About 1 in 4 American workers have filed for unemployment since March.
More than 40 million people — the equivalent of one out of every four American workers — have filed for unemployment benefits since the pandemic began to upend life across the nation in mid-March.
The latest additions — the 2.1 million people who filed state unemployment claims last week — may not be only a result of fresh layoffs, but also evidence that states are working their way through some of the choking backlog.
And some of the federal aid meant to cushion the blow is set to expire over the summer. The federal virus relief package gives eligible unemployed workers an extra $600 per week on top of their state benefits, but that aid is schedule to end on July 31.
Laid-off workers who have not applied for benefits and those who have left the labor force entirely are not included in the claims numbers. Nor are any of the eight million undocumented workers who lost their job but aren’t eligible for any benefits.
Neither are new graduates just entering the labor force, like Matthew Wilson, 24, who lost his barista job in Philadelphia, but was turned down because he had been working in the state for less than a year.
“It doesn’t make any sense — I moved, and now I’m magically not qualified for unemployment?” said Mr. Wilson, who relocated to Pennsylvania after graduating from Tufts University in Massachusetts last year. He appealed the decision and heard last week that his claim had been approved, but he hasn’t received any money, The Times’s Patricia Cohen reports.
The latest claims may not only be a result of fresh layoffs, but also evidence that states are working their way through a backlog. State unemployment offices that manage and distribute benefits have been stretched by the scale of the layoffs.
And overcounting in some places and undercounting in others has made it difficult to precisely measure the number of layoffs caused by the pandemic — and devise policy responses — as shutdowns lift and state and local economies start to reopen.
The number of people receiving state jobless benefits dropped by roughly 3.8 million to 21.1 million for the week ended May 16.
While rehiring certainly accounts for a chunk of that decline, it also reflects workers who have exhausted their weekly state benefits.
Shelter-in-place orders and business restrictions have been lifting across the country, and some workers have been called back to work. But the reopenings remain bumpy and incomplete, and flare-ups of the virus continue to disrupt business.
U.S. stocks pushed higher on Thursday, a third day of gains that has brought the S&P 500 to its highest level in nearly three months. The benchmark index was up less than 1 percent, but added to back-to-back gains that have come as bullish investors have looked past the immense economic damage wrought by the pandemic toward signs of a recovery.
The White House won’t update its economic projections this summer.
The Trump administration will not issue a midyear update to its economic forecasts this summer, breaking decades of tradition amid the uncertainty of a pandemic recession, administration officials confirmed on Thursday.
The decision will spare the administration from having to reveal its internal projections for how deeply the recession will damage economic growth and how long the pain of high unemployment will persist.
When the administration last published official projections in February, it forecast economic growth of 3.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021, and growth rates at or around 3 percent for the ensuing decade. It forecast an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent for the year.
The virus has rendered those projections obsolete. Unemployment could hit 20 percent in June, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNN this week. The Congressional Budget Office said in April that it expects the economy will contract by 5.6 percent this year and end with unemployment above 11 percent.
The White House is required by law to issue both an annual budget and a midyear update to it, called a “mid-session review.” Updating economic projections in the mid-session review is optional, but it is a practice that administrations — including Mr. Trump’s — have widely followed since the review was mandated by Congress in 1970.
The review is required by law to give at least a partial window into how the administration expects the economy to perform this year and in the future: It must contain “any substantial changes to estimated receipts or expenditures” by the federal government, which includes the projected effects of cratering tax collections from lost economic activity and increased spending and tax cuts to combat it.
The decision not to release updated projections was first reported by The Washington Post.
Trump administration officials have in the past resisted updating their forecasts in the face of evidence that the economy was not growing as fast as they had projected. The budget they released in February officially conceded for the first time that growth in 2018 and 2019 had not reached 3 percent, as they had predicted.
The Federal Reserve is still scheduled to release its first summary of economic projections this year following its June 9-10 meeting. Central bankers release the forecasts for unemployment, growth, inflation and interest rates each quarter, but skipped the March edition amid virus uncertainty.
Pennsylvania House Democrats say Republicans hid a lawmaker’s positive virus test.
Democrats in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Thursday accused Republicans of keeping a lawmaker’s positive virus test a secret to avoid political embarrassment, even at the risk of exposing fellow legislators, Trip Gabriel reports.
A Republican House member, Andrew Lewis, confirmed on Wednesday that he received a positive test on May 20 and went into self-isolation. Mr. Lewis said that every lawmaker or staff member he was in contact with who “met the criteria for exposure” was notified.
But Democrats disputed that, saying none of their own members were alerted even though some were in proximity to Mr. Lewis in committee meetings.
The House Democratic campaign arm accused Republicans of keeping Mr. Lewis’s positive test a secret “to protect their public talking points against science and facts.” Another Republican representative, Russ Diamond, who said he was notified of possible exposure through contact with Mr. Lewis, had previously spoken at an anti-shutdown protest outside the Capitol and boasted on social media of not wearing a mask while shopping.
In an emotional Facebook video recorded in his office at the Capitol, Representative Brian K. Sims, a Democrat from Philadelphia, said Mr. Diamond has “apparently been quarantining himself for weeks” but “didn’t explain that to any of us when he was in committee, talking with us or walking up and down the aisles or bumping into us or letting us hold the door open for him.”
Mr. Lewis said he had kept his positive diagnosis private “out of respect for my family, and those who I may have exposed.”
Representative Ryan Bizzarro, a Democrat, disputed that Mr. Lewis had quarantined himself after his diagnosis. “We have footage of him being here,” he said.
Mr. Bizzarro, who went for a test on Thursday in Harrisburg, added: “The thing that was just infuriating about this whole situation is that we found out the Republican caucus leadership knew about this and tried to bury it.”
Some Democrats have called for the House speaker, Mike Turzai, to resign.
A spokesman for Mr. Turzai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As nations loosen lockdown restrictions, countries are turning their focus to testing and contact tracing to contain outbreaks. Starting Thursday, Britain will start mass testing and tracing. In the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, the government undertook a mass testing program to prevent a resurgence. In two weeks, it says it has been able to test nearly 6.5 million people.
In a tweet, Mr. Trump offered his condolences to the families and friends of those who died, a number reached a day earlier.
Mr. Trump and his presumptive Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., have outlined two very different strategies for moving forward. Mr. Biden, who laid out his plan in a little-noticed Medium post, said he would he would set up testing through the federal government, with a public-private board to oversee test manufacturing and distribution, federal safety regulators enforcing testing at work and at least 100,000 contact tracers tracking down exposed people.
The Trump administration released its new testing strategy over the weekend in an 81-page document, as it was required to do under the Paycheck Protection Program and Heath Care Enhancement Act. The plan would hold states responsible for carrying out all testing, though the federal government would provide some supplies needed for the tests.
Polls show that voters tend to favor a prominent role for the federal government. In a Pew Research survey released this month, 61 percent of Americans said coronavirus testing was mostly or entirely the responsibility of the federal government, not the states. A Fox News poll released last week found that 63 percent of registered voters viewed the “lack of available testing” as a “major problem.” Just 12 percent said it was not a problem at all.
Still, some say a one-size-fits-all program isn’t the right way to go. Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, called Mr. Biden’s idea a “typical Democratic response.”
“There’s a big difference between what’s going on in Queens, N.Y., and rural Tennessee, and the governors know best what to do,” he said.
Mr. Biden’s plan, though, shows what a national strategy could entail, including a “Pandemic Testing Board” to oversee “a nationwide campaign” to increase production of diagnostic and antibody tests, coordinate distribution, identify testing sites and people to staff them, and build laboratory capacity.
Testing, he and his advisers wrote, “is the springboard we need to help get our economy safely up and running again.”
The City Council in New York City planned to introduce legislation on Thursday, backed by the restaurant industry, to require Mayor Bill de Blasio to find a way to open streets, sidewalks and public plazas to outdoor dining.
The executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, Andrew Rigie, said the idea was to require the mayor to establish a framework to identify appropriate places for restaurants to sell food and beverages outside, and create a mechanism by which businesses and community boards could submit suggestions.
The bill would also require the city to set health and safety requirements for such operations.
“Our hope is there may be areas where entire streets could be shut down for restaurant service,” Mr. Rigie said in an interview. “Other places you may be able to extend the sidewalk, while keeping a lane of cars and bike lanes. Other places, you may be able to use pedestrian plazas. We really need to be creative.”
Last week, 24 councilmembers sent a public letter to the mayor urging him to create more space for outdoor dining, citing similar efforts in Tampa and Cincinnati.
“New York City faces urgent crises on many fronts — but we must make sure that our bars and restaurants are able to survive and recover,” they wrote.
At the mayor’s daily briefing on Thursday, he noted that restaurants and bars were not among the businesses included in the state-permitted first phase of reopening, which the city hopes to enter in early June.
When they do come online, though, Mr. de Blasio said, “I’m hopeful that the outdoors can be a big part of the solution.”
The governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, said on Thursday he would issue an executive order authorizing any business in the state to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings.
“We’re giving the store owners the right to say, if you’re not wearing a mask, you can’t come in,” he said. “That store owner has a right to protect themselves. That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”
On Thursday, the state reported 74 more deaths, unchanged from the number reported the previous day.
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, disclosed on Thursday that he had tested positive for virus antibodies.
Mr. Kaine is the second senator known to have had a confirmed case of Covid-19. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, tested positive for the virus in late March, even as he continued to appear in person at the Senate facilities.
Mr. Kaine said in a statement on Thursday that he and his wife started experiencing flulike symptoms around that time, after the Senate had begun a prolonged recess. The senator’s doctor thought it could be a virus case, but because of testing scarcity, the couple did not get tested at the time and their symptoms never became bad enough to seek additional treatment.
A recent antibody test came back positive. “While those antibodies could make us less likely to be reinfected or infect others, there is still too much uncertainty over what protection antibodies may actually provide,” said Mr. Kaine, who has returned to work on Capitol Hill. “So we will keep following C.D.C. guidelines — hand-washing, mask wearing, social distancing. We encourage others to do so as well.”
Also on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, said at her weekly news conference that she had not been tested for the virus or its antibodies.
Fears about catching the virus from contaminated surfaces have prompted many people to spend the past few months wiping down groceries, leaving packages unopened and stressing about touching elevator buttons.
But what’s the real risk? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently tried to clarify its guidance: “It may be possible that a person can get Covid-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
The bottom line, she writes, is that the best way we can protect ourselves from the virus — whether it’s surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing our hands, not touching our faces and wearing masks.
Official case counts often substantially underestimate the number of infections. But in the new studies, which tested the population more broadly in an effort to estimate everyone who has been infected, the percentage of people who have been infected so far is still in the single digits. The numbers are a small fraction of the threshold known as herd immunity, at which the virus can no longer spread widely. The precise herd immunity threshold for the virus is not yet clear, but several experts said they believed it would be higher than 60 percent.
Even in some of the hardest-hit cities in the world, the studies suggest, the vast majority of people still remain vulnerable to the virus.
Viewed together, the studies show herd immunity protection is unlikely to be reached “any time soon,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“We don’t have a good way to safely build it up, to be honest, not in the short term,” Dr. Mina said. “Unless we’re going to let the virus run rampant again — but I think society has decided that is not an approach available to us.”
In and around New York City, tens of thousands of people are still contracting the virus, even though the city has been facing locked down for more than two months.
In the past two weeks, more than 47,000 people in New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut tested positive, including 13,000 in New York City alone.
The New York State Health Department looked at the question of who is getting sick enough to go to the hospital. It surveyed over 100 hospitals across the state in early May and learned that four in five incoming patients were retired or unemployed, most had been sheltering at home, and nearly all had other underlying health conditions.
But health authorities are only beginning to grapple with the questions of how and why people are getting sick — what jobs they do, what housing situations they live in, and what avenues of exposure they have to the coronavirus.
To try to find answers to those questions, the Times correspondent Andy Newman interviewed doctors and hospital administrators, public-health officials, immigrant groups and patients themselves. Their answers varied, but they painted a collective portrait of those who are still getting sick, including people in the New York region living in multigenerational apartments who can’t afford to social distance and are afraid to get tested because of language barriers or immigration status.
More than a dozen Indian casinos across California reopened last week despite pleas from the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
In a series of correspondences and video chats with tribal leaders this month, Mr. Newsom sought to persuade more than cajole.
“This virus does not recognize jurisdictional boundaries, and it is in the best interest of public health to move toward reopening in concert,” he wrote in a letter to tribal leaders.
While churches and beaches have become bitter reopening battlegrounds, the issue of the state’s more than 70 Indian casinos, an $8 billion industry that has been shut down for the past two months, has been a separate contest of wills.
The question of who should decide when they are allowed to reopen is shadowed by the legacy of the deadly and degrading treatment of tribal communities for centuries. It is also complicated by the role of sovereignty. Under a series of agreements that tribes have with the government, Indian businesses have a special status that allows them to operate independently in many areas.
A majority of Indian casinos in the state have chosen to stay closed and are coordinating their reopening with the governor’s office.
But the closure in March elicited fears that tribes could lose the financial independence that came with owning a successful business.
Greg Sarris, the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which runs a casino north of San Francisco that is still shut, does not question the right of other tribes to open.
“I will honor any tribe’s sovereignty,” Mr. Sarris said. “Sovereignty is the only thing we have.”
The precautions designed to stem the spread of the virus has led to new and conflicting laws, closings and reopenings, and strict requirements on social-distancing and hand-washing for campgrounds in Western states.
What’s open now is changing on a daily basis, and the reopening rules and phases not only vary according to state, but also whether the park is state or national, on private or public land, or on federal land belonging to the National Park Service, Forest Preserve or Bureau of Land Management.
Campers might need to consider creating spreadsheets to keep track. For example, Zion National Park in Utah reopened, but only one of its three campgrounds is operating. Colorado’s state-park campsites are open, at half capacity and requiring advance reservations, while its Rocky Mountain National Park plans to phase in its Moraine Park and Glacier Basin campgrounds in early June. Montana’s state parks are open for camping, but the Montana side of Yellowstone National Park remains completely closed. (The Wyoming side, including Old Faithful and other landmarks, is open, but not for camping.) In California, the 700,000-acre Angeles National Forest, home of Mount Baldy, Mount Wilson and a section of the Pacific Crest Trail, is scheduled to reopen its campgrounds over the next few weeks, but state camping remains prohibited.
Almost all reopening public campgrounds are broadcasting the same messages: Stay close to home; bring water, food and whatever else you need; and avoid taxing local resources.
As the British government prepares to roll out a large-scale track-and-trace system intended to head off a second surge in infections, other countries’ experiences offer case studies — and cautionary tales.
Starting Thursday, anyone in Britain who has potential symptoms will be tested and, if positive, asked to list all those with whom they have recently been in close contact for at least 15 minutes. Those people, in turn, will be contacted and asked to isolate themselves for 14 days.
It’s the latest national campaign that aims to prevent more infections and another test of how testing and tracing affect transmission of the virus. The results so far are mixed.
What does it feel like to have Covid-19 and not need hospitalization?
Rest and fluids are essential, but so is knowing when to call a doctor. Give yourself plenty of time to feel better.
Reporting was contributed by Karen Barrow, Scott Cacciola, Patricia Cohen, Michael Cooper, Catie Edmondson, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Fuller, Trip Gabriel, David Gelles, Erica L. Green, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jennifer Medina, Andy Newman, Nadja Popovich, Dana Rubinstein, Margot Sanger-Katz, Anna Schaverien, Kaly Soto, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Jim Tankersley and Katie Van Syckle.