"President Trump told a group of governors Monday morning that they should not wait for the federal government to fill the growing demand for respirators needed to help people diagnosed with coronavirus.
“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times.
“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
The suggestion surprised some of the governors, who have been scrambling to contain the outbreak and are increasingly looking to the federal government for help with equipment, personnel and financial aid.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, whose state is at the center of the domestic outbreak, and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico both reacted angrily to the administration’s slow response to the crisis.
“If one state doesn’t get the resources and materials they need, the entire nation continues to be at risk,” said Ms. Lujan Grisham."
President Trump recommended strict new guidelines, but they fell short of what experts wanted to curb the spread of the virus. France and the San Francisco Bay Area are ordering residents to stay in their homes as much as possible.
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Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have ordered people to stay at home as much as possible — the strictest measure yet over a wide area of the United States.
Trump released national guidelines to control the virus.
The Trump administration on Monday released new guidelines for the public to slow the spread of the coronavirus, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10 people, discretionary travel, bars, restaurants and food courts.
Mr. Trump, flanked by task force members, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the recommendations would be in place for 15 days.
“It seems to me if we do a really good job, we’ll not only hold the death down to a level that’s much lower than the other way had we not done a good job, but people are talking about July, August,” Mr. Trump said about the duration of the crisis.
The new measures reflected the increasing gravity of global attempts to contain the virus as governments around the world, from Canada to Hungary, moved to close their borders to foreign travelers, and world leaders pledged to work together to coordinate on efforts to share information and assuage consumer fears.
“If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now,” Mr. Trump said, “we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus and we’re going to have a big celebration all together.”
Hours earlier, Mr. Trump told a group of governors that they should not wait for the federal government to fill the growing demand for respirators needed to help people diagnosed with coronavirus.
“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times.
“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves,” he said. “Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
The suggestion surprised some of the governors, who have been scrambling to contain the outbreak and are increasingly looking to the federal government for help with equipment, personnel and financial aid.
At the briefing with the president, Dr. Fauci stressed that some of the White House guidelines were inconvenient, but they would stop the spread of the virus. He conceded that some would say the government was overreacting, but he was emphatic: this was not an overreaction.
“I say it over and over again: When you’re dealing with an emerging infectious diseases outbreak, you are always behind where you think you are,” he said.
Mr. Trump, addressing rumors that a nationwide lockdown was under consideration like the ones imposed by Italy and Spain, said that would not happen.
As businesses and schools closed across the United States, public spaces emptied and people kept a wary distance on sidewalks and in supermarkets, millions of Americans found their lives upended on Monday, trying to work from their living rooms, look after suddenly homebound children, or just keep enough food on hand.
Nations around the world shut their borders and ordered shops and restaurants to close, and people across the United States awoke to the fact that they were not far behind, with the new coronavirus epidemic sweeping into every corner of their lives.
Though relatively few Americans have been tested, more than 4,000 have tested positive. The clear message from officials was that it would continue to grow unabated and whole sectors of the economy and society would grind to a halt and stay that way for weeks or months.
The stock market plummeted yet again on Monday on the mounting bad news. In less than a month, the pandemic has caused trillions of dollars in losses and wiped out most of the market gains made under President Trump’s low-tax, low-regulation policies — one of his favorite boasts.
The airline industry asked for more than $50 billion in emergency government support. Economists warned that crowded, tourism-dependent New York City could be especially vulnerable economically.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for a halt to all gatherings of more than 50 people, airlines canceled flights and mothballed planes, and states and cities around the country shut down bars, restaurants, stores, libraries and museums.
America’s legal gates to the world are closing fast, as the Trump administration added Great Britain and Ireland to a list of European nations whose residents are barred from entering the country. More and more, those European countries are closing their doors to each other.
In the United States, the sense of being cut off increasingly seems to apply to the states themselves, as Washington has been slow to produce either promised aid or a coherent strategy and President Trump advised governors — some of whom were shocked — that they should look to buy their own ventilators and respirators, which are in desperately short supply.
On Monday, health officials ordered millions in six counties in the Bay Area to “shelter in place,” one of the most significant restrictions yet to American life in the race to stop the coronavirus outbreak from surging in the United States.
The order, which goes into effect Tuesday, is expected to disrupt life for millions of residents in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties. The City of Berkeley also issued the same order.
And families were left to worry about lost wages, about inadequate supplies of medicine and protective gear, about leaving the ill and elderly even more isolated and vulnerable, and about jobs, institutions, relatives and neighbors that might vanish and never return.
Scientists say there are likely 5 to 10 undetected cases for every confirmed one.
Scientists tracking the spread of the coronavirus reported Monday that, for every confirmed case, there are most likely another five to 10 people in the community with undetected infections. These often-milder cases are, on average, about half as infectious as confirmed ones, but responsible for nearly 80 percent of new cases, according to the report, which was based on data from China.
The researchers modeled the virus’s natural spread in China before the government instituted a travel ban and an aggressive testing policy. During that time, from December of last year through late January, about 6 in 7 cases went undetected. That situation is analogous to the current state of affairs in the United States and other Western countries, where tests are not widely available, the researchers said.
“If we have 3,500 confirmed cases in the U.S., you might be looking at 35,000 in reality,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and the senior author of the new report, which was posted by the journal Science.READ MORE
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