US oil market collapses into negative prices – as it happened

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21 Apr 202019.25 EDT

Sam Levin

The US president ended today’s briefing citing a range of different numbers for the potential deaths the US could have experienced, saying if the country hadn’t done lockdowns, there could have been 700,000 deaths, a million deaths, or maybe “millions”.

As of today, there have been more than 41,000 deaths recorded in the US. Experts fear that the country could experience surges and second waves if states reopen too soon and if there is not enough testing and contact tracing in place.

Get in touch with me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.

That White House Press Briefing is now over. We’ll bring you a summary shortly.

21 Apr 202019.16 EDT

Sam Levin

Asked why he didn’t take the virus seriously in the early phases of its spread in the US, the president repeated his claims about that his travel restrictions against China made a difference and saved many lives: “People should say I acted very early.”

In fact, the administration’s travel policy did not cut off all travel from China. Although non-US citizens were prohibited from entering the country if they had traveled to China within the previous two weeks, American citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family members were exempt. Similarly, Trump’s European travel restrictions exempted citizens, residents and their families. And initially, the restrictions didn’t apply to the UK and Ireland, as well as most Eastern European countries.

Epidemiologists have told the Guardian that these policies likely had little impact, as they were enacted after the virus was already spreading within the US.

“We are in a war. This is a World War Two this is a World War One,” says Trump.

Watch the White House press conference live below:

Trump is back on the World Health Organization. The WHO “covered up for China,” he says repeatedly.

He also says he’s going to win “in a landslide” in November.

He adds that stopping arrivals from China and Europe were very difficult decisions that he took, which, he says, Dr Deborah Birx herself has said saved “tens of thousands of lives”.

The truth here is obviously that tens of thousands more could have been saved.

The current death toll in the US, the highest in the world, is 41,816, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The number of confirmed infections, at 783,000, is almost four times higher than those in the next worst-affected country, Spain, which has 200,210. Spain has 20,852 deaths.

Trump is being asked, just after saying “I cannot tell a lie,” (a quote from a made up story about George Washington confessing to chopping down his father’s cherry tree), why he feels that criticism of the administration doing too little testing too late is a bipartisan, personal attack.

He responds that he “doesn’t view it as personal at all”:

If we have enough tests to go into phase 1, why is the governor of Maryland having to get half a million tests from South Korea? Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir is asked.

He responds: “I don’t know what the governor of Maryland is doing in South Korea but there’s excess capacity every day.”

Trump then attacked Hogan for securing tests, saying, “He could’ve saved a lot of money ... He needed to get a little knowledge, that would’ve been helpful.”

Regarding testing facilities in his state, Hogan just told CNN “more than half [of those listed by the federal government] in Maryland were federal facilities that we have desperately been trying to get help from, or military facilities”.

From my colleague Sam Levin:

Earlier in the conference, vice president, Mike Pence, praised the testing efforts in Arizona, Florida, California, Michigan, and other states. He also claimed the US currently has “enough testing capacity” for every state to start phase one of the White House recommendations for re-opening their economies.

In fact, a number of governors have expressed concerns that the testing capacity is not yet adequate for reopening the country. Most prominently this week, Republican governor Larry Hogan of Maryland has said his state was dealing with a shortage and negotiated to get 500,000 tests from South Korea.

Trump says he will look into stopping oil shipments from Saudi Arabia, and that his administration will either ask congress’ permission to buy oil, “or we will store it.”

It’s quite a graph:

Trump is back on the podium and says that testing might not even be that important (it is).

Now he is talking about oil – as the market collapses to negative pricing.

“Nobody’s ever heard of negative oil before but it’s for a short term,” Trump says. Just before this he said again, “It’s for the short term. A lot of people got caught.” The oil decline was largely a “financial squeeze”, he said.

Asked if he would like Opec+ to make more cuts, he said “we’ve already done that”.

He said oil producers need to “do more by the market” in terms of production cuts.

The full story on the price drop below:

The US oil market has collapsed into negative prices for the first time in history as North America’s oil producers run out of space to store an unprecedented oversupply of crude left by the pandemic:

US vice president Mike Pence said the US has enough tests for those states that are ready to reopen – that meet the conditions for Phase 1 – and that the US will continue to ramp up testing in the meantime.

20 Apr 202018.20 EDT

Sam Levin

Fact check: testing quality

Trump claimed the US is “way advanced” on testing.

In fact, some of the initial coronavirus tests sent out to states were seriously flawed. Part of the problem came from the CDC shunning the World Health Organization (WHO) template for tests, and insisted on developing a more complicated version that correctly identified Covid-19, but also flagged other viruses – resulting in false positives.

Other countries – after their first coronavirus case – swiftly asked private companies to develop their own tests. South Korea, which recorded its first case on the same day as the US, did so within a week. The US only allowed laboratories and hospitals to conduct their own tests on 29 February, almost six weeks after the first case was confirmed.

You can watch the White House press conference live below:

“‘Testing’ is a big word,” says Trump. “Remember when it was all ventilators? Now the US is the king of ventilators.

“So they said, ‘Oh, now we’ll get him on testing.’”