President Trump walks outside the White House in January. The president received intelligence briefings on the coronavirus twice that month, according to a White House official. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
President Trump walks outside the White House in January. The president received intelligence briefings on the coronavirus twice that month, according to a White House official.
President Trump twice received intelligence briefings on the coronavirus in January, according to a White House official. The official tells NPR the briefings occurred on Jan. 23 and Jan. 28.
"The president was told that the coronavirus was potentially going to 'spread globally,' " the official said of the first briefing, which came two days after the first case of the virus was reported in the United States. "But the 'good news' was that it was not deadly for most people," the official said the president was told.
Five days after that initial briefing, the president was briefed again, according to the official. This time, he was told the virus "was spreading outside of China, but that deaths from the disease were happening only in China," the official said. "He was also told that China was withholding data."
The question of what Trump knew about the coronavirus, when he was aware of it and the tenor of those conversations have come under heavy scrutiny, as the administration faces criticism that it was slow to respond to early warnings about the virus. In the time since the president's January briefings, the U.S. has reported more than 1.1 million cases of the coronavirus more than any other nation. In all, more than 66,000 Americans have died.
The president has defended his handling of the crisis pointing to steps like his decision at the end of January to restrict travel into the U.S. from China. But for much of the following month, the president and some of his top surrogates downplayed the threat of the virus.
"We pretty much shut it down coming in from China," the president said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News early in February. By the end of the month, with the virus reported in several dozen countries at that point, he continued to tell reporters that the risk "remains very low."
During his State of the Union address, roughly a week after being told that China was withholding data, Trump said his administration was "coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak."
To this point, the White House has offered little clarity publicly about the exact dates when Trump was briefed about the virus. Asked about this on Thursday, Trump told reporters that he spoke with intelligence officials about the coronavirus "in January, later January," adding that intelligence officials had confirmed that this was the case.
On Monday, when The Washington Post reported that Trump received more than a dozen classified briefings in January and February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded, "The detail of this is not true," and declined to elaborate.
I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.
She and I were Zooming thats a verb now, right? and she pulled out a 2017 book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of H.I.V. but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens.
Im a double Cassandra, Garrett said.
Shes also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about the Coronavirus Cassandras.
Cassandra, of course, was the prophetess of Greek mythology who was doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about in her 1994 best seller, The Coming Plague, and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks is a pandemic like the current one.
She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.
Despite the stock markets swoon for it, remdesivir probably isnt our ticket out, she told me. Its not curative, she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of Covid-19 patients. We need either a cure or a vaccine.
But she cant envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while Covid-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that.
Ive been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and thats my best-case scenario, she said.
Im quite certain that this is going to go in waves, she added. It wont be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and its going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.
Theyll re-evaluate the importance of travel. Theyll reassess their use of mass transit. Theyll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. Theyll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.
So, I asked, is back to normal, a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?
This is history right in front of us, Garrett said. Did we go back to normal after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldnt go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldnt get on airplanes the same way ever again. Thats whats going to happen with this.
Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.
Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.
If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, Oh, my God, its not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and cant make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they dont care whether or not our streets are safe, then I think we could have massive political disruption.
Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like, she said, we may also see what collective rage looks like.
Garrett has been on my radar since the early 1990s, when she worked for Newsday and did some of the best reporting anywhere on AIDS. Her Pulitzer, in 1996, was for coverage of Ebola in Zaire. She has been a fellow at Harvards School of Public Health, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and consulted on the 2011 movie Contagion.
Her expertise, in other words, has long been in demand. But not like now.
Each morning when she opens her email, theres the Argentina request, Hong Kong request, Taiwan request, South Africa request, Morocco, Turkey, she told me. Not to mention all of the American requests. It made me feel bad about taking more than an hour of her time on Monday. But not so bad that I didnt cadge another 30 minutes on Thursday.
She said she wasnt surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. Shes Cassandra, after all.
But there is one part of the story she couldnt have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.
I never imagined that, she said. Ever.
The highlights or, rather, lowlights include President Trumps initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well, his scandalous complacency from late January through early March, his cheerleading for unproven treatments, his musings about cockamamie ones, his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.
Having long followed Garretts work, I can attest that its not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.
But she called Trump the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.
And shes shocked that America isnt in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.
Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me: Ive heard from every C.D.C. in the world the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. and they say, Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we aint hearing back. Theres nothing going on down there. Theyve gutted that place. Theyve gagged that place. I cant get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like its safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?
The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals access to health care.
But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?
Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns, she said. The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.
Thats America? I asked.
Thats America, she said.
And what America needs most right now, she said, isnt this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, super-reliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.
America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a presidents tender ego.
I can sit here with you for three hours listing boom, boom, boom what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and its just incredibly upsetting. Garrett said. I feel like Im just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that theres not a whisper of it.
Instead of that whisper she hears wailing: the sirens of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients to hospitals near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she has been home alone, in lockdown, since early March. If I dont get hugged soon, Im going to go bananas, she told me. Im desperate to be hugged.
As an undocumented student, the connections he made with educators were incredibly important, he told CNN, and inspired him to become a physical education teacher.
"For underrepresented communities, it's definitely a tough thing to not have educators of color," he said, "and many students have never seen a male Hispanic educator like myself."
Jaimes Rodriguez, a senior at Delaware State University, recently took one of the last steps toward becoming a fully-fledged teacher and began student teaching at a high school, working with a mentor teacher to prepare and execute lessons.
But after just nine days, while he was still learning students' names, the coronavirus forced schools to close, leaving Jaimes Rodriguez without the classroom access he needs to complete the last requirement for his teaching license.
"It's very, very stressful," he said. "It's something I think about every day, because I've worked hard to get to the point where I'm at now. I was very excited for this year, excited to get started with my career in education."
They should be in the classroom, working with students and shoring up years of study with more hands-on experience.
The circumstances have also prompted questions about whether they'll be ready when they have classes of their own.
The obstacles these student teachers face are not their fault, said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a policy and research organization.
"But we do have a responsibility," Walsh said, "as school districts and states to find a way to make sure every person put in front of kids deserves to be there."
States work to compromise while student teachers navigate challenges
The requirements to become a certified teacher vary by state and university, but there are boxes most candidates need to check. Generally, they need to have spent a certain amount of time in the classroom, they need to pass a state certification exam and some may need to complete a performance assessment demonstrating their abilities.
It's this last requirement Jaimes Rodriguez has yet to meet. To complete a portfolio for his performance assessment, he needs video of himself teaching in the classroom. But he was unable to film before schools closed.
Some states are working to provide student teachers with certain accommodations, while others are still working through the challenges presented by the coronavirus.
"The bottom line is this is pure chaos," said Walsh of the NCTQ. "The states don't know what to do."
Of the states that have offered solutions, accommodations on student teaching requirements generally fall into two buckets, Walsh said.
The second group of states has expanded the definition of what student teaching experiences can look like, per the NCTQ, prompting students to stay involved and participate in remote instruction.
Bryce Ballew, a senior at the University of Georgia studying to become a special education teacher, was among those unable to complete his state special education exam before everything closed.
While he expects to receive the provisional certificate, not having taken the exam is another wrinkle for Ballew, who wants to teach elsewhere in the country. Without certificate in hand, he said, he's left in "total limbo" about where he'll end up come the fall.
"Some of those questions still remain," he said. "What exactly do I need to do for a new state, if I transfer, because all these state requirements are getting changed because of this virus."
Meantime, some states that use performance assessments -- like the one Jaimes Rodriguez is hoping to finish -- have allowed them to be substituted for other tests, according to the NCTQ. Others have provided a grace period in which teachers could complete the assessments while teaching on a provisional license.
The organization that administers Jaimes Rodriguez's assessment did extend the deadline to submit the portfolio, but that deadline is meaningless, he said, without access to a classroom.
He may have the chance to finish it later, he said, but he's not sure what will happen, because he had to move home to North Carolina after schools closed.
"There's just a bunch of factors to consider," he said, "about how we're going to be able to finish ... and get our teaching license or, essentially, get a job."
Turning lemons into lemonade
Despite the challenges, the pandemic has offered student teachers the chance to grow, said Wetzel of UT Austin.
Schools in Texas closed midway through the semester, she said, and at that time, Wetzel and her colleagues didn't feel student teachers were ready for the classroom just yet. So they've continued to teach students to the extent they can.
One student teacher in Wetzel's program is Fields Dunston, an aspiring kindergarten teacher. She's been trying to keep a positive outlook and focus on what she can learn.
"Looking at what could have happened and what could have been is not going to do me any good," Dunston said, "when I can look to the future and see what I can take from this experience right now."
She was recently planning a lesson at home on living and non-living things. Dunston initially made a PowerPoint, before realizing kindergartners might find it dull.
Instead, Dunston filmed a lesson in her parents' backyard. She pointed out insects, a flower, clouds and a piece of wood, walking students through the process of identifying whether each item was alive.
When schools closed in Georgia, Ballew said, realizing he wouldn't see his students again was hardest.
"I've been with these kids since August, full-time since January," he said. "We've made so much progress with their skills and their goals." That was something he wanted to see through.
But he's kept working with his mentor teacher.
Each week they have a class meeting on Google Hangouts, Ballew said, so students can continue building social skills. He's also taken more novel approaches, zeroing in on students' interests, like creating an activity using Google Maps for one student who loves maps.
"By no means am I saying this is a good thing compared to being in person," he said. "But it has allowed us to be more flexible and develop resources and find new ways to do certain things that we can bring back to the classroom."
A mentor recently told Dunston, "Right now, we're all new teachers."
"We're all in the same boat," Dunston said, "figuring out how to deal with the equity of technology and do what's best for our kids in such odd circumstances."
'I am confident in my ability'
There will be challenges ahead for student teachers lacking the full in-classroom experience they expected. But for many, it wasn't their first and only semester spent in the classroom, and they attribute their nerves to the anxiety of any first-year teacher.
"I don't think someone would be telling the truth if they said they're not nervous about starting a full-time teaching position," Ballew said. "But if I had completed seven more weeks, I don't know that I would feel any more prepared."
"I am confident in my ability," he added.
Wetzel wants to encourage families and school administrators who see a first-year teacher this fall to "recognize that this person doesn't have a deficit in terms of experience," but instead has great preparation for it.
Teddi Beam-Conroy, director of the University of Washington's elementary teacher education program, said some students in her masters program are concerned that their preparation didn't play out the way they expected.
But she's trying to help them understand they are ready. "In actuality you're now prepared to teach ... in the middle of a war, in the middle of a natural disaster," she said.
As for the teachers themselves, they're just looking forward to being the best educators they can for their students.
"There were a bunch of things I wish we could have spent more time on or gotten more experience with and I know it's going to be tough," Jaimes Rodriguez said. "But like everything in life we're just going to have to adapt and overcome."
While Dunston knows her first year as a kindergarten teacher will be challenging, she, too, is ready for what comes next.
"I'm going to do my best to give these kids the kind of education all kids deserve."
For most of her life, Maranda Lender, 32, has lived with her parents in Lewisberry, Pa.
An only child, she grew up doted on by a mother and father who took her to golf lessons, soccer games and orchestra rehearsals (Maranda played the viola). After she graduated from design school, she moved back home in 2014 to save money.
But the family-of-three configuration imploded last month.
Marandas mother, Becky Lender, 61, died on April 4. Her father, Brad Lender, 60, died three days later. Both had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Im alone, Maranda said.
One of the cruelties of the coronavirus is the way it sweeps through homes, passing from person to person, compounding the burdens and anxieties of relatives who are either prevented from giving physical and emotional care to their loved ones, or must risk getting sick themselves to do so.
The cruelty is darker when both partners in a couple die, often within a few days of each other. Its the coronavirus version of dying of a broken heart, but the cause of death isnt a metaphor. Its a pandemic.
There is no reliable data tracking the number of couples dying from coronavirus complications, but cases have cropped up in news reports across the country. Last month, a couple in Louisiana, married for 64 years, died within 10 days of each other. The virus took a Milwaukee couple two months shy of their 65th anniversary, and a couple in Connecticut that had celebrated theirs. A couple from the Chicago area who were married nearly six decades died a few hours apart. A Florida couple married a half-century died six minutes apart. Another Wisconsin couple died on the same day last week in side-by-side hospital beds; they had been married 73 years.
Stephen R. Kemp, director of the Kemp Funeral Home in Southfield, Mich., made arrangements for 64 people who died last month of Covid-19 including three married couples.
Entire households are becoming ill, and then the deaths of husbands and wives become a part of this crisis, said Mr. Kemp, who has been a funeral director for 36 years. Ive never seen anything like it.
Every long-term couple has a distinct story of love and commitment. For the Lenders, the story took them from a family living room where they were married to interstate motorcycle rides in search of the perfect hot dog.
Dr. Delutha King Jr. and Lois King had their own narrative, 60 years in the making and winding from the South Side of Chicago to Tuskegee, Ala., and then Atlanta, with excursions to South Africa and South America. But it ended just as the Lenders did.
Dr. King died in early April at the age of 96 and was buried on April 10. An hour after the graveside service, the couples son, Ron Loving, heard his phone ring.
The call came from Arbor Terrace at Cascade, the assisted living residence facility in Atlanta that Mr. Loving, 77, had moved his parents into last summer: His mother had died, too.
For her to pass the day we lay my granddaddy to rest, said their granddaughter, Kristie Taylor, it was like, Wow, you two really were inseparable.
The Kings both tested positive for Covid-19.
Lois and Dee, as Dr. King was known to friends, met in 1960 at a cocktail party in Chicago. She was 36, a dental hygienist and divorced mother raised on a corn and tobacco farm in Ahoskie, N.C. He was a World War II veteran who attended college and medical school after the war, and had just completed a residency in surgical urology at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington.
They were married within six months, and he quickly became a surrogate father, and then just a father, to Mr. Loving.
The family moved to Tuskegee, Ala., where Dr. King worked at a V.A. hospital, and then to Atlanta, where Dr. King began building a medical practice in 1966.
Mrs. King delighted in being a doctors wife, having supper on the table when he arrived home, playing bridge and raising money for organizations they both cared about, like the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia, which Dr. King helped found.
At night they would watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, sitting in the built-in recliners at either end of their couch and reaching their arms toward the middle, over the newspapers they had been reading, to hold hands.
They visited Barbados and Venezuela, traveled through the Panama Canal, and took a cruise through Europe with their best friends, Dr. Clinton E. Warner Jr. and Sally Warner. In the mid-90s, after Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, the two couples traveled there to take part in the historic moment. The trip ended with a safari.
Dee, who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, loved the excursion. Lois, who longed for air-conditioning, tolerated it.
She was very opinionated, said Mrs. Warner, 73. If Lois thought something, she would say it. If Dee thought something, he would think about it long and hard.
The Kings were part of Atlantas African-American professional elite. Their social circle included Andrew Young, the former mayor and ambassador to the United Nations. They celebrated the new year at the home of Billye and Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player and executive, who helped Dr. King raise money to fight sickle-cell anemia.
The Kings son, Mr. Loving, an Army veteran and former Atlanta police officer who had a long second career as a news cameraman for WXIA in Atlanta, revered his parents.
His wife, Freda Loving, remembers that when she and Ron began to date seriously in 2012, he told her, I want us to be like my mom and dad.
As the Kings slipped into old age, Lois developed dementia and Dee had Parkinsons disease. Their son visited them daily and arranged for visiting nursing aides, so that his parents could keep living in their house for as long as possible.
But by last year, it was clear that it was no longer safe for them to live independently. Thats when they moved into Arbor Terrace. They were still going to be together, that was the important thing. Mr. Loving said.
When you are 77 and your parents are 96, Mr. Loving said, you know that their deaths will come. But to lose them in such rapid succession, and have the virus deny him the chance to comfort them at the end or give them proper funerals to celebrate their lives, particularly his fathers career and civil rights achievements he found that hard to cope with.
This has been devastating, Mr. Loving said.
Almost 800 miles to the north, Maranda Lender is living through similar pain. Its the worst kind of situation, she said.
Brad and Becky Lenders life together wasnt always easy. He had health issues, including diabetes and a hip injury that in recent years had left him unable to work. The couple squabbled often and fought some, most recently about Marandas fianc, whom Mr. Lender gave a hard time.
Its not like their marriage was a love story, because it was not, said Bonnie Hammaker, one of Becky Lenders sisters. But they were committed to the marriage. You would never find them holding hands, but you would always find them together.
They were both raised in Enola, Pa., and were married in 1986. Their life revolved around family and work. He was a forklift operator. She was a clerk at the New Cumberland Army Depot, a job she left when Maranda was born in 1988 and then reclaimed several years later. She added a second job as a cashier at Karns Foods to help send Maranda, now a graphic designer, to Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.
Sue Hutchison, Ms. Lenders boss at the depot and a close friend, said Becky loved meeting new people.
She had a magnet for the needful souls, said Ms. Hutchison, 63. Wed be sitting somewhere eating and I would leave the table, and when I would come back, she would know the life story of the person sitting next to us. Id say, Dude, how could you do that? I went to the bathroom for five minutes! She had that kind of draw.
The Lenders spent free time motorcycle-cruising and driving vintage fire trucks owned by Mr. Lenders uncle in parades and expos all over Pennsylvania. They were into racing, dirt tracks, NASCAR, they did a lot with the fire company, they had a ton of friends, Ms. Hammaker said.
Over the winter they had made plans for a trip to Cincinnati to visit the zoo, which they had seen on a favorite program on the Animal Planet channel. They were supposed to go the weekend of May 9, to celebrate their 34th anniversary. It would have been the first vacation that they had together in my entire life, Maranda Lender said.
But Covid-19 intervened.
On March 21, Becky Lender told her daughter she had a fever. Neither woman was particularly worried, Maranda said. But the next day, Maranda and her father had developed fevers as well.
The next day, a Monday, Becky went to the family doctor and was tested for Covid-19. There was a six-day wait for the results, so she went home to rest. A few days later, she had terrible diarrhea and was nearly incapacitated. Her husband took her to the emergency room.
Doctors gave her anti-nausea medicine and sent her home again, where Maranda waited, fighting a high fever that made her sweat and shiver. (All three Lenders ultimately tested positive for Covid-19.)
Ms. Lender continued to get worse. On March 29, Maranda heard her mother get out of bed and then collapse. She called 911. Becky Lender was admitted to the hospital and put on a ventilator.
On April 1, as Maranda and her father continued to deal with their own symptoms, the family doctor called Maranda and said Mr. Lender needed to go to the hospital as well. An ambulance was called. One of the EMTs had also been to the house three days earlier to take her mother.
That night, Mr. Lender called his daughter from the hospital. They want to put me in a coma and stick me on a ventilator, he told her. I just want you to know that I love you and that I always have.
I love you too, Dad, Maranda replied. Youre going to be home soon, and youre going to be fine.
She tried to set aside her anxiety. Both my parents are in the I.C.U. on ventilators, and Im not well myself, Maranda remembered thinking. I was alone. You go into survival mode: What is it that I need to do for me right now?
Her mothers condition was worsening. Maranda had a conference call with her aunt Bonnie Hammaker and her mothers doctors. They said, Its not looking good, and we think at this point you may need to just make peace with it, Maranda recalled.
The next day, nurses brought an iPad to her mothers bedside and put Maranda on speaker. I told her that I loved her, Maranda said. I said, I dont want you to suffer and I dont want you to be in pain. Go take care of Dad.
Becky Lender died about an hour later. Her siblings, including Ms. Hammaker, went to their mothers assisted living residence in Harrisburg, Pa., which is under quarantine. I had to tell my 85-year-old mother that her daughter died, through a window, Ms. Hammaker said.
Back at home, Maranda Lender was fielding more hospital phone calls. On April 7, a doctor treating her father called and said that the ventilator was merely prolonging the inevitable. Give him eight hours to fight, she told the doctor. If he is worse in eight hours, we should look into making him comfortable. Her father died about 10 hours later.
In the weeks since then, Maranda has been hunkering down in the house she is now afraid to leave, healing physically from the virus and trying to manage its emotional toll. At moments, she has found dark humor in the situation, imagining her father tracking down her mother in heaven and her mother telling her father, Brad, you only gave me a three-day break!
Maranda also has been scrubbing the house, and this week she finally let Aunt Bonnie and her husband come into the house, masked and gloved, to help disinfect the place and look for a will.
And she has been FaceTiming with her fianc, whom she hasnt seen in person since mid-March because she is terrified that she could spread the virus to him, too.
We have the idea of next year getting married on May 9, their anniversary date, Maranda said. Every time we celebrate for us, we can celebrate for them, too.
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) As the coronavirus pandemic continues, 8 is On Your Side with what you can expect this week, as phase one of Governor Ron DeSantis Smart. Safe. Step-By-Step plan for reopening the state goes into effect.
Latest numbersAs of Sunday morning, there have been 36,078 positive cases of coronavirus in the state. The death toll stands at 1,379.
Reopening Florida: Phase 1 begins MondayMost counties in the state, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward excluded, will enter phase one of reopening beginning Monday. The safer-at-home order will expire when this goes into effect. Elective surgeries will resume, restaurants can reopen at 25 percent capacity and retail stays may reopen at that capacity as well. Bars, gyms, hair salons and personal services must remain closed.
State parksAccording to the Florida State Parks website, approximately 80 parks and trails throughout the state will open during phase one. Portions of the parks and trails will reopen for day-use.
Beaches to reopenPinellas County will reopen county-run beaches, including Clearwater Beach, as of Monday. Chairs and coolers will be allowed, but folks are still asked to practice social distancing.
Manatee County will reopen beaches as well, with a two hour parking limit.
Sarasota County beaches will also be open and allow chairs, canopies and coolers, after previously announcing beaches would be open for essential activities like running.
Malls begin to openSeveral Tampa Bay area malls will reopen on Monday as well with the governors announcement that retail stores can operate at 25 percent capacity.
Unemployment system allegedly coming back onlineAfter being offline for the second weekend in a row, Floridas CONNECT unemployment system is reportedly set to go back online at 8 a.m. Monday.
LATEST ON THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC:
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow has not ruled out any element in the next potential coronavirus relief bill, including more money for state and local governments and the small business programme.
But he added that the White House was in kind of a pause period, while hinting that Donald Trumps threat to link aid to concessions on immigration policy could yet be attempted.
Regarding the states, Kudlow told CNNs State of the Union, as you know, the president has from time to time spoken about linking that to sanctuary cities. I dont think anythings been decided yet.
Sanctuary cities, mostly run by Democratic authorities, do not comply with federal attempts to detain and deport undocumented migrants under Trumps hardline immigration approach.
Speaking at the White House this week, the president said: If youre going to get aid to the cities and states for the kind of numbers youre talking about billions of dollars I dont think you should have sanctuary cities.
It is not clear that the White House would be legally able to mandate such compliance. Observers have also questioned the propriety of tying economic aid to states and cities to policy priorities, particularly in a time of national crisis.
The US has recorded more than 1.1m coronavirus cases and the death toll has passed 66,000. More than 30 million people have filed for unemployment in the past six weeks.
Lawmakers are discussing a fourth coronavirus relief bill. Democrats are calling for aid to cities and states and some governors have warned of massive layoffs.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy told Fox News Sunday federal help would be about firefighters, police, EMS, teachers at the point of attack.
Were already seeing some layoffs in New Jersey, he said. We need a big slug of federal, direct cash assistance.
Illinois governor JB Pritzker, another Democrat, rejected Trumps argument that states with budget problems before the coronavirus outbreak should not be bailed out.
All 50 states are suffering from the lack of revenue, Pritzker told CBSs Face the Nation, and coronavirus has caused that. All of us are having to spend more on social services and healthcare to take care of people.
Some Trump advisers have said the need for another stimulus bill is not yet clear. Kudlow said there may well be additional legislation.
We know the economy is still in a terrible, contractionary phase, tremendous hardships everywhere, he said. Were trying to work through this. I dont want to rule in or out anything right now. We are in discussions internally and with leading members of Congress.
The White House, Kudlow said, was just trying to stabilise things and get folks through this, and then well see, we will see in a couple of weeks, what needs to be done and perhaps how to do it.
Kudlow was asked if aid to small businesses would be increased again, given how quickly the money is being claimed.
It may be, he said. We havent made a decision yet. This has been an extremely popular and effective programme. Keeping folks on the payroll is extremely important.
While Democrats support more money for state, local and tribal governments, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, has demanded protection for businesses from Covid-19-related lawsuits.
Also on CNN, Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, chastised the White House, the Senate and the Democratic-held House for tying divisive politics to the need for coronavirus relief.
Stop and focus on helping, he said.
Trump is focused on the stalled US economy, seeing its recovery as vital in a re-election year as polls put him behind Joe Biden, his presumptive challenger, in key states.
Kudlow said: We had a very strong economy during the Trump years and even during the first few months of this year. Wed like to apply the same free enterprise principles. Besides [a] second-half rebound [this year], I think 2021 could be a spectacular year in the economy with the right set of policies.
The president has backed protesters demanding an end to social restrictions, even when those protesters were armed and entered a statehouse, as in Michigan this week. That state has seen more than 43,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths from Covid-19.
More than half the 50 US states are now relaxing their social distancing guidelines, even as public health experts caution against moving too fast.
On Sunday, senior Michigan adviser Dr Joneigh Khaldun told NBCs Meet the Press: If we dont do well with these social distancing measures, more people will die and that is just the facts.
Fracking billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm was among an elite group of oil and gas executives who met with the president in early April to press for federal help, including access to big loans for businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. It prompted Trump afterwards to promise to make funds available to these very important companies.
Major Trump ally Tommy Fisher, who last year landed a $400m Army Corps of Engineers contract to build 31 miles of Trumps border wall in Arizona, in April received another $7m from the army despite an active investigation by a Pentagon watchdog into allegations of favoritism after Trump reportedly pushed for Fisher.
Another big Trump donor, Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and the chair of Trumps campaign in Minnesota, got red-carpet treatment from Trump at a press briefing in late March. Lindell then praised Trump, hailing him as chosen by God as the president touted the firms efforts to make thousands of face masks.
The presidents kid-glove treatment of the three Trump backers, who have donated well over $1m to help Trump and other Republican candidates try to win this fall, underscore how even during an unprecedented national crisis Trumps priorities and campaign machine often tilt towards giving donors and political allies favors, access and publicity.
Numerous bosses of hotels, airlines and other sectors have lobbied Trump and cabinet officials during the pandemic. Watchdog groups say Trumps close ties with top backers and donors from the oil patch and other sectors deserve close scrutiny, as more than $2.6tn in relief funds are doled out.
The Trump administrations dealings with these and other big donors highlight why we need stringent oversight to make sure that the hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing around benefits the American people, and not the presidents donors and political allies, said Robert Maguire, the research director at the watchdog group Crew.
Hamms inclusion at the White House meeting with chiefs from giants ExxonMobil and Chevron was not a surprise: Hamm gave a major speech at the 2016 Republican convention, has been an informal energy adviser to Trump, and has opened his checkbook wide for the president.
Numerous bosses of hotels, airlines and other sectors have lobbied Trump and cabinet officials during the pandemic
Continental Resources, the company Hamm founded and is the major shareholder in, has donated almost $1m to the pro-Trump Super Pac America First Action. Hamm gave $50,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Trumps oil and gas meeting also drew billionaire Kelcy Warren, the chief of Energy Transfer Partners, which developed the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Warren and his wife donated more than $720,000 to Trump Victory, according to the CRP.
After the meeting, Trump asked his energy and treasury secretaries to explore options for helping oil and gas companies facing leaner times and debt burdens, as demand for oil and gas has plummeted during the pandemic.
The options said to be under review include increasing loan limits in part of the $2.2tn relief act for troubled companies especially mid- and smaller sized firms that have been hit hardest and possibly putting tariffs on oil imports, an idea Hamm has touted before.
Further, some mid-sized oil and gas companies are seeking waivers for debt strapped members looking to tap into part of the $2.2tn relief act that the Federal Reserve will launch soon, giving loans to firms with more than 500 employees.
Veteran oil lobbyists caution that Trumps efforts to help fossil fuel allies, who have benefited mightily from Trumps deregulatory and tax policies, could spark a political backlash.
Sentiment against the oil industry is taking a backseat to concerns over the coronavirus, but that could change quickly if the administration offers up a generous economic package to the industry, warned Don Duncan, a former top lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.
Separately, Trump personally backed the Army Corps of Engineers handing the $400m contract to Fishers North Dakota-based company Fisher Sand & Gravel, despite concerns the Corps had about Fishers wall proposal, according to the Washington Post.
Trumps support came after Fisher publicly touted Trumps wall and his own skills on Fox News, and his home state senator Kevin Cramer, who received $10,000 from Fisher for his campaign in 2018, championed him.
The DoD inspector generals investigation of whether improper favoritism helped Fisher, didnt deter the Army giving him $7.6m more in mid-April to construct an 800ft barrier in Arizona.
Meanwhile, MyPillow chief Lindell is reportedly weighing running for governor in Minnesota in 2022 with some encouragement from Trump.
The state Department of Health Services onSunday reported 304 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, and four more deaths in Wisconsin.
The new cases bring the statewide's total to 7,964 cases and 339 deaths as of Sunday. Almost 80,000 people have tested negative for the virus.
Burnett, Forest, Langlade, Pepin and Taylor counties remain the only counties with no confirmed cases, according to DHS.
Gov. Tony Evers announced Sunday that the Wisconsin National Guard willassist state and local health officials holdnew community testing eventsin northwestern Wisconsin counties that, to date, have had a lack of testing or high rates of COVID-19.
LIVE UPDATES: The latest on coronavirus in Wisconsin
DAILY DIGEST: What you need to know about coronavirus in Wisconsin
The breakdown of confirmed cases from DHS by county is as follows:
Note that the state's totals are frozen once each day and may not match up-to-date county figures.
The state Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether or not to keep Evers' stay-at-order order in place after Republican lawmakers filed a lawsuit challenging the order last week.
Almost 3.5 million cases of the virus have been confirmed across the globe, according to the Johns Hopkins University globalcasedashboard.
Contact Benita Mathew at (920) 309-3428 or bmathew@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @benita_mathew.
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LAS CRUCES, N.M. On March 13, the same day that a reluctant President Trump admitted that the coronavirus pandemic was a national emergency, a storied New Mexico hospital established the nations first drive-through testing for the virus.
The next day, hundreds of cars lined the streets of Albuquerque, the states largest city. A second hospital jumped in with more testing. Within days, drive-through testing still not widely available in much of the nation, even today expanded here to Las Cruces, to the southern edge of the state.
One of the nations poorest states, with a small population flung across 122,000 square miles, New Mexico quickly accomplished what for the United States as a whole seems elusive: widespread testing for the deadliest pandemic in a century.
For all its haunting, natural beauty, New Mexico is a land of grit. Led by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, the state swiftly shuttered much of its economy, not waiting on the federal government. It also tapped two secret weapons: sophisticated medical knowledge, a legacy from its role as a hub of aerospace research, and the scientific power of the nuclear weapons laboratories that occupy the states high desert plateaus.
On its face, New Mexicos success might seem hard to believe. For years, young people fled the state in search of better economic opportunities elsewhere. The opiate crisis hit hard and early. Despite a rich history and an equally rich culture, New Mexico just couldnt keep pace with its wealthier neighbors, Texas, Colorado and Arizona.
Two recent developments made a difference, though. Though the oil and gas boom has gone bust, while it lasted it helped fill the states coffers, providing something of a fiscal cushion. The second is Governor Lujan Grisham. Before serving as governor (and before that, a U.S. representative), she had been the states health secretary.
As the states top health official, she dealt with the sort of problems that make the coronavirus so calamitous: underserved rural populations, urban pueblos and rural reservations dependent on government help, rampant poverty and poor public health. During her stint, she focused on suicide prevention, building new laboratories and facilities and tackling infectious diseases.
When Covid-19 attacked, Ms. Lujan Grisham sprang into action. She declared a statewide health emergency on March 11, when just four people in her state had tested positive and two days before the president.
In the background, the state was already moving. One of the states most valuable assets is Lovelace Health Systems, one of the states three biggest hospital networks. Modeled on the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Lovelace became famous for administering the physicals that narrowed the field of the original Mercury astronauts. Veteran physicians had already endured the 1993 outbreak of Hantavirus, a deadly, aerosolized respiratory virus spread by deer mice. Lovelace drilled extensively for the Ebola outbreak in 2014.
By February, executives at Lovelace and the states two other largest systems Presbyterian Healthcare Services and the University of New Mexico were trading notes. Troy Greer, the chief executive of Lovelace, recalled asking, How could we work together to give the state its best shot?
By early March, as Mr. Trump downplayed the crisis, Lovelaces top doctor and engineer sketched out exactly how they would provide drive-through testing on a pair of napkins. On March 11, Ms. Lujan Grishams administration said it would provide the test kits, from a stash of supplies in a state lab, if the hospitals provided the labor. Two days later, Lovelace opened for business in one of its parking lots, testing 200 people on the first day and then 800 the next day. The next day, Presbyterian took the baton. Soon the testing spread across the state.
Meanwhile, the governor was doing battle with the president. During a March 16 teleconference between the president and governors and Mr. Trump, he told them to get their own ventilators. Try getting it yourselves, he said. An angry Governor Lujan Grisham shot back, If one state doesnt get the resources and materials they need, the entire nation continues to be at risk.
She also warned that entire Native American tribes were at risk of being wiped out; New Mexico is home to an array of Pueblo, Apache and Navajo people.
Shortly after, she ordered businesses shuttered, and encouraged people to stay home. Public schools were required to adopt distance learning. She resisted pressure from churches to reopen, and ordered every New Mexican to wear a mask in public. Though they havent been universally popular, her actions have paid dividends.
The state is also harnessing the scientific power of two national nuclear laboratories to process still more coronavirus tests. Normally dealing in physics to secretively maintain the nations nuclear weapons arsenal, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories will not just test, but model and even help search for a vaccine for the virus.
With a little more than 3,200 cases, New Mexicos infection rate is on par with similarly sized states like Nebraska and Kansas. But with over 65,000 tests so far outstripping richer Texas on a per capita basis the death rate has remained lower than neighboring Colorado or nearby Nevada. A total of 112 people have died in New Mexico, according to state data.
She made our case, Tim Harman, a gallery owner in Santa Fe, said of the governor. She also gave us lots of information quickly, on websites and in email. New Mexico is a lot like a small boat. Were just not that big. And so, we could turn the boat quickly. We feel really good.
During a car trip across the eastern half of the state, the radio crackled with state public service announcements urging people to stay home a message echoed in a follow-up announcement by Baptist preachers in the mountain town of Ruidoso, saying they would conduct drive-in services. But we want everyone to stay in their car, their commercial urged.
At a briefing last week in Santa Fe, Ms. Lujan Grisham did something that still has eluded Mr. Trump: She showed compassion. Even as her administration announced that the state would have enough hospital beds, and was considering steps to open up the economy, she began by mourning the dead.
I do want people to know that we mourn with you, she said. Its incredibly hurtful to know we lose anyone in this state to this unfair, invisible, deadly threat.
Then, as other states told businesses to open with little data, she refused to lift the stay-at-home order. Her stellar performance during the crisis has raised her as a possible vice presidential running mate alongside Joe Biden.
New Mexico isnt out of the proverbial woods yet; infections rage on the Navajo reservation in the western part of the state, stretching into Arizona, with infection rates akin to New York. Already, Navajo officials have recorded nearly 1,200 infections and the entire Navajo police force is being tested.
And, even with a massive death toll averted, she and the states 2.2 million people face economic devastation. This is the governors next challenge.
She has ordered the horseracing industry shut down; it normally generates hundreds of millions of tourist and gambling dollars annually. Sunland Park has been feeding stable workers daily with zero customers, according to Julie Farr, the tracks in-house racing analyst. Were fierce competitors on the track, she said. But when something goes wrong we take care of each other.
Casinos from the Texas border to Colorado are closed. So are liquor stores and gun shops. In the north, Santa Fes 99th annual Indian Market has been postponed for a year. In the southeast, the oil and gas patch lies crushed by record low prices.
Meanwhile the state has one of the lowest median incomes in America. And rural hospitals here are going broke after being ordered to cancel procedures to make way for coronavirus cases.
Making things worse, New Mexico is also politically divided. The eastern part of the state and the southwest are deep-red Republican, although the state government is run by Democrats, who also occupy every seat in Congress and the Senate. The local government in the town of Grants effectively rebelled by defying the governors orders, daring her to send in the state police, though it later seemed to back off.
Afterward, in repairing a shattered economy, it is likely that New Mexicos leaders will need to at least consider tapping one more secret weapon, the states $23 billion sovereign wealth fund, accumulated over the years from oil and gas royalties. Only a few states and about 80 foreign nations, such as Kuwait and Russia, have such funds. So, as the age of fossil fuel draws to a close, the fund may provide a way out of the economic damage of the crisis and into the future.
Up in Santa Fe, Mr. Harman has taken to building a digital experience of his gallery, Gallery Campeaux. A creative director, photographer and filmmaker by profession, he hopes to make up for the lack of physical presence by visitors, perhaps for years to come. I want to make it as real as possible, he said. In a larger sense, I think, or at least hope, that this whole thing will usher in the future. I do know I want the world to be a better world after this.
Maybe. New Mexico is always full of grit, secrets and, yes, even secret weapons.
Richard Parker is the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America.
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Several weeks ago, Larry Welch and his mother, Mary Ann, contracted Covid-19 and died. In the midst of a pandemic in which one of the first lines of defense is vigorous hand washing, they were among more than two million Americans who lack running water.
Mr. Welch was a disabled Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm. His mother lived in Arizona in a remote corner of the Navajo reservation, and her son often visited her to help out by cutting firewood, caring for her sheep and hauling her drinking water.
Hauling water required Mr. Welch to leave the safety of his home, another line of defense against the coronavirus, to fill a 200-gallon tank in his truck from a public tap and drive 90 minutes to his mothers house. In mid-March, he probably also brought the virus to his mother without knowing it. Weeks later, their family and community are mourning their loss.
They are two of the more than 60,000 Americans who have succumbed to Covid-19 so far. I cant help feeling that their deaths were especially senseless. DigDeep, the organization I lead, was working to install indoor plumbing for Mary Ann Welch through our Navajo Water Project. Just days after surveying her home, we were forced to suspend operations because of the pandemic. If we had completed that work, perhaps theyd be alive.
More than 2.2 million Americans, through no fault of their own, lack access to the clean running water and basic indoor plumbing the rest of us take for granted. Every state is home to entire communities facing this virus without being even able to wash their hands, but the federal government has yet to form an emergency response that addresses their safety.
Its no accident that these places tend to be communities of color. Decades ago, they were bypassed by government initiatives to build water infrastructure, and federal funding for water projects is now just a tiny fraction of what it once was. Today, race is the single strongest predictor of whether you have access to a tap or a toilet in your home. Nationwide, Indigenous households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack access to complete plumbing, while African-American and Latinx households are nearly twice as likely.
It is too soon to say what impact the lack of clean running water has had on the spread of the coronavirus in most of these communities. But in the Navajo Nation, more than 27,000 square miles in the four-corners region of the Southwest, more than a third of homes lack running water, and there are more Covid-19 cases per capita than in any state other than New York and New Jersey.
In parts of Californias Central Valley, where tap water is too tainted by agricultural chemicals and other contaminants to drink, mothers have formed water-sharing groups on Facebook to get around the bottled water purchasing limits at many stores. Remote communities in Alaska rely on washeterias shared laundry and shower facilities that typically provide two washers and two dryers for an entire village. That makes social distancing difficult, to say the least. And across the country, the more than 500,000 Americans experiencing homelessness face some of the most difficult barriers to water access.
These conditions are making the virus more powerful than it should be, endangering all of us. But this is not an intractable challenge. We can close Americas water access gap.
To address the immediate crisis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should work together to distribute packaged drinking water to communities without water, using existing natural-disaster response protocols. These agencies should also partner with states and municipalities to provide water deliveries and set up hand-washing stations.
In the meantime, water donations can help fill the gap. Nestl recently provided my group with 248,000 gallons of bottled water, which we distributed through Navajo agencies and local partners to about 30,000 people across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. But much more water is urgently needed.
And as Congress sets priorities for future infrastructure and stimulus bills, it should prioritize water infrastructure investments that target these communities. Investing in our water system is one of the smartest ways to help jump-start the economic recovery, creating jobs and generating economic activity. Most important, it will make us more resilient to future outbreaks of the coronavirus or another viral threat and provide those without water the health and dignity we all deserve.
Larry and Mary Ann Welch might have had a better chance at fighting the virus if they had running water at home. Lets make sure every American does.
George McGraw is the founder of DigDeep, a nonprofit focused on providing water access.
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