Here’s what you need to know:
- As many businesses open their doors around the country, some governors face growing resistance.
- W.H.O. extends its declaration of a global health emergency.
- Labs across the U.S. join a federal initiative to study the virus genome.
- As stay-at-home orders lift, individuals are wrestling with decisions that feel life-or-death.
- Mnuchin says private schools with large endowments should return funds.
- Texas moves aggressively to restart businesses, with restaurants, malls and movie theaters all open.
- Patients on kidney dialysis face a steeper fight to survive the virus.
As many businesses open their doors around the country, some governors face growing resistance.
The sweeping orders that kept roughly nine out of 10 Americans at home in recent weeks gave way on Friday to a patchwork of state and local measures allowing millions of people to return to restaurants, movie theaters and malls for the first time in a month or more.
But as more states, like Texas, prepared to reopen on Friday, the governors of California and Michigan contended with challenges to their authority to shutter at least some parts of public life.
In Lansing, Mich., hundreds of protesters — many of them armed — gathered at the State Capitol on Thursday to oppose stay-at-home orders, weeks after a larger gathering on April 15, when thousands of demonstrators mobilized by conservative groups created a traffic jam on the streets around the statehouse.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Governor and the Protester
She ordered Michigan to stay on lockdown through mid-May. He thinks the measures are too extreme.And in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped in on Thursday to shut down the beaches in Orange County, rolling back earlier attempts at giving people there a chance to stroll along the shore while staying a safe distance away from one another.
Now Mr. Newsom, already the target of litigation for his stay-at-home order, is facing fresh resistance: The Huntington Beach City Council voted Thursday night to sue the state over the beach ban, and the City Council in nearby Newport Beach appeared poised to follow, according to local media reports.
The protest in Michigan came as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signed three orders extending the restrictions to combat the coronavirus. State Senator Dayna Polehanki shared a photograph of protesters with rifles inside the building, as well as a video of hundreds of people outside. It is legal to carry firearms inside the State Capitol.
President Trump on Friday urged Ms. Whitmer to “give a little,” writing that the protesters were “very good people, but they are angry.”
The president has voiced support for protests against restrictions, even as federal guidance urged Americans to avoid large gatherings to help stem the spread of the virus. The Justice Department has signaled that it might endorse court challenges pushing back against some rules.
In addition to Texas, reopenings of certain businesses or public spaces were expected on Friday in Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. In Colorado and Oklahoma, which had already made moves to reopen, Friday marked an expansion, with new businesses set to reopen. And in Tennessee, a stay-at-home order expired at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, making Friday the first day where more movement was permitted.
Several other states, including Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and West Virginia, have announced openings starting on Monday.
The changes — which have come piecemeal, by industry or region, and with restrictions for sanitation and social distancing — followed reopenings in several other states, including Alaska, Georgia and South Carolina.
By next week, nearly half the states will have made moves toward reopening their economies. In some states, reopenings have happened even as cases were still increasing or remaining steady, raising concerns among public health experts about a surge in new cases that might not be detectable for up to two weeks.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top expert on infectious diseases, said that while states and cities would reopen at their own discretion, there was danger in acting rashly.
“They know their states, the mayors know their cities, so you want to give them a little wiggle room,” he said on CNN on Thursday evening. “But my recommendation is, you know, don’t wiggle too much.”
Some cities and states are seeing increasing cases of the virus like Massachusetts, Worthington, Minn., a city in the southwest corner of the state, and Green Bay, Wis., which were singled out in a recent federal government briefing obtained by The Times. The briefing also noted that federal officials are monitoring North Carolina, where cases have increased and stay-at-home orders are set to expire on May 8.
W.H.O. extends its declaration of a global health emergency.
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency on Friday, amid increasing criticism from the Trump Administration about its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The move comes three months after the organization’s original decision to announce a “public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30. At the time, only 98 of the nearly 10,000 cases confirmed had occurred outside China’s borders.
But the pandemic continues to grow. More than 3.2 million people around the world have been sickened by the virus and nearly a quarter million have died, according to official counts. Hot spots have moved outside China; there is evidence on six continents of sustained transmission.
All of this led experts in the W.H.O.’s emergency committee to reconvene to assess the evolution of the pandemic, and to advise on updated recommendations, officials said.
There has been a rapid rise in new cases in Africa and South America, where many countries have weak health care systems that could easily be overwhelmed. The acceleration is concerning because the growth rate of the virus has appeared to slow in many other countries in Asia and Europe.
Although people are slowly starting to return to work in China after weeks of lockdowns, nonessential stores still shuttered in most parts of the world and the virus has badly damaged the economy.
Across the United States, governors are struggling to square constituents’ demands for an end to stay-at-home orders and the consequences of loosening social distancing rules. Scientific and public health experts have warned that reopening businesses, restaurants, movie theaters and malls may lead to a deadly second wave of the pandemic.
The Trump administration has cut off funding for the organization, claiming without evidence that W.H.O. officials colluded with China to obscure the extent of the epidemic in its early days. Political strategists have advised Republicans that blaming China, and by extension the W.H.O., is an effective deflection from criticism of the administration’s own handling of the epidemic in the United States.
Labs across the U.S. join a federal initiative to study the virus genome.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday announced a national initiative to speed research into how the virus was spreading around the country, bringing together at least 75 public health, academic and commercial institutions studying its genome.
As the virus replicates, tiny mutations accumulate in its genetic code. Those differences help scientists trace patterns of transmission and investigate outbreaks. They also provide an understanding of how the virus is evolving, which can affect the accuracy of diagnostic tests and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines.
Historically, laboratories studying the genomes of pathogens released only general information about them, often in academic journals. Patient privacy laws in some states also limited the details they could provide. But that began to change in recent years with food-borne illnesses, as officials realized that publicly sharing gene sequences allowed scientists to find links with greater speed and react to save lives.
Sequences themselves mean little without context. The consortium aims to standardize what information should accompany each sequence, such as where and when a sample was taken, which are critically important details to make use of the data. The hope is that sharing the results will help researchers design vaccines and therapies.
As stay-at-home orders lift, individuals are wrestling with decisions that feel life-or-death.
As states begin to loosen restrictions on their economies, the act of reopening has come down not to governors or even to President Trump, but to millions of individual Americans who are being asked to do it. It is not an easy decision. In homes across the country this week, Americans whose governors said it was time to get back to work wrestled with what to do, weighing what felt like an impossible choice.
If they go back to work, will they get sick and infect their families? If they refuse, will they lose their jobs? What if they work on tips and there are no customers? What happens to their unemployment benefits?
On Friday, as several additional states, including Texas, allowed their stay-at-home orders to expire, more Americans ventured out of their doors to work, but often with a sense of dread — that they were being forced to choose between their health and their livelihood.
Large majorities still approve of shutdown orders as a way of protecting public health, but the tremendous surge of jobless claims since mid-March has created a crosscurrent: An urgent need for income.
Andrea Pinson hasn’t been paid since March 18, the last day she worked at her job at a bingo hall in Fort Worth, taking customers orders, cooking and serving them their meals. But this week, she received a short text from her boss, telling her to show up for work on Friday, when Texas is set to reopen restaurants, shops, churches and other gathering places.
The demand was direct — be there at 5 p.m. — and on Thursday Ms. Pinson, 33, was agonizing over how to respond. If she stayed home she could lose wages or even her job. If she went to work, she risked bringing the coronavirus back to her great-uncle, 73, who lives with her and has health conditions.
“We need the money for sure, but I don’t want to put his life at risk just so we can have money,” she said. “He’s had open-heart surgery, he’s got asthma, there’s no way he could come back from that. I can’t lose him.”
She said the bingo hall will require customers to wear masks, but she is sure people will take them off — they will have to in order to eat the burgers, nachos, and other food that she makes. She is leaning toward showing up on Friday evening, hoping that people follow the state’s guidelines and keep their distance from each other. If they don’t, she said she would probably ask her boss to let her take additional time off.
“Hopefully he would understand,” she said. “Me and him do have a pretty good relationship. But he just kind of expected me to show up to work. But if I explained my situation to him, he might be OK with it. I don’t know.”
Mnuchin says private schools with large endowments should return funds.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin wants private schools with large endowments to return federal stimulus loans they received from a program intended for small businesses hit hard by the coronarvirus pandemic.
In a post on Twitter, Mr. Mnuchin said Friday, “It has come to our attention that some private schools with significant endowments” have taken the loans. “They should return them,” he said.
Many prominent prep schools have applied for the loans, which are being issued by the Small Business Administration to help businesses meet their payroll needs, The New York Times reported this week. Some decided not to take the loans because of their other resources, but others said they needed the money.
The recipients include Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., the alma mater of President Obama’s and President Clinton’s children, and St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Md., which counts the president’s youngest son as a student.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that a private school in Los Angeles attended by at least two of Mr. Mnuchin’s children had also accepted a loan, and that a spokeswoman for Mr. Mnuchin had described the arrangement as inappropriate.
In his tweet on Friday, Mr. Mnuchin did not specify what qualified as a significant endowment. Sidwell Friends has an endowment of roughly $50 million, while St. Andrews indicated in a 2017 tax filing that its endowment was about $9 million.
Several schools with large endowments have already returned their funds, or withdrew from the applications process, The Times previously reported. Meanwhile, some smaller private schools with little or no endowments missed out on the first round of funding.
Run by the S.B.A., the $660 billion aid program — formally known as the Paycheck Protection Program — has been criticized for providing funds to large public companies ahead of Main Street small businesses like restaurants and shops.
The money comes in the form of loans, backed by the S.B.A., that can be forgiven if recipients put most of it toward payroll needs.
Texas moves aggressively to restart businesses, with restaurants, malls and movie theaters all open.
Texas, the largest Republican-led state in the country, and other states set to loosen restrictions on Friday were embarking down a politically charged path fraught with uncertainty and public health risks. Amid a pandemic that has killed more than 800 Texans, the state was ending its stay-at-home order weeks before some of the benchmark epidemiological models suggested doing so
Based on an executive order issued by Gov. Greg Abbott, the state’s restaurants, movie theaters and other businesses were allowed to reopen on Friday, although they were required to limit their capacity to 25 percent of their listed occupancy. In Houston, the Galleria mall was preparing to open its doors but keep its playground areas and water fountains shut. On the Gulf Coast, the beaches at Galveston were reopened.
In San Antonio, the celebrity chef Johnny Hernandez was reopening three of his seven restaurants and bringing back 40 furloughed employees, all required to wear face masks and gloves. Patrons will be asked whether they have any symptoms, but he decided against checking diners for fevers as they enter.
Many businesses remained closed around the state, a sign of both fears and anxiety about the governor’s decision. One Austin man posted an online list of local restaurants that planned to reopen for indoor dining and called for a boycott.
Officials and public health experts in Texas’ largest cities warned that a second wave of the virus was possible if the reopening caused a widespread decrease in social distancing.
“As long as we’re reporting new cases,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston told reporters this week, “and as long as we’re reporting people who are dying, and as long as we can’t tell you that this virus is out of here, then you need to be very, very, very careful.”
Patients on kidney dialysis face a steeper fight to survive the virus.
As patients with the virus multiplied and filled hospitals around the country, routine treatments like kidney dialysis became scarce, placing virus patients with kidney disease at an even higher risk of dying. Kidney specialists estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of I.C.U. patients with the coronavirus suffered kidney failure and needed emergency dialysis. In some hospitals in New York City, demand for dialysis rose threefold during the crisis.
The Times reporter Nicholas Kulishchronicled theexperience of a 68-year-old New Yorker’s fight to survive. The patient, Jamal Uddin, a supervisor at the city’s H.I.V./AIDS Services, had a ventilator to help him breathe, the one piece of equipment everyone feared would be unavailable if the hospitals were overwhelmed. But he did not have adequate access to dialysis, a common treatment for impaired kidney. After fighting for four days, Mr. Uddin was finally scheduled to receive dialysis at 9 p.m. on April 14. He was declared dead at 9:01 p.m., after going into cardiac arrest.
At the peak of the outbreak, the number of Covid-19 patients fighting kidney failure led to soaring demand for dialysis at hospitals around New York City, including at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, where Mr. Uddin was being treated. Nephrologists sounded the alarm that they did not have the medication, staffing or machines to deal with the unexpected influx of patients.
The hospital’s own records indicate that the specialized dialysis known as continuous renal replacement therapy was in short supply when Mr. Uddin was severely ill with Covid-19 there.
“Every day there were decisions made as to whether he was stable, whether he required an emergency intervention, and on each of these days he did not,” said Dr. Joseph M. Weisstuch, chief medical officer of the hospital. “We went above and beyond taking care of an extremely sick patient.”
The hardest-hit regions say restrictions must remain in place until new infections show a steady decline.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has said that some parts of the state might be able to gradually reopen businesses on May 15 but has resisted setting a timeline for New York City and the surrounding region, saying those decisions would be data-driven. Schools in the nation’s largest school district and throughout New York State will stay closed through the end of the school year, the governor said, as he reported another 289 virus deaths in the state, the first one-day total below 300 since March.
“The big question everyone is asking is the reopening. When? How? Where?” he said on Thursday. “I said from Day 1 on this situation, we have to be smart. We are at a place we have never been before. Emotions run high. Be smart, follow the numbers, follow data, talk to experts. Don’t get political, even in this election year even, even in this partisan time in this country where everything is political and everything is polarized — not now.”
He said one part of the plan to get the economy moving again would be the establishment of perhaps the largest “contact tracing program” ever envisioned. He tapped Michael R. Bloomberg, a former New York City mayor, to lead the effort.
Statewide, Mr. Cuomo said, 6,400 to 17,000 tracers would be needed to locate, contact and isolate all those whose paths crossed with infected individuals.
New Jersey has had the second-highest number of virus cases in the United States, behind only New York State. Even as leaders there began to sketch out how to reopen in the weeks ahead, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced that the state had recorded 460 new virus-related deaths, a sharp one-day increase and the most the state had reported in a single day so far.
“Extraordinary,” he said of the deaths. “This is the single biggest day that we’ve had.”
“The only way we can get New Jersey on the road back is if we all continue to practice social distancing over the coming weeks, to really bend this curve down and to keep it going down,” Mr. Murphy added.
Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut on Thursday outlined a plan for restarting the state’s economy that would begin with some retailers, offices, hair and nail salons, outdoor restaurants and outdoor recreation facilities reopening by May 20, if infections and hospitalizations continued to decline.
The final stage in the process, he said, might not come for at least 10 months.
Mr. Lamont emphasized that businesses would not be required to open.
“We’re just saying that you have a green light to open if you want to,” he said. He added: “Nobody is obviously required to go. And I think a lot of people are going to self-select.”
With rent due today, #CancelRent becomes a rallying cry for some tenants.
As unemployment soars nationwide, tenants rights groups and community nonprofits have rallied around an audacious goal: to persuade the government to halt rent and mortgage payments — without back payments accruing — for as long as the economy is battered by the virus.
The effort has been brewing on social media, with the hashtag #CancelRent and online video rallies, as well as a smattering of in-person protests, frequently held in cars to maintain social distancing.
But landlords say they are also struggling to pay their bills since many tenants have already been unable to pay rent. They call the advocates’ efforts reckless and say that withholding rent would create cascading consequences, including leaving property owners without the means to pay mortgages and property taxes or to maintain buildings.
Still, from New York to Kansas City to Los Angeles, groups have encouraged tenants to withhold payments on Friday, the due date for May rent, aiming to create pressure for an expansion of affordable housing and tenant-friendly legislation.
To cancel rent and mortgage payments, the federal government would have to take sweeping and possibly unconstitutional intervention in the housing and financial markets, interceding in private contracts and ordering banks and landlords not to collect money.
While the prospect of this happening is low, the campaigns are less about pushing a particular piece of legislation and more about kindling a mass movement akin to the Occupy Wall Street protests that followed the 2008 financial crisis.
Stocks slump after tech companies take a hit.
U.S. stocks fell on Friday as investors reeled from earnings reports by Apple and Amazon that underscored the virus’s effect on big business.
The S&P 500 was down nearly 2 percent in early trading, dragged lower by shares of tech companies.
Amazon stock fell about 5 percent after the company reported on Thursday that despite surging sales in the first quarter, rising delivery costs had taken a big bite out of profits. Apple stock also fell, after the company refused on Thursday to give any estimates for the current quarter.
The emergence of investor doubt could signal a turn for the markets, which have risen despite the steady drumbeat of negative news. Even with a retreat on Thursday, Wall Street closed out the month of April with a nearly 13 percent gain, its best performance since 1987.
More than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment, but job losses may be far worse.
With a flood of unemployment claims continuing to overwhelm many state agencies, economists say the job losses may be much deeper than government tallies indicate.
The Labor Department said on Thursday that 3.8 million workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the six-week total to 30 million. But researchers say that as the economy staggers under the weight of the pandemic, millions of others have lost jobs but have yet to appear in the figures.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that roughly 50 percent more people than counted as filing claims in a recent four-week period may have qualified for benefits — with the difference representing those who were stymied in applying or who did not even try because the process was too formidable.
“The problem is even bigger than the data suggest,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with the institute, a left-leaning research group. “We’re undercounting the economic pain.”
Coastal states debate opening beaches as sunny weather beckons people outdoors.
How to prevent beach blankets and lawn chairs from becoming new founts of infection has become a flash point for governors in California, Florida and other coastal states, who must balance demands from constituents for relief from the escalating spring heat against the horrified reaction of the general public to photographs of the busy sands.
Mr. Newsom of California stepped in on Thursday to shut down the beaches in Orange County, rolling back earlier attempts at giving residents a chance to stroll along the shore while staying a safe distance apart. Broad swaths of sand were packed over the weekend with crowds, many flocking from neighboring Los Angeles and San Diego Counties, where the beaches had been off limits.
“This disease isn’t going away,” he said at a news conference, noting that the pandemic had claimed at least 95 lives in the state in the past 24 hours.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has resisted pressure to close all the beaches, insisting that the decision should be made locally — and that people who consider the beach their backyard deserve a respite from being cooped up at home.
When photographs of beachgoers in the Jacksonville area prompted “#FloridaMorons” to trend on social media, Mr. DeSantis dismissed the mockery as misguided elitism from outsiders who were unwilling to accept that not all areas of Florida have been hit by the virus as hard as the region from Miami to West Palm Beach, where the beaches remain closed.
“For those who try to say you’re morons, I’ll take you over those who criticize you every day of the week and twice on Sunday,” Mr. DeSantis told Jacksonville residents in a news conference last week.
The virus is overwhelming New York’s system for burying its dead.
With more than 18,000 announced fatalities and a total death toll that is almost certainly higher, the crisis is the worst mass-casualty event to hit New York since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.
At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes — more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate. And though the daily toll has recently slowed, hundreds of bodies are still emerging each day from private homes and hospitals.
While hospitals bore the initial brunt of the crisis as sick people flooded emergency rooms, the sheer volume of human remains has pushed the system for caring for the dead to its limits, too: Hospital morgues, funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories are all overflowing and backed up.
“The death rate is just so high,” one funeral director said, “there’s no way we can bury or cremate them fast enough.”
Finding a vaccine will be hard. But delivering the doses presents its own, huge problems.
In the midst of national shortages of testing swabs and protective gear, some medical suppliers and health policy experts are looking ahead to another extraordinary demand on manufacturing: Delivering a vaccine that could end the pandemic.
Making a vaccine is not easy. More than two dozen companies have announced programs to develop a vaccine against the virus, but it may still take a year or more before one becomes available to the public.
But what comes next will be just as big a problem: In the United States, more than 300 million people may need to be inoculated. That means at least as many vials and syringes — or double that amount, if two shots are required.
To meet that demand, companies will have to ramp up manufacturing. If they don’t, products that doctors and government officials give little thought to now could easily become obstacles to vaccine delivery in the future.
Everything will need to be systematically planned. Adding the capacity to make millions more syringes alone could take a manufacturer as long as 18 months to complete such a large order, for example.
And several manufacturers are already worrying that the Trump administration may be waiting too long before ordering for an ample supply of medical equipment needed to deliver a vaccine.
“We’re thinking about the vaccine, but what if the vials it is stored in, or rubber stoppers in the vial or the plungers in the syringes become the constraint?” said Prashant Yadav, who studies health care supply chains at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.
The more you move, the more motivated you will be to move.
Maybe you started this lockdown with good intentions to stay active. It’s possible those promises have slipped away as the days have passed into weeks. But take heart: It doesn’t take much — no more than four seconds — to get your metabolism going. Here’s how a short burst of activity can help you, and more exercise tips to keep your motivated to move.
Follow the news from our correspondents around the world.
Hong Kong police officers were deploying across the city to prevent any pro-democracy Labor Day rallies held in defiance of social-distancing orders.
Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder, Eileen Sullivan, Sarah Mervosh, Sheri Fink, Manny Fernandez, Alan Feuer, Matthew Haag, Conor Dougherty, Thomas Fuller, Shawn Hubler, John Koblin, Patricia Mazzei, Marc Santora, William K. Rashbaum, Sabrina Tavernise, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Nelson D. Schwartz, Tiffany Hsu and Patricia Cohen.
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