Coronavirus US live: cases near 800,000 as Trump hypes ‘praise’ from Cuomo

The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports:

In a faux campaign ad appearing to mock Joe Biden, Donald Trump tweeted a 2017 clip of the former vice president recalling his time at a community pool in his home state of Delaware.

“So I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap,” Biden told the Delaware audience at the time. “And I loved kids jumping on my lap.”

Biden went on to discuss peers rubbing his wet, blonde leg hair in a bizarre memory of the community pool at a ceremony commemorating its reopening. The dedication is the same event where the vice president detailed his run-ins with a neighborhood bully named Corn Pop.

The rant became a source of ridicule for Biden within conservative media. He has drawn criticism for, at times, seemingly nonsensical segues during speeches.

Perhaps the most controversial element, however, is that the Biden clip appears as a commercial that four black men watch in annoyance. One of those men is Barack Obama, with the formre president’s head spliced onto the actor’s body. Obama retorts “what” when confronted with stares about Biden’s comments.

Critics immediately called out the tweet:

Supporters of Trump pushed back against the criticism, retorting in the comments that it is merely a joke referring to Obama’s embarrassment at promoting Biden as the current Democratic nominee for the 2020 presidential election:

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned this morning that the US will likely not have widespread coronavirus testing until the fall.

“We’re not going to be there. We’re not going to be there in May, we’re not going to be there in June, hopefully we’ll be there by September,” Gottleib told the “Today” show.

Many public health experts have said that without widespread testing, the country could see a surge in coronavirus cases once social distancing guidelines are relaxed.

But Gottleib argued it would not be realistic to wait to reopen until testing is widely available. “If we wait until we have sort of the optimal framework for testing, we’ll be waiting until the fall and that’s just not going to be possible from an economic, social or public health standpoint,” he said.

Amanda Holpuch

Dr Anthony Fauci warned that if the US moves to quick to end stay-at-home orders there could be another surge in Covid-19 cases in an interview with ABC this morning.

Fauci’s remarks were much more cautious than those from Donald Trump, who has previously downplayed the outbreak and pushed to open the US quickly.

“If you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back. So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a re-opening, it’s going to backfire,” Fauci said. “That’s the problem.”

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), also warned: “Unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not going to happen.”

Fauci and Trump’s relationship is a study in contrasts, as the Guardian’s Tom McCarthy wrote this weekend:

The deadly Covid-19 pandemic, has now created a most unlikely and delicate partnership between Trump and Fauci on which the future of the country hinges. The two men appear to share little by way of philosophy, but each night they share a stage in front of a scared nation in the grip of a terrifying pandemic; a nation looking to these two very different men to save it from further disaster.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Pengelly.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the US had more than a dozen experts working at the World Health Organization’s headquarters when coronavirus first emerged in late 2019.

The experts’ presence at the WHO undercuts Trump’s claim that the organization failed to adequately warn countries about the threat of the virus, out of alleged deference to China.

The Post reports:

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at the WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

A department of health and human services spokesperson responded to the story by arguing that “just because you have Americans embedded in WHO providing technical assistance does not change the information you are getting from WHO leadership.”

The WHO is, of course, only the latest target of Trump’s ire since coronavirus struck the US. The president has tried to deflect blame for his administration’s early response to the virus, which has been widely criticized, by trying to put the onus on China, state governments and now the WHO for allegedly failing to adequately prepare the country for the crisis.

Amanda Holpuch

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has argued social media sites are uniquely positioned to help with Covid-19 data collection, amid discussions about how much personal data Americans could share, and under what terms, to combat the outbreak.

In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Zuckerberg announced the preliminary findings of an attempt with Carnegie Mellon University to survey the symptoms of Facebook users in the US, in order to create preliminary reports on where outbreaks could get worse.

While some health and technology experts are arguing for data collection to aid the outbreak response, others have warned there is a need for increased protection of health data, out of concern it could be accessed by marketers or hackers.

So far, the Facebook surveys have been opt-in and Zuckerberg said the site does not have access to the information, which so far has correlated well with test-confirmed cases of the disease, according to the researchers at Carnegie Mellon. The researchers said they were hoping these estimates could be used to help hospitals and health officials in the coming weeks.

Zuckerberg argued Facebook and other social media sites are uniquely positioned to assist researchers, because the survey is being distributed to “people whose identities we know”.

The piece ends with Zuckerberg insisting such data collection should be done with people’s privacy in mind.

In July, the US government handed Facebook a $5bn penalty for “deceiving” users about their ability to keep personal information private, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Months earlier, Zuckerberg announced the firm’s new focus was privacy.

Here’s some related reading from the UK:

Here comes Donald with a Twitter post guaranteed to cause controversy: it uses doctored footage meant to show (in a clearly satirical and low-fi fashion) Barack Obama embarrassed by footage of Joe Biden, his vice-president and the presumptive Democratic nominee in November, speaking in public.

It seems to be footage of Biden speaking in Wilmington, Delaware in 2017 which has circulated on the right for a while. Trump, notoriously erratic and rambling as he can be, has made targeting Biden’s faculties a key part of campaign attacks so far.

Presidential the tweet is not, at least by any normal standards which of course ceased to exist once Donald Trump mounted his run for the White House five years ago.

I won’t link to it here, but it’s there.

A deal is expected in Washington on Monday to boost small-business loans made available under the $2.2tn Cares Act stimulus package, funds which have proved inadequate to meet demand from businesses crippled by the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Associated Press, “the emerging accord links the administration’s effort to replenish the small-business fund with Democrats’ demands for more money for hospitals and virus testing.

“It would provide $300bn for small-business payroll program, and $50bn would be available for small business disaster fund. Additionally, it would bring $75bn for hospitals and $25bn for testing, according to those involved in the talks.”

The AP also reports that the national burger chain Shake Shack will return its $10m small-business loan, according to its chief executive, after attracting criticism.

Shake Shack has “laid off or furloughed hundreds of its employees and needed the assistance, CEO Randy Garutti and founder Danny Meyer said in a statement seen Monday”, the AP said. “But the company was able to get extra funding late last week through an ‘equity transaction’ and decided to ‘immediately return’ the $10m.”

The AP continues:

Shake Shack has 189 restaurants in the US that employ nearly 8,000 people. It said it is still operating many outlets while closing its dine-in facilities. Union Square Hospitality Group, with more than 2,000 employees, suspended business in March. Like many big companies, both qualified for the government loans, the statement said, because their outlets employ fewer than 500 workers each.

Garutti and Meyer said: “We urge Congress to ensure that all restaurants no matter their size have equal ability to get back on their feet and hire back their teams.

“Fund it adequately. It’s inexcusable to leave restaurants out because no one told them to get in line by the time the funding dried up. That unfairly pits restaurants against restaurants.”

…and welcome to another day of coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in the US. First, the figures according to Johns Hopkins University:

• US cases: 759,600
• US deaths: 40,601
• New York cases: 248,417
• New York deaths: 18,298
• New Jersey deaths: 4,362
• Michigan deaths: 2,391

Other states are hard-hit too, of course: there have been more than 1,000 deaths in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Connecticut and Louisiana.

On Sunday night, Donald Trump held another controversial White House coronavirus task force briefing, hyping praise for the federal government from Andrew Cuomo, for example, and of course ignoring the New York governor’s many stringent criticisms. Washington bureau chief David Smith’s report is here:

There’s a briefing on the White House schedule for Monday, 5pm ET.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, meanwhile, said on Sunday: “There was that famous Daily News cover that said ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead.’” So my question is, Mr Trump, Mr President, are you going to save New York City or are you telling New York City to drop dead? Which one is it?”

For what might be filed under lighter reading, meanwhile, at least for Brits, a new spin on the old US political saying, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” If like me you regularly wake up wondering what’s the matter with Piers Morgan?, it seems that today the matter is that possibly Trump’s premier British fan is… not a fan of how the president is handling the pandemic.

This is from CNN’s Reliable Sources, where Morgan said he was watching Trump’s progress with “mounting horror”, and also addressed the president directly:

He’s turning these briefings into a self-aggrandizing, self-justifying, overly defensive, politically partisan, almost like a rally to him – almost like what’s more important is winning the election in November.

“You will win the election in November if you get this right. If you stop making it about yourself and make it about the American people and show that you care about them over yourself, you will win. And, conversely, you will lose the election in November if you continue to make it about yourself, you continue playing silly politics, continue targeting Democrat governors because that suits you for your electoral purposes.”

So there’s that.

As further reading as the day gets going, here are new entries in two Guardian series: the ER diary of a nurse on the front line, and what it’s like to have cancer during a pandemic.