Live reporting on the coronavirus in the US continues on Monday’s blog:
Summary
Here’s a summary of today’s major news developments ...
- Trump coronavirus vaccine goal ‘amazingly ambitious’, Senate Republican says. White House predictions about how the US economy might rebound from the coronavirus crisis and how quickly a vaccine might be rolled out came under question on Sunday.
- Fauci in quarantine as Trump projects confidence and urges states to reopen. The White House is stepping up precautions to try to stem the spread of Covid-19 in the West Wing after Dr Anthony Fauci and two other senior leaders in the coronavirus fight began self-quarantining on Sunday.
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Cuomo alerts states about mystery coronavirus illness after three children die. New York state is alerting all other parts of the US about a new mystery syndrome that appears to be related to Covid-19 and is causing severe illness and even death in very young children.
- Trump charges Obama with ‘biggest political crime in American history’. The US president continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
- Up to 43m Americans could lose health insurance amid pandemic, report says. As many as 43 million Americans could lose their health insurance in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.
Oklahoma City University president Martha Burger has condemned the “hate-filled attack” that interrupted the Methodist school’s remote graduation ceremony on Saturday.
“We are heartbroken and outraged at the hate-filled attack that occurred at the end of our virtual graduation celebration,” Burger said in a statement. “During a time that should have been focused on recognizing our graduating students, an unknown source was able to bypass the system and display racist and offensive language. I want to be clear, OCU stands against racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism.”
While Burger did not give any details about the content of the interruption, the Associated Press reported that a racial slur and a swastika appeared as the names of the graduates scrolled across the screen near the end of the ceremony, which was held using the popular video-conferencing platform Zoom.
Since the coronavirus lockdown, Zoom’s daily active users shot up from around 10 million to 300 million as people have increasingly relied on video-conferencing. The uptick in usage has given rise to cyberattacks known as ‘zoom-bombings’, where bad actors enter video meetings and broadcast explicit imagery or abuse other users.
In April, Zoom released an update including encryption and new privacy controls, improvements that were part of a 90-day plan to address an onslaught of security concerns surrounding the service.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy has reported at least 1,503 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the statewide total to roughly 138,532.
“We’ve tragically lost 140 more lives, pushing our total to 9,255 lives lost,” Murphy said on Sunday.
NEW: NJ has 1,503 new confirmed positive cases of #COVID19, pushing our total to 138,532. Of those cases:
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) May 10, 2020
➡️4,308 are in hospitals
➡️1,338 are in critical or intensive care
➡️994 are on ventilators
We’ve tragically lost 140 more lives, pushing our total to 9,255 lives lost. pic.twitter.com/7LCMQmK6Qk
It marked the fourth straght day with fewer than 2,000 cases in the Garden State, although deaths from the virus remained up. New Jersey, with a population of approximately nine million people, remains a coronavirus hotbed with more cases and deaths than any US state besides New York.
That has led Murphy to proceed with extreme caution in the easing of coronavirus restrictions. While the governor has explored allowing a limited number of more essential businesses to reopen, he stressed during Saturday’s daily briefing that he won’t do so until satisfied by the data and public health officials.
“Nothing’s changed,” Murphy said on Saturday. “We’re under consideration. We’re all looking at what other steps we can take. We will let you know if nonessential retail is allowed to be open. It is not at the moment.”
“I hope it can change,” he added. “I hope it’ll change sooner than later. No one would be happier.”
A study of 5,754 employees of Major League Baseball found only 60 tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, a rate lower than what similar studies on the infection rate among the general population have found.
“I was expecting a larger number,” said Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at the University of Stanford and one of the study’s authors, told ESPN. “It shows the value of doing the science as opposed to guessing.”
Twenty-six of MLB’s 30 teams took park in the study, which required participants to use a pin prick to draw blood, test it themselves using a pre-shipped kit, then return a survey.
Of the 5,603 employees who took the test and submitted their results, only 39 (0.7%) returned positive results. MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that none of the people who tested positive have died from the virus.
MLB, like every other major US sports league, has remained on hiatus since spring training was shut down and opening day postponed indefinitely. But details of a restart plan expected to be submitted on Tuesday began to trickle out on Sunday. They include a truncated season of around 80 games beginning in early July exclusively against opponents in the same geographic regions and an expanded postseason format that would send seven teams from each league to the playoffs instead of the current five.
Donald Trump was back at it on Twitter on Sunday, seething over the Russia investigation more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges.
“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote amid a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”
OBAMAGATE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2020
“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”
The president did not immediately name anyone.
More than 1.3m people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and nearly 80,000 have died, according to publicly available data from multiple sources compiled by the Guardian.
New York senator Chuck Schumer has called on the Department of Veterans Affairs to explain why it allowed the use of hydroxychloroquine on veterans for the coronavirus despite scant scientific evidence it helped. The Senate’s top Democrat said the VA needs to provide more information about a $208,000 order of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug widely promoted by President Trump as a ‘miracle cure’.
The request comes on the heels of a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday by former Health and Human Services official Rick Bright alleging he was ousted from his position after raising concerns that the Trump administration wanted to “flood” coronavirus hotspots like New York and New Jersey despite the uncertain efficacy and potential for harm.
“There are concerns that they are using this drug when the medical evidence says it doesn’t help and could hurt,” Schumer said in an interview with the Associated Press. The senator added that VA secretary Robert Wilkie must address whether anyone at the department was pressured by anyone at the White House to use hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 in light of Trump’s persistent endorsements.
A VA spokesperson decried Schumer’s “preposterous” suggestion that any department official would make treatment decisions based on anything other than “the best medical interests of patients” in a statement on Sunday.
Saturday night saw a return to major, live sports in America as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the leading promotion in mixed martial arts, staged an event broadcast live on pay-per-view on ESPN+.
UFC’s president, Dana White, is a close ally of Donald Trump and the president recorded a message of support that was shown on the telecast before the event.
“Let’s play,” Trump said in the video. “You do the social distancing and whatever else you have to do. But we need sports. We want our sports back.”
One of the fighters had to drop out before the event after testing positive for Covid-19, but White said it had been a useful experiment as sports look to reopen during the pandemic.
“I knew we could do this,” he said following the event on Saturday night. “I knew we could figure it out. Even with all the hurdles that we had early on, this has been fun. It’s been challenging and it’s been fun.”
There was no live audience for the fights, which took place at Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida. Sports leagues across America, and the world, have been shut down during the pandemic. Although professional baseball is being played in Taiwan and South Korea, and Germany’s Bundesliga plans to return later this month.
Updated
The Covid-19 pandemic poses obvious immediate health risks but it could also place our longer-term well-being in jeopardy. If, as some forecasts predict, the unemployment rate rises to 20%, up to 43 million Americans could lose their health insurance. That could result in deaths with people unable to afford treatment.
“The status quo is incredibly inefficient, it’s incredibly unfair, it’s tied to employment for no real reason,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “This problem exposes a lot of the inadequacies in our system.”
You can read our full report on the subject here:
Updated
Dr Anthony Fauci will testify remotely before a Senate committee next week. The US government’s top infectious diseases adviser had been due to appear in person while observing social distancing and wearing a mask but the Washington Post reports he will now do so via videoconference.
Two other witnesses at the Senate Covid-19 hearing on Tuesday had already said they would testify remotely. CDC director Dr Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn are in self-quarantine after coming into contact with Vice-President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, who tested positive for Covid-19 last week.
“After consulting with Dr Fauci, and in an abundance of caution for our witnesses, senators, and the staff, all four administration witnesses will appear by videoconference due to these unusual circumstances,” Senator Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee said, in a statement on Sunday.
The Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr Brett Giroir, had also been due to appear in person, but joined Fauci in saying he would appear via video link.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, says he will continue with plans to reopen the state despite the fact that cases and deaths of Covid-19 are not going down.
“We wish we were going down. We are not. We have been hit in Ohio, just like other states have been hit economically, so we’ve got to try to do two things at once, you know no one is underestimating how difficult this but, it’s something we have to do,” DeWine said in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
DeWine said that taking steps to reopen the Ohio economy is necessary as the state has taken a severe economic hit during the pandemic.
“We’ve been hit very hard. We’ve had over a million people apply for unemployment,” he said. “So we’re no different than most other states. I mean we’ve been hit exceedingly hard. And again, as we look to come back carefully, it’s not so much about at this point orders that I issue or my health director issues, it’s really about what people do and I emphasize that time and time again.”
DeWine said it was important for the state’s residents to observe safety rules. “The virus is still out there, it’s still very, very dangerous. We have to keep the distancing. People should wear masks, wash their hands. I mean, these are basic things that we have to do. We can’t let up,” he said.
More than 23,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Ohio and there had been 1,331 recorded deaths as of Sunday morning.
The Associated Press has spoken to Americans who have decided to sue China over the Covid-19 outbreak. So far at least nine lawsuits have been filed against China in the US, claiming the country did not do enough to control the pandemic and sought to hide the full extent of the outbreak. Many of the lawsuits are class action, filed on behalf of thousands of people and business. One was filed by the district attorney of Missouri, on behalf of the entire state.
“I do feel that they hid it from the world and from Americans,” Saundra Andringa-Meuer, one of the people pursuing legal action against China told the AP. “I don’t feel we had to have the loss of life. I don’t think we had to have the economy shut down. It disrupted all of American lives. I do believe we need to right some of these wrongs.”
Andringa-Meuer, 61, came down with the virus in March and was on a ventilator for 14 days.
Foreign governments cannot be sued in the US, apart from in exceptional circumstances. “We think it’s going to be an uphill battle for them to ultimately take advantage of those exceptions,” Robert Boone, a specialist in class-action lawsuits told the AP.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang described the Missouri lawsuit as “very absurd and [with] no factual and legal basis.”
Fears of a hot zone in the West Wing are mounting after a valet who handles food and beverages and the vice-president’s press secretary tested positive for Covid-19, a New York Times report citing multiple White House officials has revealed.
According to the report, Trump “was spooked that his valet, who is among those who serve him food, had not been wearing a mask” and “annoyed” to learn that Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller tested positive.
“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
He added: “It’s a small, crowded place. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit risky. But you have to do it because you have to serve your country.”
The discovery of the two infected employees has prompted the White House to ramp up its procedures to combat the coronavirus, including daily tests for some senior staff, increased usage of masks and more rigorous screening of people entering the complex.
The concern about an outbreak of the virus at the White House – and the swift testing and contact tracing being done to contain it – underscores the broader challenge for Americans as Mr. Trump urges them to begin returning to their own workplaces despite warnings from public health officials that the virus continues to ravage communities across the country.
Most restaurants, offices and retail stores do not have the ability to regularly test all their employees and quickly track down and quarantine the contacts of anyone who gets infected. At the White House, all employees are being tested at least weekly, officials said, and a handful of top aides who regularly interact with the president are being tested daily, they said.
“To get in with the president, you have to test negative,” Mr. Hassett said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
Updated
New York health commissioner Howard Zucker says the deaths of three young New Yorkers from inflammatory complications possibly linked to Covid-19 were in otherwise healthy children: two in elementary school and one adolescent. He says 30 to 40 people are reviewing charts of the 85 young people with the illness to “assess exactly what has happened to them”.
When asked if those who died had any underlying conditions, Zucker tells parents to call their doctor if their child is suffering from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, pallor or chest pains, which are common symptoms of the toxic-shock syndrome-like condition, and to “err on the side of caution”.
“You want to talk about Mother’s Day?” Cuomo says. “This is every mother’s nightmare.”
The New York governor is blasting the “corporate bailouts” embedded in the federal government’s coronavirus relief legislation. “You took care of corporate America,” Cuomo says, “but now you’re going to starve police and fire and hospitals and schools?”
“Going forward, let them fund working Americans because that’s the need,” the governor says. “You look at the past legislation: they funded hotels, restaurants, airlines, big corporations, public companies. Now it turns out they funded a tax break for millionaires in the Covid response legislation. And they didn’t fund state and local governments. Who do state and local governments fund? I fund police, fire fighters, nurses, school teachers and food banks.”
He ends with a warning, calling back to the much-criticized bailouts during the last financial crisis.
“Don’t make the same mistake twice,” Cuomo says. “Don’t do what this nation did after the 2007-08 mortgage crisis bailout where the government bailed out all these bankers and corporations that made a fortune running a mortgage scam.”
Cuomo holds press briefing
New York governor Andrew Cuomo says the number of total of hospitalizations and intubations statewide are down from the previous 24-hour period in his daily briefing from Albany, calling it “good news”. He says that the new Covid-19 hospitalizations are also down with 521 in the last 24-hour period, the same number as 20 March before they sharply escalated.
There were 207 deaths from the virus statewide in the last day – including 43 in nursing homes – which is down from 226 on Saturday.
The governor, who has come under criticism for the disproportionate death toll at assisted-living facilities (particularly upstate, where in some counties they account for nearly all coronavirus-related deaths), stresses that it is a national problem and notes that New York’s percentage of deaths in nursing homes ranks 34th out of 50 states. To address the issue, he says all nursing home staff in New York must now be tested for the virus twice a week.
Cuomo then says the state’s department of health is investigating up to 85 cases of what may be a Covid-related illness in children – mostly toddler to elementary school age – with symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease. The illness has taken the lives of three young New Yorkers and an additional two deaths are currently under investigation. Cuomo adds the department is issuing a notice to all other 49 state health departments to notify them of the situation.
Updated
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, gave his sobering assessment of the pandemic on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying “we’re going to see 60 to 70% of Americans” infected with Covid-19.
“We have to understand that we’re riding this tiger, we’re not directing it,” Osterholm said. “This virus is going to do what it’s going to do. What we can do is only nibble at the edges, and I think it’s not a good message to send to the public that we can control this virus in a meaningful way. ... What we have to tell people honestly, what they want to hear, they don’t want it sugarcoated and they don’t want it coated in fear. But somewhere between now and tomorrow, next year, we’re going to see 60 to 70% of Americans ultimately infected with this virus. What we have to do is to figure out how not just to die with the virus but also how to live with it. And we’re not having that discussion. As Lewis Carrol once said: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.’”
When asked whether the United States is ready to reopen the economy, Osterholm said it was “unclear” what that exactly means.
“When we say what we mean by opening the economy, that’s really unclear,” Osterholm said. “We have to, we can’t stay locked down for 18 months, but at the same time when you have cases increasing, deaths increasing, healthcare workers without adequate protective equipment, and we’re suddenly going back to what was once our normal lives, that’s not a safe place to be. We can’t do that and not expect to see a major increase in cases.”
Atlanta mayor slams Trump for 'erratic leadership'
Keisha Lance Bottoms also, of course, discussed with CNN the coronavirus outbreak in her state and attempts to reopen the Georgia economy. As she did so she hit Donald Trump again, accusing him of “erratic leadership” during the crisis.
Bottoms said it was “difficult to tell” if people in Atlanta were following her recommendation to stay at home despite Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s attempts to open the state up, per Trump’s desire.
“Many young people are out and about as if everything is normal,” she said. “Our malls have opened. Restaurants are reopening. But, anecdotally, I have spoken with just as many people who have said that they will remain at home.
“Many of our Fortune 500 companies are not reopening for business just yet. And I think … therein lies the issue that we have really across this nation. You have Fortune 500 companies and people who have the ability to telework are able to remain at home, but our frontline workers, many who are most vulnerable in terms of having access to health insurance and to quality health care, are the people who are having to go back out to work.
“And so we will see over the next couple of weeks what this massive health experiment, what the results are in our state.”
Asked what she would like to see from the federal and state government to help remedy the kind of racial disparities in Covid-19 patients referred to by Robert F Smith on NBC, Bottoms said: “One, I think that we need to make sure that people have access to funding, people who own small businesses, that they have access to these loans, and that they are able to make decisions not based on economics, but what is best for their health and for their families and for their communities.
“But, also, I think that we have to be responsible. We know that there will be a time that we have to reopen this country, because we’re not at the point that there is a cure or even a vaccine for Covid-19. But I think we have to be very thoughtful. I don’t think the way to reopen up Georgia and stimulate the economy is to send the people out who can least afford to get sick.”
Bottoms added: “It’s very difficult to have those decisions put forth when we are getting really what I call erratic leadership from the White House and no clear blueprint on how we move forward thoughtfully as a country.”
Moving away from the coronavirus for a moment, the Democratic mayor of Atlanta has called the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed by two white men in February, a “lynching”.
Keisha Lance Bottoms also accused Donald Trump of inciting overt acts of racism.
Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, the rising star within the Democratic party said the killing of Arbery, 25, was “heartbreaking”.
Father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael were charged with murder and aggravated assault on Thursday after video of a confrontation with an unarmed Arbery, who was African American, was made public.
Asked if the former county police officer and his son would have been charged had the video not been posted online, Bottoms said: “Had we not seen that video I don’t think they would have been charged.”
She added: “It’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African American man.”
The Guardian has disclosed that police in Glynn county, Georgia, where Arbery was killed while jogging in a quiet suburban street, failed to conduct a thorough investigation.
The idea that the incident was a lynching has also been expressed by the dead man’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr, in an interview with the Guardian.
Bottoms is an increasingly prominent voice in Georgia. As the black mayor of the state’s largest city, she has been talked about as a possible vice-presidential candidate for Joe Biden.
On Sunday she was sharply critical of Trump and the US justice department.
“With the rhetoric we hearing coming out of the White House in so many ways, I think that many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way we otherwise would not see in 2020,” she said.
Where local police forced fail to take action against alleged racial killings, she said, there used to be the justice department as a “backstop”, ensuring appropriate prosecutions.
“We don’t have that leadership at the top right now. It’s disheartening.”
Trump has commented on Arbery’s death, telling Fox News: “My heart goes out to the parents and the family and friends.”
“Justice getting done is the thing that solves that problem,” the president added.
On Sunday, Bottoms talked about her four children, three of whom are boys.
“They are angry and afraid,” she said. “It speaks to the need to have leadership at the top that cares about all our communities, not just in words but in deeds as well.”
NBC’s Meet the Press has an interesting interview today with Robert F Smith, a billionaire who a year ago famously took care of the debt of a whole graduating class at Morehouse, the alma mater of Martin Luther King in Atlanta.
Discussing the coronavirus outbreak and its various disproportionate effects on communities of colour, Smith said: “You know, as a good friend of mine has said, this is a pandemic on top of a series of epidemics.”
Smith was not asked to elaborate but one would presume he was referring to the effects of gun violence, drug abuse, poverty, harsh sentencing laws and more.
He added: “And I think the important thing that we have to do is continue to rally as Americans to come with real lasting, scalable solutions to enable the communities that are getting hit first, hardest, and probably will take the longest to recover with solutions that will enable their communities to thrive again.”
On ABC’s This Week, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow repeated, as did treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin elsewhere, that the Trump administration does not want another stimulus bill yet.
He was also asked about Barack Obama’s comments about the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
“It has been an absolute chaotic disaster,” Obama said in a call reported by Yahoo News on Friday, “when that mind-set of, what’s in it for me and to heck with everybody else, when that mind-set is operationalized in our government.”
Kudlow listed Trump’s responses to the crisis, and said: “I don’t understand what President Obama is saying. It just sounds so darn political to me.
“Look, what we’ve done may not be 100% perfect. You know, these things happen once every 100 years. But the overall pictures, we’ve created a massive health and safety infrastructure to deal with the pandemic here in the United States.
“And judging from the results, where there has been a flattening in the rate of growth in infection rates and mortality rates, it’s working, so we’re preparing to reopen the economy.”
Kudlow then repeated a talking point from a White House not surprisingly focused on economic recovery, given its centrality to Trump’s re-election hopes in November.
“Next year, 2021 could be a tremendous snapback in the US economy,” Kudlow said. “So, I’m going to leave President Obama alone.”
Here’s our report on what Obama said, which was mostly about Michael Flynn:
Hassett: White House has stepped up precautions
Precautions against Covid-19 infection have been stepped up at the White House but are hampered by the cramped and poorly ventilated conditions in the West Wing, Kevin Hassett, a special adviser to Donald Trump on the pandemic response, said on Sunday.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Hassett said extra measures were being taken after two White House staffers, including Katie Miller, the press secretary to vice-president Mike Pence and wife of senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, tested positive for the virus.
“The West Wing, even with all the testing in the world and the best medical team on Earth, is a relatively cramped place,” Hassett said. He added: “There are things that have to happen in that West Wing even though the building is a little old and poorly ventilated.”
Hassett emphasised that anyone coming into contact with Trump has to have tested negative in advance.
“There’s not a lot of evidence that you can pass the virus if you test negative,” he said.
But Trump has come under criticism in recent days for ostentatiously failing to wear a mask in White House meetings. He even toured a mask-making factory in Arizona without wearing a mask.
Hassett said he himself did wear a mask when necessary.
On the wider pandemic picture, Hassett said it was “a scary time for everybody. We’ve got moving on 80,000 dead and more than 30m getting unemployment benefits - it’s a stressful time for all Americans”.
He warned that unemployed could exceed 20% of the US workforce by late summer, after which he predicted it would start to decline amid a strong economic rebound.
Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin has been talking to Fox News Sunday about the Trump administration’s attempts to reopen and restart the stalled US economy, and whether there will be another huge stimulus bill. Democrats who control the House want one of those but the White House doesn’t – that’s the short version.
The White House is “absolutely pushing for a payroll tax cut”, Mnuchin says. Most observers think that is a non-starter, because Democrats won’t let it. Payroll taxes, meaning deductions from regular paychecks, include funds for Social Security and Medicare, vital social benefits.
Here’s a taste of how BusinessInsider.com explains things:
- A payroll tax cut could free up more cash for employees and employers. If Social Security and Medicare taxes aren’t taken out of paychecks, workers and businesses would take home a little more money with each paycheck. The idea is that workers benefiting from the cut would spend more money, which could help curb a recession. It could give employers more money, which could reduce the need to lay off employees.
But here’s what it says would happen:
- The tax cut would disproportionately give more money to people with higher incomes, who typically have more savings to fall back on during a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic. A payroll tax cut would also do nothing to help those who lost their jobs because of the crisis, especially lower-income people in industries like tourism, hospitality, and dining that have been especially hit hard by the pandemic and decline in demand from consumers.
Here’s our business editor, Dominic Rushe, on the economic crisis:
Updated
California Democrat: 'F*ck Elon Musk'
After Elon Musk sued local authorities in California and threatened to move Tesla’s HQ to Texas or Nevada, over attempts to contain the coronavirus outbreak, one Democratic state politician had a blunt message for the electronic car magnate: “F*ck Elon Musk.”
Lorena S Gonzalez from San Diego, who describes herself on Twitter as a “Mama, Labor Leader turned CA Assemblywoman [and] Progressive Latina Democrat”, tweeted the pithy rebuke on Saturday night, earning predictable press attention. She did not immediately comment further.
The fight is all about state regulations versus county regulations, and Reuters reported it thus:
Musk has been pushing to reopen Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory after Alameda county’s health department said the carmaker must not reopen because local lockdown measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus remain in effect.
Tesla filed a lawsuit against the county on Saturday, calling the continued restrictions a ‘power grab’ by the county since California’s governor had said on Thursday that manufacturers in the state would be allowed to reopen.
The company said Alameda was going against the federal and California constitutions, as well as defying the governor’s order, in the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court.
Alameda county, where the Fremont factory is located, is scheduled to remain shut until the end of May, with only essential businesses allowed to reopen. County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Musk, of course, was free with his tweeted comments, blasting “the unelected and ignorant ‘Interim Health Officer’ of Alameda” for he said “acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!”
According to CNBC the official in question, Erica Pan, told an online town hall on Friday “even though California had relaxed Covid-19 restrictions at the state level, legally, ‘If there are local orders, whichever is stricter prevails.’
“She added that currently, Alameda county – where the Fremont car factory is based – is ‘still a little bit stricter’ than the state in its approach to protecting public health amid an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
CNBC quoted Pan as saying of Tesla: “We have not given the green light. We have been working with them looking at some of their safety plans. But no, we have not said that it is appropriate to move forward.”
“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Musk responded. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen[t] on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in [California].”
Musk also claimed “Tesla knows far more about what needs to be done to be safe through our Tesla China factory experience than an (unelected) interim junior official in Alameda County”.
“I’m not messing around,” the billionaire insisted. “Absurd [and] medically irrational behavior in violation of constitutional civil liberties, moreover by unelected county officials with no accountability, needs to stop.”
Fauci will still appear before Senate despite quarantine
This is from Paula Reid of CBS, a reporter who has challenged Donald Trump publicly recently and gained a certain amount of fame as a result:
FAUCI UPDATE: WH still plans for Dr. Fauci & Adm Giroir to appear in person before Senate Committee Tuesday, Fauci tells @CBSNews he will wear a mask & socially distance. FDA Chief Hahn & CDC Dir Redfield will appear remotely. H/T @MajorCBS #COVID19 https://t.co/ZjWTcNUGV5
— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) May 10, 2020
Dr Anthony Fauci, 79, is the top US public health expert whose profile has risen steeply during the coronavirus crisis and who we learned last night will now enter a form of quarantine and work remotely due to exposure to a White House staffer who tested positive for Covid-19.
Drs Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield, other senior health advisers, are also in isolation.
Tony Blair has waded into the row over China’s role in exacerbating the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the country had “serious questions to answer” but urging Europe and the US to keep lines of cooperation open.
The former UK prime minister tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that in what he calls the “new world order” forced by coronavirus, co-operation between nation states and regions of the world will be all the more important.
“The reflation of our own economies is obviously going to work better if there’s global concerted action around the economy,” Blair says.
Taking a starkly different line to Donald Trump, who has become increasingly belligerent towards China and has repeated unproven theories that the disease originated in a Chinese laboratory, Blair cautions against any attempt to break ties with Beijing.
“If you think of the big issues that we face today, whether it’s on the economy or on issues like climate or indeed dealing with this global pandemic, how do you deal with it unless you have some space for cooperation with China?”
Here’s the president’s Sunday morning coronavirus tweet, or one of them:
We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic, especially the very early BAN of people from China, the infectious source, entering the USA. Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks, bad polls - didn’t have a clue!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2020
Suffice to say, whether or not the president is “getting great marks” for how the coronavirus outbreak has been handled rather depends on who is doing the judging, and Trump’s heralding of his restrictions (not outright ban) on travel from China relatively early in the outbreak is subject to all sorts of caveats.
The president’s Sunday morning tweet, or one of them:
When are the Fake Journalists, who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2020
Pulitzers were handed out for work on the Russia investigation. Washington Post editor Marty Baron, for one, is not the kind of chap you’d think would be inclined to give his back. Impeachment (which was all about Ukraine, as it happens) didn’t feature in this year’s list, though.
Anyway, here’s some context, if context is needed, for the president’s fixation with the Russia investigation – which ended last spring, remember, with the publication of the Mueller report.
On Thursday the justice department announced it was dropping its case against Michael Flynn, the retired general who was Trump’s first national security adviser, was fired for lying to the vice-president and then pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador and co-operated with special counsel Robert Mueller, before changing his mind, seeking to withdraw his plea and, it seems, avoiding sentencing thanks to attorney general William Barr.
Breath.
Here’s what Yahoo News said Barack Obama had to say about it all in a leaked tape recording:
The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed – about the justice department dropping charges against Michael Flynn.
“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury [in fact Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI] just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.
“And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
Good morning…
…and welcome to another day of coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, and of course the politics of and around it.
It’s a fine – if surprisingly cold – day in New York, still the epicenter of the outbreak in the US although as Andrew Cuomo said on Saturday, things are improving if still, of course, vastly concerning. Here are the Johns Hopkins figures:
- US cases: 1,309,373
- US deaths: 78,789
- New York cases: 333,122
- New York deaths: 26,612
Other states, of course, are hard-hit and some are being hit harder by the day. Some, many more than half the 50, are attempting various forms of economic reopening. Here’s southern bureau chief Oliver Laughland’s latest report from Biloxi, Mississippi:
At the White House, of course, Donald Trump continues to push such reopening moves, while not lashing out at political enemies.
Once again, there is no White House briefing, coronavirus task force or otherwise, on the schedule today. That might in part be because the task force is now committed to working remotely, because the virus has been spreading through the White House, very close to the president and his No2, Vice-President Mike Pence.
Trump last communicated with the public via an absolute box barrage of retweets about Russia, James Comey, Michael Flynn, Adam Schiff and Robert Mueller. So far, so much like the rest of the last three years. The president wants the country to move on – but does he?
Here’s something that might’ve contributed to the president’s mood, which has developed this morning.
More to come, of course. Here’s some more reading in the meantime, from our columnist Robert Reich and under one of the more stark headlines I’ve ever written:
