Coronavirus Updates: Trump Insists He Has ‘Total’ Authority to Supersede Governors

Mr. Trump broadly mischaracterized an article on his response to the coronavirus, published Sunday in The New York Times, repeatedly insisting that the United States had very few cases of the virus in early January — six weeks earlier — and angrily mocking a suggestion that was never made: that he should have ordered all schools and businesses shut that month.

President Trump is in a rush to lift restrictions, convinced that the move will rocket the economy out of a deep recession.

Companies say otherwise. So does a wide variety of economic and survey data, which suggests the economy will recover slowly even after the government begins to ease limits on public gatherings and allow certain restaurants and other closed shops to reopen.

The plant, which employs 3,700 workers and produces about 130 million servings of food per week, is responsible for about half of the state’s cases.

Meat production workers often work elbow to elbow, cleaning and deboning products in large open areas filled with hundreds of people. The closure at Smithfield follows the halting of production at several other poultry and meat plants across the country as workers have fallen ill with Covid-19.

Many meat processing facilities have been hit hard by the virus. Three workers have died at a Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, Ga. Tyson also shut a pork plant in Iowa after an outbreak there among workers. JBS USA, the world’s largest meat processor, confirmed the death of one worker at a Colorado facility and shuttered a plant in Pennsylvania for two weeks.

In a statement announcing the closure, Smithfield’s chief executive warned that the closures were threatening the U.S. meat supply. The shuttered plant produces about 4 percent to 5 percent of the country’s pork, Smithfield said.

The lines start forming the night before, as people with glassy eyes and violent coughs try to get tested before the next day’s supplies run out. In the darkness, they park their cars, cut their engines and try to sleep.

The backlog for virus testing in New Jersey, the state with the second-highest caseload in the country, has been getting worse, officials say.

Initially, the strain came from a lack of test kits, but now there are not enough nasal swabs or nurses. There is a pileup at the labs and a limited supply of the chemicals needed to identify the virus.

Coronavirus concerns could lead to fewer measles vaccinations.

More than 100 million children could be at risk for measles because countries around the world are suspending national immunization programs in order to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection, international public health leaders warned on Monday.

In the United States and other wealthier countries, parents typically make appointments to follow a routine vaccine schedule at clinics or private pediatric offices. In poorer countries, however, large numbers of infants and children are inoculated in communal settings, like marketplaces, schools, churches and mosques.

There are also concerns about potential outbreaks in North America and Europe, which do not have national inoculation programs. Because of Covid-19 fears, American pediatric practices are beginning to report significant drops in well-child visits, including those for routine vaccines.

“Even in resource-rich settings there is a danger of measles raising its ugly head in the not-too-distant future,” said Dr. Beate Kampmann, director of the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In 2019, the United States reported 1,282 measles cases, its highest in more than 25 years.

The Census Bureau will seek a four-month delay for its count.

Conceding that its effort to count the nation’s population has been hamstrung by the pandemic, the Census Bureau said it would ask Congress for a four-month delay in delivering the population data used to reapportion the House of Representatives and political districts across the country.

The bureau also said it would extend the deadline for collecting census data, now Aug. 15, to Oct. 31, and would begin reopening its field offices — which have been shuttered since mid-March — sometime after June 1.

Democrats who oversee census operations on the House Oversight and Reform Committee reacted cautiously to the news, which they said was relayed to a handful of members of Congress in a telephone call with officials from the White House and the Commerce Department. The director of the census, Steven Dillingham, apparently did not participate in the call.

“The chance of us getting someone with coronavirus is low,” Ms. Babcock advised community health providers, according to internal City of New Orleans emails obtained by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and reviewed by The New York Times.

The projection proved to be terribly off-base, as New Orleans would soon erupt into one of the largest hot spots for the virus in the U.S., with one of the nation’s highest death rates. Experts now widely agree that the Mardi Gras festivities likely served to accelerate the spread of the highly contagious disease.

But in the run-up to Mardi Gras Day, on Feb. 25, no major events were being canceled anywhere in the U.S., and “no red flags” had been raised by federal officials, the city’s mayor said in an interview on CNN.

Still, according to the emails, city and state officials were planning both for the celebration and the virus’s eventual arrival, but those preparations were based on a misunderstanding of how the virus was spreading.

A study involving chloroquine is stopped after fatal heart complications.

The study, which involved 81 hospitalized patients in the city of Manaus, was sponsored by the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Roughly half the participants were prescribed 450 milligrams of chloroquine twice daily for five days, while the rest were prescribed 600 milligrams for 10 days.

Within three days, researchers started noticing heart arrhythmias in patients taking the higher dose. By the sixth day of treatment, 11 patients had died, leading to an immediate end to the high-dose segment of the trial.

The researchers said the study did not have enough patients in the lower-dose trial to conclude whether chloroquine was effective in patients with severe cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

On Monday, President Trump doubled down on his support of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus, claiming during his daily briefing that an unnamed friend had benefited from the drug. He said 28 million doses of hydroxychloroquine had been deployed to hospitals around the country.

Hydroxychloroquine is being tested in the treatment of people with the coronavirus, but there is little evidence it works, other than a handful of small, limited studies. Still, Mr. Trump has enthusiastically promoted it and chloroquine even as his own scientific experts have expressed concerns.

“Who knows,” he said, adding that it was being combined with other treatments such as an antibiotic — azithromycin — and zinc. “I think if anyone recommended it other than me, it would be used all over the place.”

As the pain of the coronavirus outbreak continued around the world, leaders in Europe sought to strike a delicate balance as they extended lockdowns and reported worsening conditions but also signaled life may start to return to normal in the coming months.

Mr. Macron’s speech came as health authorities in France reported nearly 15,000 deaths. Warning the transition away from stay-at-home orders would only be possible if France continued to slow the epidemic, he vowed that by May 11, the authorities would be ready to test and quarantine anyone with symptoms and that “general public” masks would be available for all.

• In Italy, officials reported fewer than 600 coronavirus-linked deaths for the fourth time in six days, a significant drop from the peak of the country’s crisis in late March and early April, when it was averaging about 800 fatalities per day. “The trend is now trustworthy,” Luca Richeldi, a pulmonologist on the scientific committee that is advising the government, said at a news conference.

• The trajectory of the outbreak in Britain was increasingly worrisome, and the government was expected to extend restrictions well into next month. The number of known infections and fatalities is rising faster in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, putting it on track to surpass the death totals in Italy and Spain. Britain’s 88,621 confirmed cases already are more than the reported total in China, and the country has reported 11,329 deaths.

• President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered his bleakest comments yet on his country’s handling of the pandemic, warning officials that the number of severely ill patients was rising and that medical workers faced shortages of protective equipment.

• In Libya’s capital, Tripoli, people are facing a dire decision: whether to stay inside to slow the spread of the coronavirus or flee from the violence of a civil war that has not paused for the pandemic. “I sometimes wonder, you know, which death is going to be worse: catching corona or being instantly attacked by a missile,” said one woman, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety.

The court said arguments would be heard on May 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13, and it listed the 10 sets of arguments it would hear. But it did not say which cases would be heard when. That would depend, the court said, on “the availability of counsel.”

The court said it would also hear arguments over whether members of the Electoral College must cast their votes as they had pledged to do.

New York, Connecticut and Vermont, along with New York City, asked the justices to temporarily suspend the new program in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Every person who doesn’t get the health coverage they need today risks infecting another person with the coronavirus tomorrow,” said Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. “Immigrants provide us with health care, care for our elderly, prepare and deliver our food, clean our hospitals and public spaces, and take on so many other essential roles in our society, which is why we should all be working to make testing and health coverage available to every single person in this country, regardless of immigration status.”

The pandemic, the motion said, had changed the legal calculus and justified loosening the administration’s new requirements for the so-called public charge rule.

Tornadoes kill more than 30 people in the South as it grapples with the virus.

In the last several days, The New York Times has heard from people who have older parents in need of assistance, a new grandmother in Ohio whose daughter in North Carolina wants help with the baby, and those who were scheduled to move to a new job or home, all seeking advice on whether a road trip was advisable or even feasible.

Access to private, controllable space has emerged as a new class divide — more valuable than ever to those who have it and potentially fatal to those who do not.

Read the stories of people who have died.

The New York Times began gathering stories of people who have died during the pandemic for the series, “Those We’ve Lost to the Coronavirus.”

Some, like Hilda Churchill, who survived both World Wars and the 1918 Spanish flu, and Rafael Gómez Nieto, the last member of the unit that helped liberate Paris, were a part of moments that made history. Many lived outside of the limelight, but were still a huge part of daily life, as children, siblings, parents and grandparents.

In an obituary written about Loretta Mendoza Dionisio, an outgoing and unstoppable woman, her family hoped that she would not simply become a statistic: “We didn’t want her to get lost,” they said.

Wyoming is the only state without a recorded death from the virus.

At least 270 people have tested positive for the virus in the state, mostly around its largest cities, and Gov. Mark Gordon has imposed a series of restrictions, including closures of public schools and bans on gatherings of 10 or more people, that will stay in effect until at least April 30.

The virus has likely infected more people, but testing issues have almost certainly kept the authorities and the public from understanding the full scope of the virus’s spread in Wyoming. The state health officer acknowledged this month that necessary materials were in “very short supply.”

Mr. Trump approved a federal disaster declaration for Wyoming over the weekend, opening a spigot of aid money and marking the first time in U.S. history that a disaster had been declared in every state simultaneously.

“Though Wyoming has not reached the dire situations of some states, this declaration will help us to prepare and mobilize resources when we need them,” Mr. Gordon said last week after he asked Mr. Trump to approve the declaration.

American Samoa, a U.S. territory, is the only other part of the country without a death that has been blamed on the virus. No infections have been reported there.

Oil-producing nations reach a deal to slash output.

Russia and Saudi Arabia typically take the lead in setting global production goals. But Mr. Trump, facing a re-election campaign, a plunging economy and American oil companies struggling with collapsing prices, took the unusual step of getting involved after the Moscow and Riyadh entered a price war a month ago. Mr. Trump had made an agreement a key priority.

It was unclear, however, whether the cuts would be enough to bolster prices. Before the coronavirus crisis, 100 million barrels of oil each day fueled global commerce, but demand is down about 35 percent. While significant, the cuts agreed to on Sunday still fall far short of what is needed to bring oil production in line with demand.

The plan by OPEC, Russia and other allied producers in a group known as OPEC Plus will slash 9.7 million barrels a day in May and June, or close to 10 percent of the world’s output.