Wines, Coronavirus Live Updates: Census Bureau Asks for Delay, as Governors Weigh Reopening Plans

The Census Bureau asks for a delay.

Conceding its effort to count the nation’s population has been hamstrung by the pandemic, the Census Bureau said Monday it would ask Congress for a four-month delay in delivering the population data used to reapportion the House of Representatives and local political districts across the country.

In a news release, the bureau said the new deadline would mean that state legislatures would get final figures for drawing new district maps as late as July 31, 2021. Delivery of that data normally begins in February.

The bureau also said it would extend the deadline for collecting census data, now Aug. 15, to Oct. 31, and would begin reopening its field offices — which have been shuttered since mid-March — sometime after June 1.

Six East Coast states and three West Coast states announce efforts to plan to reopen.

Two groups of governors, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, announced Monday that they were forming regional working groups to help plan when it would be safe to begin to ease coronavirus-related restrictions to reopen their economies.

Their announcements came hours after President Trump, who has expressed impatience to reopen the economy, wrote on Twitter that such a decision lies with the president, not the states.

“Well, seeing as we had the responsibility for closing the state down,” Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania said, “I think we probably have the primary responsibility for opening it up.”

He joined the governors of Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island on a conference call, where they agreed to create a committee of public health officials, economic development officials and their chiefs of staff to work together as they decide when to ease the restrictions they have put in place to slow the spread of the virus. They said they did not necessarily expect to act together or to create a one-size-fits-all solution, but they stressed the need for regional cooperation.

On the West Coast, the governors of California, Oregon and Washington also announced Monday what they called a Western States Pact to work together on a joint approach to reopening economies. They said that while each state would have its own specific plan, the states would build out a West Coast strategy that would include how to control the virus in the future. “Our states will only be effective by working together,” they said in a joint statement.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Monday that he had been in discussions with the other governors to coordinate efforts on the West Coast. He said that on Tuesday he would outline the “California-based thinking” on reopening and promised it would be guided by “facts,” “evidence” and “science.”

The stay-at-home orders that have kept a vast majority of Americans indoors were issued state by state, by their governors. The president did issue nonbinding guidelines urging a pause in daily life through the end of the month; in some states that had resisted such measures, including Florida, his input helped spur governors to act. If the federal government were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to relax those measures or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel tremendous pressure from their businesses and constituents to relax restrictions.

But Mr. Trump, who said Friday that the decision of when to reopen the country would be the biggest he would ever make, said Monday on Twitter that it was up to the president, not the governors, to decide when to reopen the states.

“A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!” he wrote.

But several of the governors who spoke Monday made it clear that they did not intend to let businesses in their states reopen until experts and data suggested it would be safe to do so. They noted that their fates were bound by geography. “The reality is this virus doesn’t care about state borders, and our response shouldn’t either,” Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island said.

“We can put together a system that allows our people to get back to work,” Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut said. But he warned against reopening too soon and risking a second wave of infections.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that he was working closely with the White House on his plan to reopen the state’s businesses. He called for a staggered approach in which businesses that have a minimal impact on the spread of the virus would open up first.

“This is not going to be a rush-the-gates” situation, said Mr. Abbott, who has been criticized for making Texas one of the last states to issue a statewide stay-at-home order.

Earlier on Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said New York’s known death toll had exceeded 10,000, with 671 people dying on Sunday. Nearly 2,000 more people were hospitalized on Sunday — a vast number, though lower than previous tallies — and there were fewer intubations. But even as he hinted that he believed that “the worst is over,” he warned the situation would worsen if New Yorkers behaved recklessly.

“Not as bad as it has been in the past, but basically flat, and basically flat at a horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow,” Mr. Cuomo said.

There are more than 500,000 confirmed cases in the United States and more than 23,000 people dead, according to a New York Times database. In one case, a sailor assigned to the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt died of complications stemming from the virus, according to Navy officials. It was the first death for the ship’s crew, which numbers more than 4,800.

Business leaders and the C.D.C. warn the economy will recover slowly, even as pressure grows to reopen it.

President Trump is in a rush to lift restrictions, convinced that the move will rocket the economy out of a deep recession.

Companies say otherwise. So does a wide variety of economic and survey data, which suggests the economy will recover slowly even after the government begins to ease limits on public gatherings and allow certain restaurants and other closed shops to reopen.

U.S. stocks slipped on Monday, a retreat that followed one of Wall Street’s best weeks in decades, as investors weighed the implications of a deal to cut oil production and awaited the release of quarterly earnings reports from corporate America. The S&P 500 fell about 1 percent.

The evidence suggests it’s not just stay-at-home orders and other government restrictions that have chilled economic activity in the United States over the last month: It’s also a behavioral response from workers and consumers scared of contracting the virus.

Some government officials have been cautioning that the restart would not happen instantly and equally nationwide.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday that he expected the reopening to play out “community by community, county by county,” but that the U.S. would first need to “substantially augment our public health capacity to do early case identification, isolation and contact tracing.”

“There’s no doubt that we have to reopen correctly,” Dr. Redfield said on NBC’s “Today.” “It’s going to be a step-by-step, gradual process. It’s got to be data-driven.”

Even in places without lockdown orders, business has suffered and unemployment has spiked because Americans are avoiding restaurants, airports and shopping centers on their own accord to minimize the risk of infection.

Until Americans feel widely confident that their risks of the virus have fallen — either through a testing system that far exceeds what is currently available, or ultimately via a vaccine — many economists and business owners say there will be no economic rebound for the country, government restrictions or no.

One member of the Federal Reserve board warned the process to reopen could take 18 months.

“This could be a long, hard road that we have ahead of us until we get to either an effective therapy or a vaccine,” Neel Kashkari, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said Sunday on CBS.

The key will be having enough tests to separate those who have had the virus and those who have not, particularly finding people who have the virus but do not experience any symptoms.

“We should prepare for the worst-case scenario,” he said.

Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who was among the first to warn Mr. Trump about the potential economic damage from the virus, is now warning that a prolonged shutdown could be more detrimental to the U.S. than the virus itself.

“It’s disappointing that so many of the medical experts and pundits pontificating in the press appear tone deaf to the very significant losses of life and blows to American families that may result from an extended economic shutdown,” Mr. Navarro said in an interview.

Business owners like Walter Isenberg are who Mr. Trump has in mind when he talks about the need to reopen the economy. Mr. Isenberg’s hotel and restaurant group in Denver has seen its revenues drop to $40,000 a day from $3 million a day last year.

But Mr. Isenberg has no expectation that his company, Sage Hospitality Group, will see the economic boom that Mr. Trump has promised, even after state officials allow his properties to begin hosting customers again.

“It’s just going to be a very long and slow recovery until such time as there is a therapeutic solution or a vaccine,” Mr. Isenberg, who has furloughed more than 5,000 of his 6,000 employees, said in an interview. “I’m not a scientist, but I just don’t see the psyche of people — I don’t see people coming out of this and rushing out to start traveling and having big conventions.”

A major meat plant is closing indefinitely, and a chief executive warns about supply chain.

Smithfield Foods said Sunday that its plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., one of the nation’s largest pork processing facilities, would remain closed indefinitely at the urging of the governor and mayor after 293 workers tested positive for the virus.

The plant, which employs 3,700 workers and produces about 130 million servings of food per week, is responsible for about half of the state’s total number of cases.

Meat production workers often work elbow to elbow, cleaning and deboning products in large open areas filled with hundreds of people. The closure at Smithfield follows the halting of production at several other poultry and meat plants across the country as workers have fallen ill with Covid-19.

Many meat processing facilities have been hit hard by the virus. Three workers have died at a Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, Ga. Tyson also shut a pork plant in Iowa after an outbreak there among workers. JBS USA, the world’s largest meat processor, confirmed the death of one worker at a Colorado facility and shuttered a plant in Pennsylvania for two weeks.

In a statement announcing the closure, Smithfield’s chief executive warned that the closures were threatening the U.S. meat supply. The shuttered plant produces about 4 percent to 5 percent of the country’s pork, Smithfield said.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” Kenneth M. Sullivan, the president and chief executive of Smithfield, warned in a statement.

He continued, “It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running.”

Several meat processing corporations are offering cash bonuses to workers who continue showing up for work amid the pandemic. Workers have said they feel pressured to do so, even if they are feeling unwell. Smithfield said it would continue paying Sioux Falls plant workers for two weeks, “and hopes to keep them from joining the ranks of the tens of millions of unemployed Americans across the country.”

A stalemate in Congress over interim emergency aid seems likely to continue.

Top Democratic leaders on Monday doubled down on their insistence that any infusion of cash for a new loan program to help small businesses affected by the pandemic must include additional funds for state and local governments, hospitals, food assistance and rapid testing.

The demands, reiterated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, is likely to further prolong a stalemate between lawmakers over what was intended to be an interim emergency package before another broader stimulus package.

They came as Democratic leaders announced that the House was pushing back its date for returning to Washington by two weeks, to May 4. Representative Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said the House would remain in recess until that date, “absent an emergency.”

Democrats on Thursday blocked a bid by Republicans to inject $250 billion of new funding into the loan program, insisting on adding money for other priorities and conditions to ensure the loan money would be distributed to small businesses that typically have trouble obtaining credit. But Republicans refused, arguing that any additional funding or policy proposals should wait until future legislation.

“We have real problems facing this country, and it’s time for the Republicans to quit the political posturing by proposing bills they know will not pass either chamber and get serious and work with us toward a solution,” the Democratic leaders said in a joint statement.

Over the weekend, Republican leaders said they would continue to push for stand-alone funding for small businesses. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California criticized Democrats for what they called a “reckless threat to continue blocking job-saving funding unless we renegotiate unrelated programs which are not in similar peril.”

The congressional standoff comes as administration officials warn that the loan program, known as the Paycheck Protection Program and created as part of the $2 trillion economic stimulus law enacted last month, will soon run out of funds, even as businesses say they have yet to receive a majority of the slated billions. The National Governors Association on Saturday also called on Congress to allocate an additional $500 billion to states and governments to help offset state revenue shortfalls, more than double what Democrats initially demanded.

“In the absence of unrestricted fiscal support of at least $500 billion from the federal government, states will have to confront the prospect of significant reductions to critically important services all across this country, hampering public health, the economic recovery, and — in turn — our collective effort to get people back to work,” the governors association’s chairman, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said in a statement with its vice chairman, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat.

Trump has no intention to fire Fauci, White House says.

President Trump has no intention of firing Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious diseases specialist, the White House said in a statement on Monday, a day after the president retweeted a message that said, “Time to #FireFauci.”

The unusual White House statement was issued to mitigate concerns that Mr. Trump might seek to sideline the veteran scientist at the very moment when the president is trying to craft a plan to reopen the country amid the ongoing pandemic, which has killed more than 22,000 Americans.

Dr. Fauci has urged caution about moving too quickly for fear of unleashing a second wave of the virus. Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, sought to blame the news media for the confusion over the president’s intentions even though Mr. Trump retweeted a sharply critical Twitter message about Dr. Fauci that ended with the hashtag calling for his dismissal.

“This media chatter is ridiculous — President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci,” Mr. Gidley said in the statement. He added, “Dr. Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump. ”

The president retweeted the #FireFauci message on Sunday shortly after Dr. Fauci acknowledged during a CNN interview that more lives could have been saved had the federal government moved earlier to shut down schools, businesses and other gatherings. Along with the retweet, Mr. Trump wrote on Sunday: “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up. ”

Dr. Fauci was talking about measures that public health experts argued should have come after limiting travel from China, such as aggressive testing and social distancing, neither of which took place until weeks later. “The president’s tweet clearly exposed media attempts to maliciously push a falsehood about his China decision in an attempt to rewrite history,” Mr. Gidley said.

Facing testing backlogs, sick patients wait all night in their cars at drive-through sites. Then they wait more.

The lines start forming the night before, as people with glassy eyes and violent coughs try to get tested before the next day’s supplies run out. In the darkness, they park their cars, cut their engines and try to sleep.

The backlog for virus testing in New Jersey, the state with the second-highest caseload in the country, has been getting worse, not better, officials say.

So far, New Jersey has conducted over 115,000 tests, about one for every 75 residents. In New York City, the epicenter of the crisis, there is about one for every 18. The tests are a critical tool in measuring the disease’s spread and a requirement for certain forms of treatment. Yet they remain hard to get, and many are actively discouraged from trying.

“It’s unequivocally worsening,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said recently.

Initially, the strain came from a lack of test kits, but now there are not enough nasal swabs or nurses. There is a pileup at the labs themselves and a limited supply of the chemicals needed to identify the virus.

Last Monday, Anita Holmes-Perez felt so sick that she asked her husband to drive her to a testing site at 10:45 p.m. She spent the night constantly adjusting her reclining car seat, lying down until the congestion in her chest forced her to sit up again.

She was battling a fever, a cough, dizziness and a feeling of confusion. “Like you don’t know where you are,” she said.

When medical workers finally took a sample from her the next morning, it would be shipped across the country because the local lab was too full. Three vans would take it part of the way. A plane, sent on a detour by a storm, would take it further. It would be days before she got a result. Until then, Ms. Holmes-Perez waited.

Emails reveal why New Orleans went ahead with Mardi Gras, even as the virus loomed.

Twelve days before thousands gathered in the streets of New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras, Sarah A. Babcock, the director of policy and emergency preparedness for the city health department, prepared a list of bullet points about the troubling disease that had already sickened thousands in China but had only infected 13 known patients in the United States.

“The chance of us getting someone with coronavirus is low,” Ms. Babcock advised community health providers, according to internal City of New Orleans emails obtained by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and reviewed by The New York Times.

The projection proved to be terribly off-base, as New Orleans would soon erupt into one of the largest hot spots for the virus in the U.S., with one of the nation’s highest death rates. Experts now widely agree that the Mardi Gras festivities likely served to accelerate the spread of the highly contagious disease.

But in the run-up to Mardi Gras Day, on Feb. 25, there were still only 15 confirmed cases of the virus in the country. No major events were being canceled anywhere in the U.S., and “no red flags” had been raised by federal officials, the city’s mayor said in an interview on CNN.

Still, according to the emails, city and state officials were planning both for the celebration and the virus’s eventual arrival, but those preparations were based on a misunderstanding of how the virus was spreading.

As the parades began, things appeared fine. A few days later, the first presumptive virus patient was identified, and reports surfaced of people in other states who had been to Mardi Gras testing positive for the virus.

Tornadoes that have killed at least 19 people add to the woes of the South as it grapples with the virus.

Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms killed at least 29 people in the South after raking across Mississippi and its neighbors on Sunday night, dealing the region another blow as virus infections mount.

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi declared a state of emergency, and parts of Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas were also hit by tornadoes and severe thunderstorms on Monday, the National Weather Service said.

“This is not how anyone wants to celebrate Easter Sunday,” Mr. Reeves said in a statement. “As we reflect on the death and resurrection on this Easter Sunday, we have faith that we will all rise together.”

The storms struck as the virus ravaged pockets across the South, where public health officials fear potentially devastating effects because of a mix of bad health, poverty and flimsy insurance options for the working poor.

The study, which involved 81 hospitalized patients in the city of Manaus, was sponsored by the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Roughly half the participants were prescribed 450 milligrams of chloroquine twice daily for five days, while the rest were prescribed 600 milligrams for 10 days.

Within three days, researchers started noticing heart arrhythmias in patients taking the higher dose. By the sixth day of treatment, 11 patients had died, leading to an immediate end to the high-dose segment of the trial.

The researchers said the study did not have enough patients in the lower-dose trial to conclude whether chloroquine was effective in patients with severe cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Patients in the trial were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, which carries the same heart risk. Hospitals in the United States are using azithromycin to treat virus patients, often in combination with hydroxychloroquine.

Mr. Trump has promoted them as a potential treatment for the virus despite little evidence that they work, and despite concerns from health officials. Companies that manufacture both drugs are ramping up production.

Asked Monday whether the World Health Organization would recommend using either chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine to treat virus patients, Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the organization’s health emergencies program, said: “There is no empirical evidence from randomized controlled trials that they have worked, and clinicians have also been cautioned to look out for side effects of the drugs to ensure that first we do no harm. We eagerly await the outcome of clinical trials that are underway.”

Russia has spread disinformation about health for more than a decade.

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West.

The House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Mr. Putin’s long campaign. But the repercussions are wider. An investigation by The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.

His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.

Moscow’s aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.

“It’s all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions,” Peter Pomerantsev, author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview.

The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.

Even so, the State Department recently accused Russia of using thousands of social media accounts to spread coronavirus misinformation — including a conspiracy theory that the United States engineered the deadly pandemic.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in May by phone.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would hear arguments by telephone over six days in May, including cases on subpoenas from prosecutors and Congress seeking the president’s financial records.

“In keeping with public health guidance in response to Covid-19,” a news release from the court said, “the justices and counsel will all participate remotely. The court anticipates providing a live audio feed of these arguments to news media. Details will be shared as they become available.”

The court said arguments would be heard on May 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13, and it listed the 10 sets of arguments it would hear. But it did not say which cases would be heard when. That would depend, the court said, on “the availability of counsel.”

The court said it would also hear arguments over whether members of the Electoral College must cast their votes as they had pledged to do.

‘The player-coaches for the real world.’

As Americans hunker down during the pandemic, free fitness workouts, many of them delightfully low-tech, have multiplied on social media platforms.

Here’s what else is happening in the world.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper, Alan Blinder, Eileen Sullivan, Jim Tankersley, Jack Healy, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Jesse McKinley, Eliza Shapiro, Jeffery C. Mays, Karen Schwartz, Clifford Krauss, Marc Santora, Peter Baker, Mike Baker, Tim Arango, Jason DeParle, Sandra E. Garcia, Aimee Ortiz, Christine Hauser, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, John Ismay, Katie Thomas, Knvul Sheikh, Vanessa Swales, Adam Liptak, Emily Cochrane, Alan Rappeport, Michael Wines and Dagny Salas.