The president signed an executive order restricting immigration for 60 days. The policy will stop new green card applicants from obtaining permanent residency but will exempt key medical workers from abroad as well as some family members of American citizens.
The president said he disagreed with Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to have some businesses start reopening. “I think it’s too soon,” he said during the daily coronavirus briefing.
The governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt announced that the state’s personal care businesses, including hair salons and barbershops, could start reopening on Friday.
A top health official in charge of the federal agency overseeing research for a coronavirus vaccine claimed he was firedafter resisting the president’s push to hydroxychloroquine as a treatment.
America’s addiction to mass incarceration could almost double its number of deaths from coronavirus, with jails acting as incubators of the disease and spreading a further 100,000 fatalities across the US.
The startling warning comes from groundbreaking modeling by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and academic researchers, released on Wednesday.
The analysis found that unless instant action is taken to reduce jail populations, a terrible price will be paid. Jails, which house men and women not yet convicted, will act as mass vectors of the contagion.
As many as 99,000 more people could die in the US as a result of the virus being contracted behind jail walls, the study predicts. Of those, 23,000 are projected to succumb behind bars and 76,000 in surrounding communities as a result of inmates spreading the virus upon release.
A federal appeals court has allowed Arkansas to enforce a ban on most surgical abortions, as part of a state directive aimed at postponing medical procedures not deemed urgent during the coronavirus outbreak.
The ruling from the eighth US circuit court of appeals in St Louis, Missouri, lifted a federal judge’s order which had allowed abortions to continue. The new ruling does not affect abortion induced through medication in the early stages of pregnancy, which is still allowed.
The ruling comes two days after another federal appeals court, the fifth circuit, allowed Texas to enforce curbs on abortions via medication, as part of its response to the pandemic.
Republican senator Lindsay Graham said he agrees with Trump that Georgia is reopening businesses too quickly.
In a statement, he said:
I have great respect for Governor Kemp and believe that future re-openings can occur rather quickly but we must get Phase I right. I totally understand Governor Kemp’s desire to allow businesses to reopen as small business owners are under great stress...
We are fifty individual states but when it comes to the virus we are all in this fight together. Because of the sacrifices we have made as a nation there is light at the end of the tunnel. Better days are ahead.”
“We had the greatest economy in the history world,” Trump said. This is a gross exaggeration. Also, the GDP growth rate during the Trump administration was lower than the peak growth rate during the previous administration.
Trump referred to the pandemic of 1917. Spanish Influenza spread globally in 1918 and 1919.
“This wasn’t the flu, you know, they like to say the flu,” Trump said. But he was the “they” who repeatedly compared coronavirus to the flu.
“Testing asymptomatics will be key,” Dr Birx added, in response to a question about whether California is right to expand testing efforts to everyone, not just those who show symptoms of Covid-19.
In California, one small town is trying to test every single resident this week, but for the infection and for antibodies against it. A similar program will soon begin in San Francisco’s Mission district.
States should start by testing vulnerable people in nursing homes, indigenous communities and other underserved communities, Birx noted. Testing is “fundamental”, she said.
Trump named Michelle Obama as one of the public figures who campaigned for Stacey Abrams, a Democrat and voting rights advocate, during her gubernatorial run against Georgia’s Brian Kemp. CNN’s Daniel Dale helps us out with this one:
Michelle Obama did not go to Georgia to campaign for Stacey Abrams. Trump has said this repeatedly. He keeps adding her to the list with Oprah and Barack Obama. It just didn't happen.
“Not everybody believes as strongly on testing,” the president said.
Maybe so, but most disease experts say that testing is key to learning more about how the disease spreads and safely reopening the country.
“As we look to reopen, we should have in place a system where we can much more easily, quickly test more people,” Art Reingold, who heads the epidemiology and biostatistics division at UC Berkeley’s school of public health, told the Guardian. “Then we can determine who is infected, isolate those individuals, and the people they were in contact with.”
Trump also claimed, once again, that the US is the “best” in the world at testing. That’s not true.
Overall, the US had administered more than 4.5m coronavirus tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project. From a very slow start, the US, with a population of 329m, had ramped up to a testing rate of one in every 80 people – a bit better than to South Korea’s rate of 1 in every 90 people. Germany has done even better, testing every 1 in 63 people.
In America, despite the recent increase in testing, backlogs are reported in labs across the country, and many people with symptoms – including health workers – are still struggling to access tests.
Asked about Rick Bright, the vaccine expert who said he was ousted for questioning the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, Trump said he didn’t know Bright.
“Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t,” Trump said. “I’ve never heard of him.”
Dr Anthony Fauci: “We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that.”
Whether or not the outbreak in the fall will be “big or small is going to depend on our response ... Nobody can predict what’s going to happen with an outbreak.”
Fauci’s statement seems to contradict what Donald Trump said earlier when the president tried to downplay the threat in the fall and winter and said that a second wave of illness “might not happen”.
Medical and other essential workers from abroad will be exempt, as will the spouses and minor children of American children, and “certain other aliens”.
The administration will review guest worker programs.
“The administration will continue to monitor the labor market to amend or extend the proclamation if needed,” per the White House.
The president said that he is establishing a new council to help black and Latino communities and other underserved communities access testing and care. The council will be headed by housing secretary Ben Carson.
