The ship, which is currently in port in San Diego, was the second US warship to be struck by an outbreak of the pandemic after the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.
The officials said that there are more than 95 cases currently aboard the ship, meaning that almost 30% of the crew has been infected, surpassing the infection rate for the USS Theodore Roosevelt which has seen approximately 24% of its crew infected.
The handing of the outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier led to the firing of the ship's commanding officer, and the resignation of the acting Navy Secretary. It has been the subject of a Navy investigation which is due to be completed on May 27 following an initial preliminary inquiry that officials tell CNN recommended that the aircraft carrier's former captain, Capt. Brett Crozier, be reinstated.
The Navy on Friday stopped providing official daily figures about the number of cases on the Kidd and Theodore Roosevelt, saying that it "will only report significant changes on these vessels and new cases on any other deployed vessels."
On Thursday night, a Navy statement said that official number of active coronavirus cases on the Kidd was 78.
The 20% increase in positive coronavirus cases does not appear to have met the Navy's definition of "significant" information.
The statement Thursday said that the USS Theodore Roosevelt had 1,102 active cases in addition to 53 sailors who have recovered from coronavirus after completing at least 14 days in isolation and two successful negative tests. Three sailors from the ship are being treated in US Naval Hospital Guam for coronavirus symptoms. None of those sailors are in the ICU.
Asked about the new policy, chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman told reporters at the Pentagon "we wanted to get out of the pattern of providing a daily tracker of minor changes."
"We've now reached a point with both of those ships, particularly with the (Theodore Roosevelt), where we've gone through, the entire crew's been off, the entire crew's been tested, we have the results, the ship has been cleaned, the crew is now returning to the ship. So we believe that we have moved past a point where the daily updates are providing useful information for a public conversation about it," Hoffman said.
"If there was unfortunately an additional outbreak, we would provide information. But we wanted to get out of the pattern of providing a daily tracker of minor changes in this. And I think that's a reasonable place to be," Hoffman added.
President Trump speaks about protecting seniors, and the coronavirus, in the East Room of the White House on Thursday. Alex Brandon/AP hide caption
President Trump speaks about protecting seniors, and the coronavirus, in the East Room of the White House on Thursday.
As April began and Americans were being told to fear COVID-19 and stay home, President Trump said there would not need to be a "massive recession." As recently as Monday, he said the economy would have "a tremendous third quarter." By Wednesday, he was looking forward to "a fourth quarter that's going to be fantastic" and then to "a tremendous 2021."
The moving time frame for the hoped-for recovery reflected a shifting of the president's rhetorical gears now that the recession has hit with hurricane force. The devastating numbers now emerging including that 30 million have applied for unemployment in the past six weeks have the White House eager to move from containing the virus to containing its damage to the economy.
The first shuttering of businesses and workplaces in March was enough to drag down economic growth for the whole first quarter by 4.8% (as an annualized rate), by the administration's own numbers. And forecasters at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week said the second quarter could see the economy shrink by 30% or more.
The receding date of arrival for Trump's self-described "rocket ship" recovery is all the more notable given his tendency and talent for putting the best face on things. And the need for positive thinking could scarcely be greater than it is now.
The president and his team are arguing that the COVID-19 crisis has peaked and will subside as a threat to public health. But they know the economic fallout from the disease (and a worldwide oil price collapse) has only begun and that may well be the greater threat to the president's political health.
Scholars and political strategists generally agree there is nothing more important for a president's reelection prospects than the state of the economy. Presidents with a robust economy routinely win a new term. Those without, as a rule, do not.
In an article published in mid-March by the University of Virginia, political scientist Alan Abramowitz said a recession in the second quarter would point to defeat for Trump, or any incumbent president possibly a defeat of "landslide proportions."
"The performance of the economy in the second quarter seems to shape opinions of the economy in the fall," wrote Abramowitz, who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. Abramowitz's predictive model prominently features second-quarter economic performance among its elements, and it has correlated remarkably well with presidential outcomes since World War II.
We may have forgotten the significance of recessions in part because the last three presidents (Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton) all won a second term after avoiding a recession in the latter half of their first. That allowed each of them to point to improving economic conditions and to do so plausibly and persuasively.
In the most recent example, Obama could point to three years of growth out of the deep recession of 2008-2009, brought about by the mortgage-and-credit crisis and market collapse of 2008.
At the time of Obama's reelection in 2012, it was often said that no president had been reelected with unemployment as high as it (still) was in that year. Statistically, that was true, but the sense of upward trajectory, reflected in crucial consumer confidence numbers that fall, buoyed the incumbent.
There were signs this week that Trump is preparing to adopt a similar strategy. In this formulation, instead of downplaying the negative, the president would be cast as the leader most equipped and best positioned to turn things around.
The next best thing to good times may be a promise of good times ahead with the right hand on the tiller. But as a campaign theme, this one's track record is mixed. "Prosperity is just around the corner" was a slogan for President Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression, just before he was crushed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While Hoover's predicament may have been uniquely hopeless, other incumbents have struggled when reelection campaigns coincided with weak or recessionary economies.
Much depends on when a recession begins or when it has ended. There needs to be time for the recovery to take hold, to move beyond technical measurements to a general sense of confidence. That is especially true in the current economy, 70% of which is consumer spending.
Feelings of confidence may have been the critical issue for the last U.S. president who was denied a second term, George H.W. Bush. A recession in late 1990 and early 1991 had long been over by Election Day, a fact the Bush team kept trying to drive home. But the downturn was worse and more persistent in some critical swing states, and its hangover (including relatively high unemployment into the second quarter of 1992) haunted the Bush campaign all year.
In one sense, the first president Bush should have known better. He had been the Republicans' running mate in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won 44 states asking people: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
The target of that simple question had been President Jimmy Carter, who was looking at a worsening job picture with historically high interest rates that had been imposed in an effort to curtail historically high inflation.
Carter himself had reached the Oval Office four years earlier talking about the "misery index" of unemployment, high interest rates and inflation. That combination had been too much for the incumbent of that time, Republican Gerald Ford.
A few presidents have survived poor economic conditions that ended in time for them to recover (Calvin Coolidge in 1924) or began too late for the full force to be felt by Election Day (Harry Truman in 1948). William McKinley was reelected in what was at least a weak economy in 1900.
But this is where historical arguments can begin. Did McKinley defy the economic imperative in 1900 or ride the popularity of the American victory in the Spanish-American War? Or was it the weakness of his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan?
Was Coolidge spared in 1924 because the Democrats took weeks to choose a nominee against him? Did Truman win in 1948 because the recession had just begun or because people did not blame him for it or because Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey scarcely campaigned?
These questions are not only of historical interest. All predictions regarding the effect of the COVID-19 economic collapse on Trump's prospects must also consider other factors. In this case, will the Democrats' perennial disunity and the lack of a traditional convention sap their voters' enthusiasm? Will the virus be around and playing hob with turnout rates in November?
Even more worrisome for Trump's opponents are the travails of Joe Biden's campaign. A sexual assault accusation and attacks speculating about the 77-year-old's health have clouded his campaign since he secured an apparent first-ballot nomination earlier this spring.
In the extraordinarily volatile environment of this pandemic-election year, even a nightmare economy may not be as fatal for the incumbent as it would have been in the past.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock asserted on Friday that it had met a headline-grabbing aim of conducting 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April. The figure was 122,347, he said -- although officials conceded that 40,369 of those were sent to people's homes or to satellite testing centers, and had not necessarily been processed by labs.
The government argued, with some justification, that the huge expansion in testing capacity -- up from 10,000 a day at the beginning of April -- was a huge achievement.
But the fact that the target was needed at all, critics say, only served to illustrate the inadequacies of Britain's testing regime in the first place.
"This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided by the best scientific advice," a government spokesperson told CNN, in response to a request to address the criticisms raised in this article. Ministers and officials have been "working day and night to battle coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed to protect our NHS and save lives," the spokesperson said. "We have provided the NHS with all the support it needs, [and] made sure everyone requiring treatment has received it."
But could more have been done to prevent the scale of loss of life? Should ministers have acted sooner? And could there be more transparency in the overall strategy?
A crucial date
Historians might look back on March 12 as the most significant date in Britain's coronavirus response. This was the day the UK formally abandoned the "contain" phase -- an attempt to stop the virus in its tracks by tracking every outbreak and tracing its origins; and moved to the "delay" phase -- an effort to "flatten the curve" and prevent the health service from being overloaded.
As he spoke, tens of thousands of people gathered at the Cheltenham racecourse for its annual festival, an early fixture in England's social calendar. Was that wise, he was asked? "It is very important that we're guided by the science," Johnson said, using a phrase that was to become a favorite of government ministers. "There is very little epidemiological or medical reason at the moment to ban such events."
Johnson's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, admitted that even people with "really quite mild symptoms" could be contagious. Despite this, the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, agreed with Johnson that canceling large events was "not a major way to tackle this epidemic."
Indeed, the next day, Vallance told BBC Radio 4's flagship morning news program, in a now-infamous interview, that a "key" aim would be to "build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission." Government sources have told CNN that herd immunity was never official policy.
Three key questions
Critics are zeroing in on three key areas as they seek to find out what went wrong in the UK.
First, there was the abandonment of mass testing.
At the start of the outbreak in the UK, public health officials tracked and traced every known case. Ministers have never offered a clear reason for why that policy was abandoned. Was it because the testing capacity had been reached? Was it because the system could not cope with the expected upturn in demand? Was it structural, since the public health system in England has, over the years, gradually been centralized?
"Abandoning testing gave the virus the green light to spread uncontrollably," says the Royal Society of Medicine's Gabriel Scally. "If you don't have access to testing, you won't know that you have an outbreak until a lot of people are ill."
Some in the scientific community say an obsession with central control led officials to set up the testing regime initially in just a few labs, rather than allowing local hospitals to do it themselves.
"Sadly, it seems likely to me that once the government models showed how bad the crisis would be, our testing capacity wouldn't be anywhere near able to cope with the coming surge," a leading microbiologist told CNN on condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions. "God only knows what their thinking was not telling hospitals to get ready. It was a mistake." Downing Street declined to provide an on-the-record explanation to CNN on this issue.
The second crucial question is whether the government failed to order a lockdown early enough.
Even though the government did not know by that March 12 briefing just how many people were infected, Whitty said it was still too early to lock down because "if people go too early, they become very fatigued." If tough restrictions came too early, the theory went, the British public would begin to tire of it just as they were starting to become effective, and demands for them to be lifted would become impossible to resist.
Government sources defended that course of action to CNN, pointing out that some mitigation measures were put in place between March 12 and the full lockdown on March 23, like advising vulnerable groups to stay at home and requiring people with certain symptoms to self-quarantine.
The third big question is the pursuit of so-called "herd immunity."
"It's not possible to stop everybody getting it," said Vallance at the March 12 briefing. However, the experience of countries like South Korea and Germany, where testing and tracking systems have been significantly more rigorous, and in New Zealand, where lockdown measures were taken at a much earlier stage, suggest that it has been possible to stop quite a large number of people from getting it.
Medical experts both inside and outside the government's circle of trusted advisers have admitted to CNN that they believe the government waited too long to enter lockdown. "Many of the decisions the government has made ignore basic public health science," says Dr. Bharat Pankhania, senior clinical lecturer at University of Exeter. "From abandoning track and trace, to the timing of the lockdown, to providing the correct protective equipment, ignoring basic public health science may have led to more deaths than necessary."
Pankhania believes that despite government claims it has been guided by science at every step, the decision to delay lockdown was likely "governed by economic consideration, rather than public health science."
This conflict between the government's claim that it has followed the science from day one, and some in the scientific community's skepticism as to how good that evidence is, has become a key battlefield between those inside and outside the UK government.
Following the science
This secrecy has led to speculation from prominent members of the public health community about the quality and breadth of evidence that is reaching the top levels of government. "The government's decisions show no characteristics of public health input. I wouldn't be surprised if the public health voice was marginalized both within SAGE and in government," says Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine.
It's "driving the public health guys mad," said another scientist who has contributed to the UK's National Risk Register, an overview of the potential threats facing the UK.
Another criticism of the process has been that the government has at times even sidestepped the normal groups of scientific advisers. "Things are moving so fast that they're rather going direct to the modelers," said Openshaw. "The epidemiological modelers have got a very direct line into government."
However trivial it might seem, disagreements between public health experts and scientific modelers are a significant part of the story. "We're seeing a struggle that has been going on for about 20 years between modelers and epidemiologists," a scientist who advises SAGE told CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential government business.
It's no secret that Dominic Cummings, Johnson's top adviser, has a personal interest in scientific modeling. So it's little surprise that public health experts were enraged when the government was forced to admit last week that Cummings had attended SAGE meetings, which are supposed to be independent advisory forums. The government said he attended in order to understand the scientific debate around the virus and its behavior.
Multiple members of SAGE and groups that advise it defended their impartiality to CNN. "The debate is robust, and everyone sets out their case clearly and articulately," said one member, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "There are lots of people criticizing from the sidelines, but I think it's possible those people are angry they have been left on the sidelines."
A source who advises SAGE said: "Frankly, I find it hard to see that the presence of Cummings makes much difference. We're not talking about shrinking violets."
However, the source went on to express concern at how scientific evidence is being presented. "Science is not homogenous... The best SAGE can do is present imperfect material. The government has been able to take advantage of the public view of science as a voice of certainty, and present some of its decisions as being taken with more concrete certainty than they have."
This has prompted fears that at some time in the future, the government might try hiding behind the science for decisions they've taken -- or worse, throw members of SAGE under a convenient bus. "It certainly does seem to be an anxiety of some of my colleagues, but I am less worried. Many politicians are not exceptional thinkers. Should a public inquiry come, I would be surprised if it's the scientists who do a bad job of making their case," said a member of SAGE.
That public inquiry seems inevitable, once the worst of the crisis is over.
And when it comes, the government will stick to its line that the decision to prioritize the protection of the NHS was the right course of action, and that it succeeded. While it's true the NHS didn't fall over during what look like the worst weeks of the crisis, a cynic might claim that focusing on hospitals ignored what was happening in the wider community.
"People might well reply that it protected the NHS at the expense of shifting deaths elsewhere. Not to mention the physical and mental suffering experienced across the country," said one of the scientists advising SAGE.
She was just 12 when she dropped out of school and began clocking in for endless shifts at one of the garment factories springing up in Bangladesh, hoping to pull her family out of poverty.
Her fingers ached from stitching pants and shirts destined for sale in the United States and Europe, but the $30 the young woman made each month meant that for the first time, her family had regular meals, even luxuries like chicken and milk.
A decade later, she was providing a better life for her own child than she had ever imagined.
Then the world locked down, and Shahida Khatun, like millions of low-wage workers around the world, found herself back in the poverty she thought she had left behind.
In a matter of mere months, the coronavirus has wiped out global gains that took two decades to achieve, leaving an estimated two billion people at risk of abject poverty. However indiscriminate the virus may be in its spread, it has repeatedly proven itself anything but that when it comes to its effect on the world's most vulnerable communities.
The garment factory helped me and my family to get out of poverty, said Ms. Khatun, 22, who was laid off in March. But the coronavirus has pushed me back in.
For the first time since 1998, the World Bank says, global poverty rates are forecast to rise. By the end of the year, half a billion people may be pushed into destitution, largely because of the pandemic, the United Nations estimates.
Ms. Khatun was among thousands of women across South Asia who took factory jobs and, as they entered the work force, helped the world made inroads against poverty.
Now those gains are at grave risk.
These stories, of women entering the workplace and bringing their families out of poverty, of programs lifting the trajectories of families, those stories will be easy to destroy, said Abhijit Banerjee, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for economics.
While everyone will suffer, the developing world will be hardest hit. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will see its first recession in 25 years, with nearly half of all jobs lost across the continent. South Asia will most likely experience its worst economic performance in 40 years.
Most at risk are people working in the informal sector, which employs two billion people who have no access to benefits like unemployment assistance or health care. In Bangladesh, one million garment workers like Ms. Khatun 7 percent of the countrys work force, and many of them informally employed lost their jobs because of the global lockdowns.
For Ms. Khatun, whose husband was also laid off, that means that the familiar pangs of hunger are once again filling her days, and she runs into debt with a local grocer to manage even one scant meal of roti and mashed potato a day.
The financial shock waves could linger even after the virus is gone, experts warn. Countries like Bangladesh, which spent heavily on programs to improve education and provide health care, may no longer be able to fund them.
There will be groups of people who climbed up the ladder and will now fall back, Mr. Banerjee, the M.I.T. professor, said. There were so many fragile existences, families barely stitching together an existence. They will fall into poverty, and they may not come out of it.
The gains now at risk are a stark reminder of global inequality and how much more there is to be done. In 1990, 36 percent of the worlds population, or 1.9 billion people, lived on less than $1.90 a day. By 2016, that number had dropped to 734 million people, or 10 percent of the worlds population, largely because of progress in South Asia and China.
Since 2000, Bangladesh brought 33 million people 20 percent of its population out of poverty while funding programs that provided education to girls, increased life expectancy and improved literacy.
Famines that once plagued South Asia are now vanishingly rare, and the population less susceptible to disease and starvation.
But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession.
The tragedy is, its cyclical, said Natalia Linos, executive director of Harvard Universitys Franois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. Poverty is a huge driver of disease, and illness is one of the big shocks that drive families into poverty and keep them there.
When it comes to a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak, Ms. Linos said, the poor are even more outmatched than people with means. They cannot afford to stock up on food, which means they must go more frequently to stores, increasing their exposure. And even if they have jobs, they are unlikely to able to work from home.
A resolution that committed the United Nations to eliminating poverty and hunger and providing access to education for all by 2030 may now be a pipe dream.
More than 90 countries have asked the International Monetary Fund for assistance. But with all countries hurting, well-to-do nations may be too strapped to provide the aid the developing world needs or offer debt forgiveness, which some countries and aid organizations are calling for.
To avoid having large chunks of their population slipping into devastation, countries need to spend more, Mr. Banerjee said. In times of crises, like after World War II, economies rebounded because governments stepped in with big spending packages like the Marshall Plan.
But so far, economic stimulus packages and support for those newly out of work have been weak or nonexistent in much of the developing world.
While the United States has committed nearly $3 trillion in economic stimulus packages to help the poor and small businesses, India plans to spend just $22.5 billion on its population of 1.3 billion four times the size of Americas. Pakistan, the worlds fifth-largest country, has committed about $7.5 billion, far less than Japans $990 billion stimulus package.
In Bangladesh this week, several hundred garment factories decided to reopen a move almost certain to worsen the countrys coronavirus caseload.
Ms. Khatuns employer, however, remains shuttered.
The owner told employees that even after the pandemic, he may no longer have work for them. The demand for clothing in Western countries may drop if people have less to spend, he said.
Ms. Khatun worries she and her family will be evicted from the small room they rent, with a bathroom and kitchen they share with neighbors.
If they are thrown out, she said, they will return to the village she left a decade ago as a child determined to to improve her lot in life.
My only dream was to ensure a proper education for my son, she said. I wanted people to say, Look, although his mother worked for a garment factory, her son is well educated and has a good job.
That dream is now going to disappear.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
This government should be on the rack. The evidence that it botched crucial decisions at crucial moments is piling up. The litany is now so familiar it barely needs repeating, from the failure to secure personal protective equipment for frontline workers in health and social care to the 11 lost days of delay before imposing a lockdown that has proved essential for saving lives.
You can focus on specific judgments: why did ministers allow mass gatherings, from racing at Cheltenham to a Stereophonics gig in Cardiff, ignoring the warnings that such events would be a virus-fest? Why did it initially tell people to stay away from pubs and restaurants, but simultaneously allow those places to stay open? Why did the government call a halt in March to testing and tracing? If the answer is a lack of capacity, then why did it not immediately set about recruiting the army of contact tracers that will be required if we are ever to emerge from our homes? Why the focus on mega-labs, rather than seizing on the offer of small laboratories to do testing for their local hospitals, which, as Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, has argued, could have made those hospitals safe places? Why the rules initially limiting tests to those NHS employees with symptoms, which, as Nurse puts it, allowed staff to be on wards infecting people?
Or you can look at decisions going back a decade, pointing a finger at Tory austerity that starved public services to the bone, leaving them underequipped and eroding our resilience. Either way, the country now faces a death toll approaching 30,000.
And yet, far from being on the rack, the government continues to bask in public support. True, approval for the governments handling of the crisis has fallen from the dizzying 61% it reached a month ago to 51% at last count. But 51% is still the kind of approval rating most politicians long for.
What accounts for this disconnect between the governments record and the publics high regard for those responsible? Put another way, why isnt Boris Johnson in more trouble?
Any answer must begin with what pollsters call the rally-around-the-flag effect, the tendency for voters to back their leaders in a time of crisis. Data from around the world, in this era and in others, suggests that when citizens are scared, they want to believe those in charge have the wisdom and strength to protect them. Think of electorates as passengers on a plummeting plane: in that moment of peril, they need to trust the pilot.
In Johnsons case, theres an additional factor. No one can throw at him the traditional accusation directed at politicians, namely that he is out of touch with the seriousness of the disease. His own near-death experience with Covid-19 immunises him from that charge. The outpouring of sympathy while he clung to life in intensive care was real; some of it lingers when he briefs the nation from No 10 and grows visibly tired before the hour is up. That might prompt some voters to go a bit easier on the prime minister than they otherwise would, an indulgence buttressed by the arrival this week of a Downing Street baby. The extraordinary month Johnson has endured acts to protect the prime minister and, since this is very much his administration, the entire government.
Hes helped, too, by the fact that there is so little we know for certain about this disease. The UK may have the highest death rate in Europe, but as David Spiegelhalter argued persuasively, we wont be sure of that until the end of the year, and the years after that. Even if Britain does turn out to be the worst hit, itll be easy to argue that it wasnt the governments fault but was rather a function of certain immovable facts about this country: that, for example, it includes a city, London, that has no direct European equivalent in size or scale.
Some voters are surely minded to give the government the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that it has merely been following the science. That could prove a valuable alibi, nicely positioning the scientists as the fall guys once all this is done. Even those who know that when it comes to public health policy there is no such thing as the science that there are always going to be competing views over how to act on data once youve got it could see that as a reason to cut ministers some slack: faced with a near-unprecedented threat, politicians have had to make life-and-death decisions with no clear manual to follow.
It helps that much of the press is supportive, putting the Johnson baby news or Capt Tom Moore on the front and condemning the dead to the inside pages. Its handy, too, to have a few outriders attacking journalists for daring to ask awkward questions at a time like this, suggesting they should be biting their tongues in the spirit of national unity (when, of course, asking awkward questions of those in power is journalists essential duty). Nor does it hurt to have an opposition that for reasons that may make sound political sense has decided to offer mild, constructive criticism rather than to put the boot in.
All of these factors have helped insulate the government from the flak that would otherwise be coming its way. But theres one more, perhaps less obvious explanation and it relates to judgment by comparison. We dont need to wait for a full statistical analysis to know that Johnson has not been the worst world leader in this crisis, because we can declare a winner in that contest right now.
Each day Britons wake up to ever more jaw-dropping news from across the Atlantic. Last week, it was Donald Trump advising Americans to inject bleach. On Friday, it was his claim to have seen evidence that coronavirus was developed in a Wuhan laboratory, a claim denied by his own director of national intelligence. The shocking images of protesters wielding assault weapons storming into the state assembly in Michigan on Thursday night are hardly a surprise, given that Trump himself was tweeting Liberate Michigan! a matter of days ago, cheering on those who are demanding their states defy the advice of Trumps own White House and prematurely end the lockdown that has so far proved to be the only way to stop the virus.
However bad Johnson and his government of conspicuously few talents is, we know theyre not that. They can at least show a modicum of human empathy for those whove lost loved ones, a feat that continues to elude Trump. They have at least eventually united behind a coherent stay home message, rather than undermining that advice at every turn. They are not hawking quack cures and endorsing deranged conspiracy theories. They do not seem willing to countenance mass death in the insane belief that it will help them win an election. Its a low bar, but these are low times.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Even in a pandemic there are weavers and rippers. The weavers try to spiritually hold each other so we can get through this together. The rippers, from Donald Trump on down, see everything through the prism of politics and still emphasize division. For the rippers on left and right, politics is a war that gives life meaning.
Fortunately, the rippers are not winning. America is pretty united right now. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll last week, 98 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans supported social-distancing rules. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, nearly 90 percent of Americans think a second wave of the virus would be at least somewhat likely if we ended the lockdowns today.
A Pew survey found 89 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats support the bipartisan federal aid packages. Seventy-seven percent of American adults think more aid will be necessary.
According to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, most of the policies on offer enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support: increasing testing (nearly 90 percent), temporarily halting immigration (79 percent) and continuing the lockdown until the end of April (69 percent). A KFF poll shows that people who have lost their jobs are just as supportive of the lockdowns as people who havent.
The polarization industry is loath to admit this, but, once you set aside the Trump circus, we are now more united than at any time since 9/11. The pandemic has reminded us of our interdependence and the need for a strong and effective government.
Its also taken us to a deeper level. The polarization over the past decades has not been about us disagreeing more; its been about us hating each other more. This has required constant volleys of dehumanization.
This dehumanization has always been a bit of a mirage. A new study from the group Beyond Conflict shows that Republicans and Democrats substantially exaggerate how much the other side dislikes and disagrees with them.
The pandemic has been a massive humanizing force allowing us to see each other on a level much deeper than politics see the fragility, the fear and the courage.
On May 8, I recommend you watch In This Together: A PBS American Portrait Story, airing and streaming on PBS. It is just regular Americans talking into their cellphones and showing what they are going through.
Theres a mom giving birth to twins while in the hospital with the coronavirus. She cant see her babies for weeks.
There are a couple of married nurses who have to send their 6-year-old to live with Grandma while they shuttle to the hospital. The boy cant understand whats happening, and the hurt and missing manifest as tantrums.
Theres an older woman sitting in a dark living room: I never expected to be alone. My husband tested positive for Covid. He lasted over a week. He didnt die until St. Patricks Day. Were 78 and I know it sounds funny, but I thought we were going to grow old together. And now Im alone.
Were also being united by those who are sacrificing for the common good: the nurse who came from North Carolina to serve New York even though she has an 8-month-old baby at home; the E.M.T.s who are living through death after death; the workers who lived in their factory for 28 days to make masks.
In normal times, the rippers hog the media spotlight. But now you see regular Americans, hurt in their deepest places and being their best selves.
Everywhere I hear the same refrain: Were standing at a portal to the future; were not going back to how it used to be.
If you want to be there at one harbinger of the new world, I suggest you tune in to The Call to Unite, a 24-hour global streamathon, which starts Friday at 8 p.m. on Unite.us and various digital platforms. It was created by Tim Shriver and the organization Unite. There will be appearances by world leaders, musicians, religious leaders, actors and philosophers everybody from Oprah and George W. Bush to Yo-Yo Ma and the emotion scholar Marc Brackett.
When the streamathon was first being organized (I played an extremely minor role) the idea was to let the world give itself a group hug. But as the thing evolved it became clear that people are not only reflecting on the current pain, they are also eager to build a different future.
If you tune in, youll see a surprising layers of depth and vulnerability. Youll see people hungering for The Great Reset the idea that we have to identify 10 unifying ideas (like national service) and focus energy around them.
Americans have responded to this with more generosity and solidarity than we had any right to expect. Ive been on the phone all week with people launching projects to feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, perform little acts of fun with the young. You talk with these people and you think: Wow, youre a hidden treasure.
What has happened to Elon Musk?
A highlight reel of the billionaire Tesla CEOs activities since early March includes his pooh-poohing the coronavirus panic as dumb; keeping his northern California factory open in defiance of local public health orders; falsely asserting that children are essentially immune from the virus; providing a giant platform to promoters of an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment; predicting (inaccurately) that the US would have no new cases of Covid-19 by the end of April; attempting to re-open the factory before the end of the local shelter-in-place order; and calling shelter-in-place orders fascist. (Lets not even get into the drama over whether the BiPap machines he donated to some hospitals count as ventilators.)
Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences
Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences. He has more than 33m followers on Twitter and a fan base that tends to exalt him as a cross between Tony Stark and God. A recent study published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine linked his tweet about chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that was subsequently touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment by Donald Trump, to a dramatic surge in online demand for the prescription medication. They werent aware of it, they werent interested in it they were trying to buy it, John Ayers, a UC San Diego professor of medicine and one of the studys authors, told the Guardian in an interview.
The chloroquine document that Musk shared was an example of what the infectious disease expert Carl Bergstrom has described as quantitative bullshit the use of statistics and data to persuade someone by overwhelming and intimidating them, without any allegiance to truth or accuracy. Last week, Musk was apparently taken in by another pair of coronavirus bullshit artists, this time a pair of doctors from Bakersfield, California.
Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi held a press conference to promote the idea that Covid-19 is much more widespread and much less deadly than what ivory tower figures such as Dr Anthony Fauci have said. Docs make good points, Musk tweeted, with a link to a YouTube video of the 50-minute press conference. (YouTube removed the video for spreading misinformation, but not before it received millions of views; one of the doctors has gone on to make appearances on Fox News.)
The docs did not make good points. After opening his remarks by defining science like a high schooler writing a term paper (What is science? Essentially, its the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation, so thats what were doing) Erickson presented testing data from the chain of urgent care clinics they own. The clinics have performed 5,213 Covid-19 tests and had 340 positive results, which they claimed means that there is a 6.5% rate of infection in the local population. The pair performed the same math (positive tests divided by total tests) on the statewide numbers of 33,865 positive tests out of 280,900 total, to arrive at a 12% infection rate for the state. From there, they calculated that California has had a total of 4.7m infections and calculated that the death rate for people who contract Covid-19 in California is just 0.03% much lower than that of the seasonal flu.
None of this stands up to scrutiny. In order to assume that the rate of infection amongst a small number of people can apply to the entire population, you have to use a random and representative sample. But the people who are getting tested at urgent care clinics in California are neither random nor representative; they are people with severe symptoms or who are performing certain essential jobs. Figuring out the actual infection rate across the broader population will require careful sampling that avoids this selection bias.
The Bakersfield duo used their meaningless numbers to argue that shelter-in-place orders must be lifted a position that Musk clearly also holds. (In an extraordinary joint statement, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine jointly and emphatically condemn[ed] the pair, and suggested they were releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the publics health.)
The issue is not that Musk has staked out a contrarian stance on the coronavirus. There are difficult debates that need to be had over how and when to restart the economy in order to minimize long term economic harms and maximize public health. We can and should have that discussion, and we should do it without impugning the moral character of everyone who argues for a faster loosening of restrictions.
But its increasingly difficult to take Musk seriously when he makes his argument by cherry-picking numbers or relying on blatant misuse of data. Please, make your case, but make it using real facts, and not by playing fast and loose with numbers in an effort to mislead the public about what is actually happening. Otherwise you look and sound a lot less like the brilliant engineer and entrepreneur, and a lot more like just another used car salesman.
US fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50m in taxpayer money they probably wont have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.
A total of $28m is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.
The other $22m is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.
Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before Covid-19 entered the public lexicon.
More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.
Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.
Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly-traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.
So far, its clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack and Ruths Chris Steak House.
The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The US government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.
The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.
The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great, said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. The worry is that the moneys going to the top and not going to filter down.
The $50m already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.
Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say its impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.
All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies, said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. No matter what, its going to be an incomplete picture of whats going on.
Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and now theyre going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.
Its both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers, and a bad situation for the planet
Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining company that hired Donald Trumps former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The companys former government relations director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10m to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.
Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trumps Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10m.
Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy departments National Coal Council, is getting $8.4m.
The US coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their lowest employment levels in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.
Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.
The Missouri-based Peabody Energy coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24m to 2020 and defer $18m of owed taxes.
US taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20bn a year, according to conservative estimates.
The Center for International Environmental Law has accused the oil, gas and plastics industries of exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be a complete waste of money, because it wouldnt fix the industrys underlying financial problems.
Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.
In an 15 April letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.
Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit small and mid-sized oil and gas companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has nearly $80bn in liabilities on its balance sheet.
Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.
And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. Its both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.
WASHINGTON There are 14 potential coronavirus vaccines under development as part of President Donald Trump's administration's program to fast-track one for use as early as January, senior administration officials tell NBC News.
That number was whittled down several weeks ago from 93 vaccines in development that were studied as part of the program, known as Operation Warp Speed, officials said.
Over the next two weeks, the 14 remaining vaccines will undergo additional testing and officials expect that anywhere from six to eight of them will make it to a subsequent round of clinical trials. Ultimately, the officials said, the goal is to have three or four vaccines make it through final testing and cleared for use early next year.
The officials, who discussed the programs progress on the condition of anonymity, said there is no guarantee that any of the 14 remaining coronavirus vaccines will make it to the end of the process, but they are optimistic about the chances.
Can I say with 100 percent certainty? No, one of the officials said. There is a reasonable probability that one or more of these vaccines will be successful.
The bigger concern, officials said, is how to quickly make the vaccine for more than 300 million Americans once they find one that works.
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Trump has hailed the program and said Thursday that he is personally overseeing it and promised to fast-track it like you've never seen before.
The senior administration officials who agreed to discuss the details said the 93 vaccines from several weeks ago came from more than 80 pharmaceutical companies. They said the next major milestone in the project will be in two weeks when the government will seek participants for clinical trials on the vaccines that make it out of the 14 that currently remain.
From there, the officials said those viruses will be scrutinized at a microscopic level for further winnowing down.
Its a constant reevaluation, one of the officials said.
They reiterated that the program will cost billions of dollars that they said would come from pre-existing government funds, but they didnt give a specific figure. They added American taxpayers will cover much of the financial burden instead of working out a deal with drug companies as a way to expedite the process.
At this point it will not require congressional approval.
The officials didnt guarantee that any vaccine that comes out of the program would be free to all Americans though they suggested that could be part of the return on the governments investment as part of the public-private partnership.
Officials said they are able to fast-track the vaccine because multiple phases of the process to get one are happening at the same time, such as clinical trials and working out a distribution chain.
They said one approach to distribution initially could be to dispense it in a way designed to stop transmission of the virus as fast as possible, such as first to nursing home facilities, first responders and other people who interact often with the public.
A number of agencies are working on the project, including the Health and Human Services Department, Veterans Affairs, the Agriculture Department and the Pentagon.
Carol E. Lee is an NBC News correspondent.
Kristen Welker is a White House correspondent for NBC News.
Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner is a producer in the NBC News Washington bureau.
This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Scientists at Oxford Universitys Jenner Institute raised hopes this week when they announced plans to expand testing for a potential coronavirus vaccine that if proven effective could be ready for emergency use as soon as September. But as my colleague Stuart Thompson explains, thats an enormous if: Most vaccines take a decade or longer to make, and none has ever been developed in less than four years.
Cutting that record down to 12 or even 18 months would already require moving at pandemic speed. But last week, 35 members of Congress proposed an extraordinary practice that some scientists think could compress the timeline even further: deliberately infecting volunteers. Heres what people are saying about the idea, known as human challenge.
As it happens, the Jenner Institute is named for Edward Jenner, who invented the worlds first vaccine by doing just this. In 1796, more than a century before anyone even knew what a virus was, Mr. Jenner suspected that cowpox, a mild disease that milkmaids sometimes contracted, might confer immunity against the far more deadly smallpox. To test his theory, he inoculated an 8-year-old boy with the first virus (courtesy of a Gloucester cow named Blossom) and then deliberately infected or challenged him with the second.
Mr. Jenners theory proved correct vaccine derives from vacca, the Latin word for cow but his method has always been ethically fraught. Today, human-challenge studies are subject to strict oversight and authorized only for diseases that have treatments, like malaria or the flu. Any potential vaccine now also has to undergo three phases of clinical trials. Efficacy is tested in the third phase, where instead of being deliberately infected, participants simply go about their daily lives and researchers see whether those who received the vaccine prove less likely to contract the disease than those who received a placebo.
But the pandemic has raised two concerns with the process:
Right now, most people are trying not to get sick: The Jenner Institutes director has said that if the infection rate continues to slow in Britain, researchers may not be able to determine whether the vaccine works.
Trials take time: The first phase typically takes months, and the second two take years.
As a result, some experts have called for replacing conventional Phase III testing with human-challenge trials. In The Journal of Infectious Diseases last month, the bioethicist Nir Eyal and the epidemiologists Marc Lipsitch and Peter Smith argued that the idea, while risky, could shave months off the process. Every week that vaccine rollout is delayed will be accompanied by many thousands of deaths globally, they wrote. If the use of human challenge helped to make the vaccine available before the epidemic has completely passed, the savings in human lives could be in the thousands or conceivably millions.
In the authors proposed design, the study would rely entirely on young, healthy volunteers who fully understand the risks of participating. (To the authors, young might mean 20 to 45; to others, 18 to 30 or even 18 to 25.) Conventional Phase III trials typically require thousands of volunteers, but a human-challenge trial might need only 100. All participants would remain isolated in comfortable state-of-the-art facilities, with access to excellent health care.
Actually, a lot of people, according to Josh Morrison and Sophie Rose, the co-founders of an organization called 1DaySooner, which has gathered signatures from over 8,000 potential volunteers. In The Washington Post, Mr. Morrison and Ms. Rose argue that the idea is not as radical as it sounds: According to one study, the coronaviruss fatality rate for 20- to 29-year-olds in China was 3 in 10,000 the same as that of kidney donation surgery and roughly twice that of childbirth in the United States.
We and many others are willing to take on what we see as an acceptable individual risk to serve the public and the people we care about, they write. As willing and well-informed volunteers, whose autonomy ought to be respected, we feel challenge trials are justified if they mean a vaccine arrives even one day sooner.
We already allow people to risk their lives for the collective good, Dr. Lipsitch, Dr. Eyal and Dr. Smith say. Firefighters, for example, are routinely called upon to rush into burning buildings. (And today, of course, delivery drivers and grocery clerks are being asked to accept a level of risk they did not sign up for.) The question, then, is whether the studys potential cost would be low enough to warrant its potential benefit. Besides recruiting only healthy, young volunteers and guaranteeing them the best care, the authors delineate four ways in which the study would minimize net risk:
The vaccine may protect some of those who receive it.
Absent an effective vaccine, a high proportion of the general population is likely to get Covid-19, so some volunteers may simply be pushing their illnesses forward.
Only people who already have an especially high risk of exposure would be recruited (e.g., New Yorkers).
Volunteers would get priority for any treatments that may become available.
But many researchers and bioethicists balk at the idea of coronavirus human-challenge trials, Jon Cohen writes in Science magazine. For one thing, the risks are hard to gauge, since the virus is so new that we dont know how often people get seriously ill or what its long-term complications are. Where youre going to give somebody a virus on purpose, you really want to understand the disease so that you know that what youre doing is a reasonable risk, Matthew Memoli, an immunologist who stages human-challenge studies of influenza, told Mr. Cohen.
There are also thorny ethical questions beyond risks and benefits, according to Seema Shah, a medical ethics professor at Northwestern University. Justice considerations also matter, such as whether the risks are fairly distributed, she told Vox. There are also other criteria: community engagement, fair selection of participants, robust informed consent, and payment that compensates for time and inconveniences. And there lies another point of contention: Dr. Eyal advises against using high payments, which he says could take advantage of the poor.
Its possible that human-challenge trials wouldnt actually speed up the process, according to Myrone Levine, a vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland who has conducted challenge trials since the 1970s. Infections are still climbing rapidly in many places, so conventional trials could reveal a vaccines efficacy on the same timeline. I cannot imagine that this would be ethical and would really speed up what we have to do, Dr. Levine told Mr. Cohen.
The benefit would also hinge on getting a lot of administrative ducks in a row, Dr. Shah said. For example, researchers would need to coordinate globally to ensure consistency across trials and to ascertain whether the Food and Drug Administration would even accept the results. And as Dr. Lipsitch, Dr. Eyal and Dr. Smith acknowledged, even if all goes well, more studies might be needed to prove the vaccine is safe and effective for older populations.
Were all looking for a Hail Mary, and its easy to see challenge studies as exciting and having a lot of promise, Dr. Shah said. But a lot of things need to fall into place to achieve that promise.
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
Heres what readers had to say about the last edition: Bidens vice-presidential pick
John C. Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, from Berlin: What about Val Demings, representative from Florida? She is experienced, well spoken and did very well during impeachment hearings. Demographically, who could be against a black, female former police chief from FLORIDA. (Tom Coleman, a former Republican congressman, also wrote in to recommend Ms. Demings.)
Alma from New Mexico: You did not mention Michelle Lujan Grisham, governor of New Mexico and former chair of the congressional Hispanic caucus. She has received national accolades for her handling of Covid-19. She is popular with both progressives and moderates.
Bruce from Hong Kong: I cant understand why no one is mentioning Susan Rice, who should be the front-runner. Highly intelligent and effective and demographically appropriate, Rice would be the perfect foil for Biden.
Deb from Minnesota: What prior experience did Trump have to qualify him?
