Global toll approaches 100,000, as N.Y. region again tallies its highest daily death count.
Never have so many millions so suddenly lost their jobs. Never has the United States government vowed to spend so much money all at once to stave off economic ruin. Still, never has the financial security of so many been in such jeopardy.
But what’s most immediate, never have Americans had to watch so many die day after day, separated from friends and family, the air drained from their lungs by a virus that was first detected in the country less than two months ago.
“We’ve lost over 7,000 lives to this crisis,” said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. “That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don’t even have the words for it.”
Around the world, the official death count surged toward 100,000 and public health officials from Paris to Los Angeles said the only way to keep that figure from growing even faster would be to extend the lockdowns.
The virus has yet to reveal many of its insidious mysteries, but new data and a growing body of research have shown that it preys on the human propensity to connect.
The swift spread of the virus in locations where people live in cramped quarters has raised concern for vulnerable populations around the world. But it is also behavior — once common, daily behavior — that can give the virus life.
A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed how one unsuspecting man who attended a dinner, a funeral and a birthday party in Chicago was the likely source of a chain of transmission that would lead to the infection of at least 15 people, three of whom later died.
Yet Republican lawmakers in Kansas blocked efforts by the governor to restrict large gatherings, saying that worshipers should be able to attend Easter services.
In most of the United States, even funerals have been canceled.
As they battle a pandemic that has no regard for borders, the leaders of many of the world’s largest economies are undermining collective efforts to tame the coronavirus.
At least 69 countries have banned or restricted the export of protective equipment, medical devices or medicines, according to the Global Trade Alert project at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The World Health Organization is warning that protectionism could limit the global availability of vaccines.
With every country on the planet in need of the same lifesaving tools at once, national rivalries are jeopardizing access to products that may determine who lives and who dies.
“The parties with the deepest pockets will secure these vaccines and medicines, and essentially, much of the developing world will be entirely out of the picture,” said Simon J. Evenett, an expert on international trade who started the University of St. Gallen project. “We will have rationing by price. It will be brutal.”
Some point to the tragedy playing out around the world as an argument for greater self-sufficiency, so that hospitals are less reliant on China and India for medicines and protective gear. China alone makes the vast majority of the core chemicals used to make raw materials for a range of generic medicines used to treat people now hospitalized with Covid-19.
But if the laudable goal of diversification inspires every nation to look inward and dismantle global production, that will leave the world even more vulnerable, said Chad P. Bown, an international trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
“You have now walled yourself off from the only way you can potentially deal with this, in your time of greatest need, which is relying on the rest of the world,” he said.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious disease expert in the U.S., said that a test to determine whether a person had been infected with the coronavirus and had therefore acquired some level of immunity would be made available in coming days.
“Within a period of a week or so, we are going to have a relatively large number of tests available,” Dr. Fauci said Friday morning on CNN.
However, there have been significant problems with many of the tests in terms of accuracy and validation. And it remains unclear exactly what sort of immunity having had the virus confers on individuals or for how long.
Dr. Fauci suggested that providers of the antibody tests that have been consulting with the White House Task Force had cleared some of those hurdles.
“As we get to the point of considering opening the country,” he said, “it is very important to understand how much that virus has penetrated society.”
He noted that the antibody tests would in no way change the need for widespread testing to determine who was actively infected and infectious.
He said there were 1,132 people receiving intensive care as of Thursday, a 1.9 percent decrease from the day before.
“One data point is not a trend,” Mr. Newsom warned. “One data point is not a headline, so I caution anybody to read too much into that one point of data, but nonetheless it is encouraging.”
California’s decision to ship hundreds of ventilators to other states this week has been met with alarm by some local officials in places like Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, which has been among the hardest hit places in the state.
Officials in the county, where there have been more than 1,100 cases and at least 32 deaths, said this week that the state had denied its request for ventilators, and that a second one was pending.
On Thursday, Mr. Newsom sought to allay those concerns and pushed back against the idea that the state was neglecting its own needs.
“It was the right thing to do, and it was the responsible thing to do as Americans,” he said. “We can’t just sit on assets when we could save lives in other states.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who allowed spring break vacationers to socialize on Florida’s beaches long after most of the country had been locked down and only issued a “shelter at home” order starting on April 3, falsely claimed on Thursday that the virus had not killed anyone in the country under the age of 25.
“This particular pandemic is one where, I don’t think nationwide there’s been a single fatality under 25,” Mr. DeSantis said during a public meeting with the state’s educators. “For whatever reason, it just doesn’t seem to threaten, you know, kids.”
A preliminary study on the first wave of cases by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 2,572 of the nearly 150,000 confirmed coronavirus cases reported in the United States between Feb. 12 and April 2 were patients under 18. At least three children have died, the research found. And there were significant gaps in the data. For instance, not all hospital visits were documented.
While less likely to become seriously ill, children can still contract the virus and spread it to people who are more vulnerable.
Of the 745 cases with data on whether the child was hospitalized, 147 children — about a fifth — were reported to have been hospitalized. Among adults, that rate is about a third, the study said.
Mr. DeSantis is one of a number of Republican lawmakers who have actively resisted following the consensus of the country’s leading public health experts.
But so far, a staggering number of Americans — more than 16 million — have lost their jobs amid the outbreak. Businesses continue to fail as retailers, restaurants, nail salons and other companies across the country run out of cash and close up shop.
There is a growing agreement among many economists that the government’s efforts were too small and came too late in the fast-moving pandemic to prevent businesses from abandoning their workers. Federal agencies, working in a prescribed partnership with Wall Street, have proved ill equipped to move money quickly to the places it is needed most.
Flooded by requests for help like never before, a federal program that was supposed to deliver emergency relief to small businesses in just three days has run low on funding and nearly frozen up entirely.
The initiative, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, is an expansion of an emergency system run by the Small Business Administration that has for years helped companies after natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and tornadoes.
But in the face of the pandemic, the loan program is drowning in requests. Many applicants have waited weeks for approval, and while the program is supposed to offer loans up to $2 million, many recent applicants said the S.B.A. help line had told them that loans would be capped at $15,000 per borrower.
For centuries, the Amish community in central Ohio has been famously isolated from the hustle of the outside world. Homes still lack telephones or computers. Travel is by horse and buggy. Home-sewn clothing remains the norm. And even now, as the virus rages in the country at large, there is resistance from people sustained by communal life to the dictates of social distancing that have brought the economy to a halt — in Amish country as everywhere else.
But as the virus creeps ever closer, the Amish community is joining the fight.
On April 1, John Miller, a manufacturer in Sugarcreek, Ohio, with deep connections to the Amish community of Central Ohio, got a call from Cleveland Clinic. The hospital system was struggling to find protective face masks for its 55,000 employees, plus visitors. Could his team sew 12,000 masks in two days?
Mr. Miller appealed to Abe Troyer, a leader in the Amish community. A day later, Mr. Troyer had signed up 60 Amish clothes makers who worked from home, and the Cleveland Clinic’s order was soon on its way.
The Amish are not immune to the virus’s rampage. As of Thursday, Holmes County, where the nation’s largest Amish community resides, had only three confirmed coronavirus cases, but the pandemic has idled hundreds of Amish craftspeople and artisans, and Amish people do not apply for federal unemployment benefits.
Almost overnight, however, a group of local industry, community and church leaders has mobilized to sustain Amish households by pivoting to making thousands of face masks and shields, surgical gowns and protective garments from medical-grade materials. When those run scarce, the Amish workers switch to using gaily printed quilting fabric and waterproof house wrap.
“We consider this a privilege that we can come in here and do something for somebody else who’s in need and do it right at home here, and do it safely,” said Atlee Raber, whose garden furniture business now makes protective face shields.
But epidemiologists, city officials and medical personnel say those numbers are likely to be far below the city’s actual death toll.
A huge number of people are dying at home with presumed cases of the virus, and it does not appear that the state has a clear mechanism for factoring those victims into official death tallies.
In the last three days, 766 people were found dead in their homes, bringing the total for the first eight days of April to 1,891, according to the city’s medical examiner’s office. It’s likely that many have not been counted in the current tally.
His whole family back in Myanmar depended on him. But Ko Zaw Win Tun, one of an estimated four million migrant workers in Thailand, lost his job at a Bangkok toy store when the city went into a coronavirus lockdown.
With little hope of a new job there, Mr. Zaw Win Tun, 24, joined the crowds of workers rushing home to Myanmar, traveling by packed bus, plane and car to reach his hometown, Kyaukme, in the country’s north.
The morning after he returned, the fever set in. A test for the coronavirus came back positive.
The virus spread early through international travelers: tourists, worshipers, conference attendees and members of the business elite. But nearly 200 million migrant workers also travel across national borders, according to the International Labor Organization. About 760 million more move within their countries, more than 40 million in India alone.
Lacking basic rights and marooned in unfamiliar places, migrant workers are usually the first in the labor force to be hit by an economic downturn. Now, as the coronavirus disease, Covid-19, spreads across the globe, migrant workers are not only victims but also vectors, taking the epidemic to villages ill equipped to deal with a health crisis.
“When the virus attacks people who are vulnerable like me, I feel like there is no help for us,” Mr. Zaw Win Tun said from his hospital bed.
Three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached voters were discovered in a postal center outside Milwaukee. At least 9,000 absentee ballots requested by voters were never sent, and others recorded as sent were never received. Even when voters did return their completed ballots in the mail, thousands were postmarked too late to count — or not at all.
In American cities, busy streets fuel commerce and sustain the background noise to everyday life. Their emptiness today, as a pandemic races across the country, stands as a grim marker of the peril of our times.
In New York City, the cacophony of honking taxis, lurching buses and stop-and-start traffic has given way to the wailing of sirens. In Los Angeles, the clock has been turned back 50 years. Commuting times, for those still traveling to work, have shrunk in Boston. And in Houston, officials are taking advantage of less traffic to speed up a paving project on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
On the plus side, the air is cleaner and car crashes are down, although police departments are worried that drivers are going too fast. Even the Earth is vibrating less, according to seismologists. But the payoffs are leavened by a feeling of disorientation and an understanding that the empty streets contain the echo of the pandemic.
Charlotte Figi, whose use of cannabidiol, or CBD, to treat her epilepsy helped popularize its medicinal use, died Tuesday. She was 13.
Her death was confirmed by her parents, Paige and Steven Figi, who said the cause was most likely complications related to Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Charlotte became the face of the medicinal CBD movement when she was 5 years old, after it appeared that taking CBD eased the symptoms of her epilepsy.
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Reporting contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Ali Watkins, Marc Santora, Tim Arango, Hannah Beech, Nick Corasaniti, Stacy Cowley, Stephanie Saul, Matt Stevens, Jim Tankersley, Elizabeth Williamson, Peter S. Goodman, Katie Thomas, Sui-Lee Wee and Jeffrey Gettleman.