. She recently learned she had bronchitis and missed two weeks of work.

At some plants, workers have staged walkouts over concerns that they are not being properly protected. Industry analysts said the plant closures were unlikely to result in serious disruptions to the food supply.

The White House gave virus tests to reporters.

The White House for the first time conducted rapid coronavirus tests Thursday on all journalists attending the daily briefing led by President Trump after a reporter who was in the building earlier this week fell ill.

Journalists were tested one by one in a vacant office, with results delivered before the briefing.

Last week White House doctors began administering rapid tests to others who came into “close proximity” to Mr. Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, but this was the first time that journalists have been tested.

An unidentified news organization employee who was at the White House as recently as Tuesday has reported experiencing symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and is expected to have test results back later on Thursday.

Also on Thursday, Melania Trump, the first lady, posted a video on Twitter advising Americans to wear face coverings in public, echoing public health recommendations that Mr. Trump has personally eschewed.

Nurses and doctors who speak out about the risks they face also risk their jobs.

Workers as varied as grocery store cashiers, customer service representatives and flight attendants have clashed with their employers, whom they accuse of failing to protect and properly value them. Amazon drew widespread attention when it fired a worker who had led a protest over health concerns at a Staten Island warehouse.

But perhaps the most curious and persistent management-labor tension has arisen among health care providers like doctors and nurses, who are at the forefront of the virus battle, and their administrators.

In New York City, the center of the crisis in the United States, every major private hospital system and some public hospitals in recent weeks sent memos ordering workers not to speak to the news media.

One system, NYU Langone Medical Center, sent an email on March 27 warning that staff members who spoke to the news media without permission would be “subject to disciplinary action, including termination.” The email was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

Similar lines are being drawn nationwide. A doctor in Washington State was removed from his hospital position after speaking publicly about a shortage of protective equipment and testing; the staffing firm that employed him said he was being reassigned. Nurses in Detroit recently walked off the job to protest critically low staffing after a colleague who had spoken up on the issue was fired.

The first crew member from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt is hospitalized because of virus.

A sailor stricken with the virus and assigned to the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt has been admitted to an intensive care unit at a Navy hospital in Guam, a Defense Department official said, marking the first hospitalization of a crew member since an outbreak began aboard the ship last month.

At least 286 members of the crew have tested positive for the virus.

“The sailor tested positive for Covid-19 on March 30 and at the time of hospitalization was in a 14-day isolation period on Naval Base Guam,” Cmdr. Clayton Doss, a Navy spokesman, said in an email.

The outbreak aboard the Roosevelt has been, in many ways, a microcosm of the Defense Department’s handling of the virus within its ranks as military officials have weighed military preparedness with the health of its personnel.

The ship’s commanding officer, Capt. Brett E. Crozier, was relieved after he wrote a strongly worded letter to Navy officials pleading for more help aboard the carrier. The fallout from the episode led to the resignation of Thomas B. Modly, the acting Navy secretary, this week.

Inmates test positive, setting off a protest in a Washington State prison.

Police officers fired pepper spray and “sting balls” filled with rubber pellets to quell a protest of more than 100 inmates at a state prison in Monroe, Wash., on Wednesday evening after six prisoners tested positive for the coronavirus.

Prisoners in the minimum-security unit, where the men had tested positive, set off fire extinguishers to create the appearance of smoke and then refused to leave the recreation yard, according to a statement from the state’s Corrections Department. The protest ended without injuries, but prisoner movement at the facility, which holds about 450 inmates, was restricted.

The chaos came as the nation’s jails and prisons, where prisoners often live just feet apart, faced urgent reckonings over the virus and whether they could adequately protect inmates. Some prisoners have staged hunger strikes, and the courts have been considering lawsuits seeking the release of vulnerable inmates across the country.

As of Wednesday, The New York Times had identified at least 1,324 confirmed coronavirus cases tied to U.S. prisons and jails, including at least 32 deaths. Those numbers are most likely a vast undercount, because some state and local agencies have not released information, and others, including the federal Bureau of Prisons, are not testing everyone who falls ill.

According to Times data, the Cook County Jail in Chicago is the largest-known source of infection in the United States. As of Thursday morning, at least 401 inmates and employees had tested positive for the virus.

Texas man is accused of falsely claiming to have paid someone to spread the virus.

A San Antonio man who became upset that so many people were crowding into grocery stores took his frustration to a criminal extreme and made an untrue claim on Facebook that he had paid someone to spread the illness, the authorities have said.

The man, Christopher Charles Perez, 39, made the false claim in the hope that it would deter shoppers from visiting the stores, and in that way keep them from spreading the contagion, according to a federal complaint.

San Antonio has been contending with a surge of infections and deaths.

An outbreak at the Southeast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center has claimed at least 10 lives. Four San Antonio police officers have tested positive. And as hotel-occupancy tax revenues decline, officials said on Wednesday that about 270 city employees would be furloughed on April 23.

An anonymous tipster sent a screenshot of Mr. Perez’s Facebook post on Sunday to law enforcement, officials said in a statement on Wednesday. In the post, Mr. Perez warned a grocery store chain that his “homeboys cousin has Covid-19 and has licked every thing for past 2 days cause we paid him too,” according to court documents. Mr. Perez was arrested on Tuesday.

“To be clear, the alleged threat was false,” the office of John F. Bash, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, said. “No one spread coronavirus at grocery stores, according to investigators.”

Need ways to preserve special days during this time? Check these out.

Stay-at-home orders don’t have to put a damper on things. Here are some ways to celebrate birthdays, weddings and the coming spring holidays.

Here’s what else is happening around the world.

• Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was moved out of intensive care, offering some relief for a country that faces several more weeks under lockdown.

• Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, expressed “cautious hope” that Germans were preventing the virus’s spread and slowing the infection rate, but warned that the numbers were no cause for abandoning severe social restrictions.

• Botswana placed all members of its Parliament in mandatory quarantine for possible exposure, in one of the world’s largest such actions involving government officials.

• Spain is adjusting Holy Week celebrations during its lockdown.

• India may extend a 21-day lockdown of its 1.3 billion people.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Brooks Barnes, Dan Barry, Alan Blinder, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Michael Cooper, Nick Corasaniti, Jill Cowan, Caitlin Dickerson, Scott Dodd, Conor Dougherty, Manny Fernandez, Sheri Fink, Matthew Haag, Maggie Haberman, Miriam Jordan, Mark Landler, Michael Levenson, Sarah Mervosh, Andy Newman, Stanley Reed, Frances Robles, Simon Romero, Jim Rutenberg, Marc Santora, Knvul Sheikh, Jeanna Smialek, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Eileen Sullivan, David Waldstein and Carl Zimmer.