New York (ANN)-The Coronavirus spreads to 49 states, and the House passes a sweeping relief package reported by New York Times.
As the coronavirus continues to spread in the United States, people are increasingly worried that a pandemic that has upended lives and wreaked havoc on financial markets could have a disproportionate effect on the nation’s poor and disadvantaged. The virus has been reported in more than 2,100 people in 49 states, as well as Washington and Puerto Rico, and has killed at least 48.
New York reported its first coronavirus death on Saturday, when a 82-year-old woman died in Manhattan, according to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The woman, who was not identified, had emphysema, an underlying medical condition that the governor said had contributed to her death.
The House passed a sweeping relief package to assist people affected by the outbreak, after a roller-coaster day of negotiations on Friday.
Talks threatened to veer off track as President Trump criticized the plan during a White House Rose Garden news conference in which he declared a national emergency. Instead, by dusk, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote to House Democrats saying they had reached an agreement with the administration, and Mr. Trump later tweeted that he would sign the bill “ASAP!”
When officials in Washington State chose two locations to house people exposed to the virus, they picked areas in mostly low-income neighborhoods, drawing ire from local officials who noted that the communities had not yet experienced any cases. Dana Ralph, the mayor of Kent, south of Seattle, said residents wondered if their neighborhoods were being sacrificed to protect wealthier ones.
Their fears came true when a person who was housed in a converted motel wandered away and hopped on a bus. The bus was taken out of service, but the community was angered.
And the closing of schools in more than a dozen states continues to create concerns that children may miss meals and parents may not be able to stay home from work. Mayor Bill de Blasio, under increasing pressure to close New York City schools, has maintained that the schools are a lifeline for the city’s most vulnerable and refused to cancel classes.
After Los Angeles Unified School District announced it was closing, school officials said that they would open 40 family resource centers to provide child care and meals to students whose parents cannot get out of work.
Warnings that prisons could be overtaken with the virus — as they have in some other countries — began to seem increasingly plausible. On Friday, Washington State announced that a prison employee tested positive for the virus. A jail employee in Hancock County, Ind., also tested positive.
The Bureau of Prisons, which runs federal prisons that hold more than 175,000 people, suspended all visits to prisoners for 30 days, including most by lawyers.
The virus continued to prompt closures and cancellations around the world. Universal Studios Hollywood said that it would be closed from Saturday through at least the end of March.
President Trump says he was tested for coronavirus.
At a news conference on Saturday, President Trump announced that he had been tested for the coronavirus on Friday night and was awaiting the results, and Vice President Mike Pence announced that the extension of the administration’s European travel ban to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Whether the president would be tested had been a matter of speculation since it first emerged that a member of a Brazilian delegation that visited Mar-a-Lago had tested positive. Two other people who were with the president at Mar-a-Lago have tested positive, and various members of Congress have been self-isolating after interacting with some of the same people.
Mr. Trump, wearing a “USA” baseball cap, said he decided to be tested for the coronavirus after his news conference on Friday to declare a national emergency.
“People were asking, did I take the test,” he said.
Asked when he expected to have the result, Mr. Trump said, “A day, two days.”
“They send it to a lab,” he said.
It was unclear if Mr. Pence, who interacted with some of the infected Mar-a-Lago visitors, had known that the president was tested. Answering a reporter’s question about his own status, Mr. Pence said, “I’m going to speak immediately after this press conference with the White House physician’s office,” which he said had previously advised him that neither he nor his wife needed to be tested.
The White House has begun checking the temperatures of anyone in close contact with Mr. Trump or Mr. Pence. White House staff checked the temperatures of everyone arriving at the news conference.
Reporters pressed Mr. Trump about “mixed messages,” asking about why he shook hands with a row of chief executives who attended his news conference on Friday where he announced a national emergency.
“It almost becomes a habit and you get out of that habit,” he said, noting that “getting away from shaking hands is a good thing.”
Mr. Pence said that, effective at midnight Monday night, the federal government’s European travel ban would apply to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. health official, said that Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on Friday had cleared the way for a concerted, effective response to the virus. “Now it’s all systems go,” he said, adding that “as we get knowledge about new testing, we’ll alleviate the anxiety that we have in the world about, we don’t know what’s going on, but also it will give the individual physician and individual citizen the opportunity to know where they stand.”
Later in the news conference, the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, called for unity in responding to the virus’s spread in the United States, urging “no more finger-pointing or criticism” and suggesting “less stories looking at what happened in the past.”said New York Times report.
meanwhile From Jersey City on the East Coast to Los Angeles on the West Coast, American shoppers picked grocery store shelves clean on products ranging from disinfectants to rice, causing retailers to race to restock their stores as the worsening coronavirus crisis stoked fears of shortages.
As shoppers swarmed stores, President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon declared a national emergency aimed at slowing the spread of the novel virus, which has killed at least 47 people in the United States. reported by Reuters.
Daily routines have been upended as businesses including Amazon.com (AMZN.O) urge employees to work from home, schools and universities close, and sporting events and church services are paused across the country. In response to the run on certain items, major retailers have imposed some purchase limits.
The chief executive of Walmart Inc (WMT.N), Doug McMillon, at a news conference with Trump on Friday, said the retailer was having trouble keeping up with demand for products like hand sanitizer Purell, cleaning supplies and paper goods.
“Hand sanitizer is going to be very difficult to have 100% in stock for some time,” McMillon said. “We’re still replenishing it … but as soon as it hits the stores it’s going. The same thing is true for the other categories I mentioned.”
In Hanover, New Jersey, about 40 customers had lined up to get into a Wegmans grocery store before it opened on Friday morning. A few hours later, shelves were stripped bare of sanitizing wipes, bulk rice and dried beans. The store posted signs announcing limits on the purchase of hand sanitizer and bottled water.
“An abundance of caution – semper paratus, like the Coast Guard motto that means ‘always ready,’” shopper Marlene Russell, 69, told a reporter after packing groceries into her car.
At a Fairway Market on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, shelves normally full of pasta, Oreo cookies, pasta sauce, crackers and toilet paper were depleted on Thursday evening. On the West Coast, grocery stores including Ralphs, Pavilions and Trader Joe’s had sold out of products ranging from eggs to Lysol cleaning wipes. said Reuters report.
