Coronavirus US live: Trump says US will stop funding World Health Organization, then backtracks – as it happened

Live reporting on the coronavirus in the US continues on Wednesday’s blog:

• Donald Trump threatened to stop funding the World Health Organization and once again touted an unproven anti-malarial drug as a quick fix for coronavirus. The president also alleged widespread voter fraud and insisted that he was getting along swimmingly state governors, who have increasingly found themselves at odds with him as they respond to the crisis.
• Dr. Anthony Fauci said the crisis has shined “a bright light” on the racial disparities in the US. Data from some states and cities suggest that the pandemic is disproportionately killing Black Americans.
• Memos revealed that Trump was warned in January of the severity of the coronavirus crisis. The president insisted he never saw the warnings from his economic adviser Peter Navarro.
• Acting navy secretary Thomas Modly resigned over insulting comments he made about Captain Brett Crozier, the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt who raised concerns about the spread of coronavirus on the ship.
  
• Trump removed a Pentagon official tapped to oversee the coronavirus relief effort from his post. Acting Pentagon inspector general Glenn Fine was supposed to oversee implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus bill, but an agency spokesperson confirmed he is no longer in the role.
• New York reported the largest single-day increase in its coronavirus death toll yet. The state has recorded 5,489 deaths linked to the virus, up from 4,758 a day earlier, governor Andrew Cuomo announced at his daily briefing today.
• The White House announced an overhaul of its communications team. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham is returning to the first lady’s staff after never having held a single White House briefing in more than nine months. She will be replaced by Kayleigh McEnany, who currently serves as a spokesperson for Trump’s reelection campaign.
• Congress is seeking to allocate additional funds to the small business loan program established by the stimulus package. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said he would ask Congress to add $250 billion to the program, which was originally given $350 billion under the stimulus package passed last month.

During the briefing, Trump also repeatedly insisted that he never daw top White House adviser’s Peter Navarro’s memos, which warned officials in late January the coronavirus crisis could put millions of Americans’ health at risk, and cost the country trillions.

Here’s more on the memos, from my colleagues Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly:

8 Apr 202019.47 EDT

Joanna Walters

Fact check: testing

During the taskforce briefing, Trump said – once again – that the United States “continues to perform more tests than anywhere else in the world, and that’s why we have more cases”.

While the US has overtaken South Korea in total numbers of coronavirus tests administered, it has conducted fewer tests per capita given the US population is over six times larger than South Korea’s.

As of 7 April, the United States, with a population of 329 million, had administered at least 1,951,044 tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a group led by Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, with more than 100 volunteers that compile coronavirus testing data from states.

This equates to 582 tests per 100,000 people in the US (with huge variations depending on the county, city and state), compared with 709 tests per 100,000 in South Korea and 600 per 100,000 in Italy.

The US rate of testing improved markedly in early April. On March 31 the rate was just 318 per 100,000.

8 Apr 202019.36 EDT

GOP congressional candidate touts AR-15s to fight 'looting hordes from Atlanta'

Lois Beckett

Why do Americans need AR-15 rifles during a global pandemic? To shoot “looting hordes from Atlanta.”

That’s the campaign message from a former Republican congressman from Georgia, Paul Broun, who is now running for congress again.

Broun lives in Gainesville, Georgia, a city that is 87% white, and that is about an hour outside of Atlanta, the state capital, which is majority-black.

In a new campaign video, Broun promises to give away an AR-15 rifle “to one lucky person who signs up for email updates” from his campaign website.

“Whether it’s looting hordes from Atlanta or a tyrannical government from Washington, there are few better liberty machines than an AR-15.”

In a phone interview Tuesday, Broun defended his message as “not racial.”

“Only the liberal press would take that kind of position,” he said. “There are a lot of white people in Atlanta as well.”

“Ma’am, I have been a keynote speaker at an MLK Day celebration,” he said.

Broun was dismissive of the idea that his rhetoric might concern black Georgia residents, or that this kind of rhetoric might increase the risk of innocent black Americans getting shot while in majority-white neighborhoods.

“You’re the racist,” he added.

Asked what evidence he had that the coronavirus pandemic might result in hordes of looters, Broun referenced civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, both majority-black cities where police killings of unarmed black men led to sustained protests over police treatment of black Americans.

Broun, who had a reputation as one of the most conservative members of the GOP during his eight years in Congress, left office in 2015 under the shadow of an ethics investigation into his former chief of staff over taxpayer dollars spent to hire a political consultant known as the “tea party whisperer.”

Dr. Birx pushed back against reports that coronavirus deaths are underreported due to a lack of testing and delays in reporting. “I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the past five to six weeks,” she said. Though rural areas may face issues accessing tests to diagnose, Birx said she doesn’t see it as a problem overall.

The New York Times reported earlier:

With no uniform system for reporting coronavirus-related deaths in the United States, and a continued shortage of tests, some states and counties have improvised, obfuscated and, at times, backtracked in counting the dead.

“We definitely think there are deaths that we have not accounted for,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, which studies global health threats and is closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic.

Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance for how to certify coronavirus deaths, underscoring the need for uniformity and reinforcing the sense by health care workers and others that deaths have not been consistently tracked. In its guidance, the C.D.C. instructed officials to report deaths where the patient has tested positive or, in an absence of testing, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.”

Dr Anthony Fauci added that “health disparities have always existed for the African American community but here, again, with this crisis, it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is.”

Although “we will get over coronavirus,” he added, “there will still be health disparities.”

Dr Deborah Birx clarified that African Americans are not more “susceptible” to coronavirus. “What our data suggests is that they are more susceptible to more difficult and severe disease and poorer outcomes,” she said.

Data from cities including Chicago and Philadelphia show stark racial disparities in coronavirus patients and fatalities. White House official Seema Verma said that Medicare data will be looking at race and underlying conditions, and the president earlier promised that more statistics on racial disparities will be revealed in the next week.

Fact check: coronavirus deaths

“I think they’re pretty accurate on the death counts,” Trump told reporters. But doctors disagree. Delays in reporting and a continuing lack of widespread testing mean that more people have died of coronavirus than the official count. Doctors also believe that deaths in February and early March — before the coronavirus was recognized as an epidemic in the US — that were attributed to influenza or pneumonia, were likely due to Covid-19.

7 Apr 202018.52 EDT

Lauren Gambino

Fact check: vote-by-mail

The president has left the briefing room, leaving it to Mike Pence and health officials to answer the remaining questions. Before he exited, he once again falsely claimed that recent elections were marred by voter fraud, insisting that millions of people voted illegally in 2016 which cost him the popular vote.

But extensive research has found that voter fraud is rare and virtually nonexistent.

Trump zeroed in on mail-in ballots, claiming the process is “corrupt” and susceptible to widespread fraud. “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing somebody’s ballot,” he said. I

n the 5 states that have moved to an entirely vote-by-mail systems, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud. More states are considering expanding their vote-by-mail systems amid the coronavirus pandemic as a way to keep voters and poll workers safe. But the moves are widely opposed by Republicans, as was the case in Wisconsin, which held its primary election on Tuesday despite calls and legal challenges to postpone the election.

It should be noted, once again, that Trump voted by mail-in ballot in Florida last month. Additionally, the most significant episode of mail-in ballot fraud in recent years involved a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina. The election was overturned.

7 Apr 202018.45 EDT

Oliver Milman

Fact check: hydroxychloroquine

Trump loves to tout hydroxychloroquine. Last week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided the drug with an “emergency use authorization” to use on coronavirus patients in some circumstances. State officials in New York have said that about 4,000 seriously ill patients are now being treated with the drug. But experts say it’s too early to call it a cure.

What is hydroxychloroquine?

Hydroxychloroquine, also known by its brand name, Plaquenil, is a drug used to treat malaria. It is a less toxic version of chloroquine, another malaria drug, which itself is related to quinine, an ingredient in tonic water.

It is also readily available to Americans – already approved as a malaria and anti-inflammation treatment by the FDA – where it is an off-the-shelf drug with various low-cost generic versions. Despite the emergency use order, the FDA has not conducted clinical trials to fully ascertain whether the drug is an effective treatment for Covid-19.

Why is Trump touting it?

Trump was influenced by a widely publicized study in France where 40 coronavirus patients were given hydroxychloroquine, with more than half experiencing the clearing of their airways within three to six days. This apparent improvement is important as it would curtail the timeframe in which infected people could spread Covid-19 to others.

However, experts have warned that the study is small and lacks sufficient rigor to be classed as evidence of a potential treatment. The French health ministry has warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, with Olivier Véran, France’s health minister, saying that it shouldn’t be used by anyone with the exception of “serious forms of hospitalization and on the collegial decision of doctors and under strict medical supervision”.

Trump is again touting hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, which has not yet been proven effective against the coronavirus.

The repeated a story about a Democratic state lawmaker who credits hydroxychloroquine and Trump for her recovery from Covid-19. “I really think it’s a great thing to try, just based on what I know,” he said. “Again, I’m not a doctor. Get a physician’s approval.”

Here’s more on that state representative, from the Detroit Free Press:

State Rep. Karen Whitsett, who learned Monday she has tested positive for COVID-19, said she started taking hydroxychloroquine on March 31, prescribed by her doctor, after both she and her husband sought treatment for a range of symptoms on March 18.

“It was less than two hours” before she started to feel relief, said Whitsett, who had experienced shortness of breath, swollen lymph nodes, and what felt like a sinus infection. She is still experiencing headaches, she said.

Whitsett said she was familiar with “the wonders” of hydroxychloroquine from an earlier bout with Lyme disease, but does not believe she would have thought to ask for it, or her doctor would have prescribed it, had Trump not been touting it as a possible treatment for COVID-19.