‘This economy will recover; it may take a while.’
Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that while he expected the U.S. economy to recover from the sharp and painful downturn brought about by the coronavirus, that process would take time — potentially until the end of 2021.
“This economy will recover; it may take a while,” Mr. Powell said in a preview of the CBS program “60 Minutes,” which is scheduled to air Sunday evening. “It may take a period of time, it could stretch through the end of next year, we don’t really know.”
Asked whether the economy could recover without an effective vaccine, Mr. Powell suggested that it could make a start, but not get all the way there.
“Assuming that there’s not a second wave of the coronavirus, I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year,” he said. “For the economy to fully recover, people will have to be fully confident, and that may have to await the arrival of a vaccine.”
The interview with Mr. Powell, which CBS said was recorded on May 13, follows a blunt speech he gave the same day, warning that the economy may need more financial support to prevent permanent job losses and waves of bankruptcies.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo provided a lasting image on Sunday for fellow New Yorkers who may be apprehensive about getting tested for the coronavirus — he invited a doctor to stick a swab up his nose during his live news briefing on the pandemic.
“It is so fast and so easy that even a governor can take this test,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Cuomo then stood up and turned to a doctor, who was holding a cotton swab and was wearing coveralls, a face shield and gloves. Camera shutters clicked furiously as the doctor guided the swab up the Mr. Cuomo’s nostril.
“That’s it?” he said. “That’s it? Nothing else?”
New York has the capability of conducting 40,000 tests per day at 700 sites, said Mr. Cuomo, who noted that testing would be critical to monitoring the spread of the virus as the state begins to reopen.
“There is nothing about this test that should intimidate people from not taking this test,” he said.
In a telephone appearance during a televised charity golf exhibition Sunday, President Trump said he enthusiastically supported the return of live sporting events during the pandemic.
“We want to get sports back, we miss sports,” Mr. Trump said during NBC’s broadcast of a skins game match involving Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff. “We need sports in terms of the psyche of our country. And that’s what we’re doing.”
While Sunday’s exhibition was contested without spectators, Mr. Trump said he hoped that future events would be teeming with fans.
“We want to get it back to where it was, we want big, big stadiums loaded with people,” he said. “We don’t want to have 15,000 people watching Alabama-L.S.U., as an example.”
He later added, “We want to get back to normal where you have the big crowds where they’re practically standing on top of each other, not where they’re worried.”
“I would love to be able to have all sports back,” Dr. Fauci said. “But as a health official and a physician and a scientist, I have to say, right now, when you look at the country, we’re not ready for that yet.”
The P.G.A. Tour is planning to become one of the first major American sports leagues to return to competition with the Charles Schwab Classic on June 11 in Fort Worth. An almost weekly schedule of men’s golf tournaments is set to follow, including the P.G.A. Championship in San Francisco in early August, the United States Open in mid-September outside New York City and the Masters in November in Augusta, Ga.
“When you have the Masters, we want to have big crowds,” Mr. Trump said. “And now, right now, that’s not what they’re planning, but you never know what happens. Things can happen very quickly.”
Thirteen sailors aboard the virus-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt have retested positive for Covid-19 after seeming to have recovered from the disease, Navy officials said on Sunday.
The infected sailors, who had all tested negative twice before reboarding the Roosevelt in recent days, have been removed from the warship to self-quarantine. The Roosevelt has been docked in Guam since March 27 as Navy officials wrestle with how to deal with sickened sailors, disinfect the vessel and prepare for it to resume operations in the Western Pacific.
Navy officials have said they are aggressively screening and testing as crew members return to the Roosevelt after quarantining at the U.S. military base in Guam, as well as at hotels and in other lodging there. Officials on the ship are requiring masks and repeatedly cleaning and sanitizing to prevent another outbreak of the virus, which has infected about 1,100 crew members since March. One sailor has died.
About 2,900 of the 4,800 crew members are now back on board. They are under strict orders to report to doctors the slightest cough, headache or other flulike symptom. In the past week or so, the new testing even turned up a sailor who tested positive for tuberculosis. That set off a wild contact-tracing scramble that found no other cases on board, Navy officials said.
The results of the Navy’s latest investigation into events surrounding the Roosevelt are due by the end of this month.
Recent research in South Korea suggested that dozens of patients there who had tested positive a second time after recovering from the illness appeared to be “false positives” caused by lingering — but likely not infectious — bits of the virus.
When a sprinkling of a reddish rash appeared on Jack McMorrow’s hands in mid-April, his father figured the 14-year-old was overusing hand sanitizer —- not a bad thing during a global pandemic.
When Jack’s parents noticed that his eyes looked glossy, they attributed it to late nights of video games and TV.
When he developed a stomachache and didn’t want dinner, “they thought it was because I ate too many cookies or whatever,” said Jack, a ninth-grader in Woodside, Queens, who loves Marvel Comics and has ambitions to teach himself “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar.
But over the next 10 days, Jack felt increasingly unwell. His parents consulted his pediatricians in video appointments and took him to a weekend urgent care clinic. Then, one morning, he awoke unable to move.
He had a tennis ball-size lymph node, raging fever, racing heartbeat and dangerously low blood pressure. Pain deluged his body in “a throbbing, stinging rush,” he said.
“You could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire,” he said.
Jack, who was previously healthy, was hospitalized with heart failure that day, in a stark example of the newly discovered severe inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that has already been identified in about 200 children in the United States and Europe and killed several.
What is the difference between “deaths among Covid-19 cases” and “deaths due to Covid-19”? In Colorado, that distinction in wording changes the total by about 30 percent.
Until Friday, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment had been including anyone who had Covid-19 at the time of death in the official total, a practice consistent with the C.D.C.’s counting criteria. By that reckoning, Colorado had 1,192 deaths as of Friday.
But the state said it would now also report a lower figure — those for whom the disease is considered the sole cause of death, with no other complicating factors. Counting that way knocks the state’s total down to 892.
Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, defended the change on Sunday.
“The C.D.C. criteria include anybody who died with Covid-19,” he said on Fox News. “What the people of Colorado and the people of the country want to know is how many people died of Covid-19.”
Health experts have warned for weeks that inconsistent reporting protocols and insufficient testing have led to an undercounting of coronavirus deaths nationally. North Dakota and Alabama have both experimented with death counts similar to Colorado’s new approach, but have continued to report the C.D.C.’s way.
Mr. Polis acknowledged that the virus, which he called a “bad bug,” can be particularly dangerous for older people and people with underlying medical conditions — those who would be most likely to be excluded from the state’s sole-cause count.
A second fisheries worker in Alaska has tested positive for the coronavirus, adding to fears that the isolated fishing towns that have so far avoided infections could face challenges as thousands of seasonal workers pour in for the start of Alaska’s summer seafood rush.
State officials said the positive case was identified Friday in the city of Dillingham. The infected worker, an employee of Trident Seafoods, had recently arrived and tested positive at the end of a mandatory 14-day quarantine.
Earlier this month, a worker who had arrived in the fishing community of Cordova also tested positive.
Some locals have expressed concern about the fishing season, which began in Cordova with the pursuit of the famed Copper River salmon. In Dillingham, hospital leaders at the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation had requested that the fishing season remain closed, arguing that the arrival of thousands of outsiders put the community at risk.
To prepare for the influx of workers, state and local government officials have put in place strict quarantine procedures, social-distancing requirements and aggressive testing. Some companies are requiring their workers to stay on site, where the seasonal crews often sleep in bunkhouses.
State officials said the worker who tested positive in Dillingham was removed from the area. None of that person’s contacts in the city have so far tested positive.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that administers the country’s lawful immigration system, says it could be insolvent by summer, and has asked Congress for $1.2 billion to stay afloat.
The agency handles applications for green cards, citizenship and other programs, and it relies on fees paid by applicants for 97 percent of its $4.8 billion annual budget. Applications have plummeted because of travel and immigration restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic.
In addition to the money it is requesting from Congress, the agency plans to impose a 10 percent surcharge on its fees, on top of previously proposed increases. The cost of petitioning for naturalization would jump more than 60 percent, to $1,170 from $725, for most applicants.
Critics said the Trump administration’s policies, including new requirements for some green card applicants and more extensive reviews for H-1B visas, hit the agency from two sides — reducing revenue by dissuading people from applying, and increasing the amount of labor involved in handling each case.
“With extreme vetting, they are making every single application take longer to review, and processing fewer,” said Melissa Rodgers, the director of programs at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, who oversees a program to promote citizenship among legal immigrants. “Word gets out that it’s not worth applying,” she said.
Now that nearly all the states that imposed stay-at-home orders and other restrictions to fight the pandemic have begun to ease them, governors say it’s gotten more complicated than ever to try to balance all the conflicting imperatives.
“The question is, how do you toggle back and make meaningful modifications to the stay-at-home order?” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said Sunday on CNN. “And that’s where we’re now in this point of friction and a lot of frustration.”
Mr. Newsom has allowed shops in California to offer curbside service, child care providers to reopen, and factories that make consumer products to restart. Restaurants and stores can resume allowing customers inside their premises in 22 of the state’s 58 counties, most of them rural. Some beaches, parks and trails reopened this weekend.
Like a number of other governors, Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has seen his decisions draw criticism from many sides, as either painfully slow or recklessly fast. And the continued restrictions in much of the state are meeting with some resistance. But he said the risks of a resurgence of the virus remained too great to simply lift them all.
“The realities of previous pandemics around the globe, and those we experienced in the U.S., suggest not just second waves but potential third waves,” he said. “So one has to be very, very sober, as we move forward to this next round of reopenings.”
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, imposed restrictive measures in the state before many of his Republican colleagues, becoming the first to close schools. The number of new daily cases in the state is down from its peak and has plateaued. Now, as Mr. DeWine looks to reopen the state, he has also chastised those seeking to get ahead of the state orders.
“This is a virus that we’re still learning a lot about,” Mr. DeWine said. “We don’t know a great deal about it, we know more today than we did two months ago, or three months ago.”
Speaking about the situation on Sunday, Mr. DeWine said the restaurant owners “seemed to get control of it last night — we didn’t have to issue any citations,” but that the state was “going to do whatever we have to do if these things occur across Ohio.”
On Friday, restaurants across the state will be allowed to resume service to patrons at outdoor tables.
“All of this is a work in progress,” Mr. DeWine said. “We thought it was a huge risk not to open. But we also know it’s a huge risk in opening.”
The passage of a $3 trillion stimulus package by the House on Friday appeared to bring Congress no closer this weekend to a deal on coronavirus aid, as pleas for more assistance collided with a conservative push to wait and see whether staggered state reopenings and previous aid packages arrest the economic free-fall.
The Republican-controlled Senate is not expected to take up the legislation that the Democratic-controlled House approved on Friday. Instead, the Senate will turn to a number of pending nominations before an expected Memorial Day recess. Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Republicans to reconsider.
“Time is of the essence,” she said in an interview aired Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “In the past bills, they put forth their proposal, and then we worked in a bipartisan way that we anticipate now.”
“They may think it’s OK to pause, but people are hungry across America,” she added. “Hunger doesn’t take a pause.”
Republican leaders have played down what Democrats say is an immediate need for relief, arguing that it was too early to allocate additional funds after Congress previously passed close to $3 trillion in relief.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has laid down a “red line,” saying that strengthening liability protections for health workers and businesses moving to reopen must be part of any future package.
Ms. Pelosi said on Sunday that she had “no red lines,” but she singled out a provision in the bill passed on Friday that would strengthen federal protections for essential workers.
“The best protection for our workers and their employers is to follow very good OSHA mandatory guidelines,” she said, referring to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “That protects the workers, protects their lives, as well as protects the employer if they follow the guidelines. Remember, when people go to work, they go home.”
The legislation the House passed on Friday, which Democratic leaders acknowledged amounted to an opening offer, faces some opposition from within their party, including in the Senate.
“I think what Pelosi did in the House — it is significant,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats. “I have some disagreements with it, and I want to see the Senate improve on it.”
A major question on the minds of many parents is whether their children’s schools will reopen in the fall. So far the plans and guidelines that have emerged are a patchwork, and state leaders are divided about whether it is possible to have the schools ready in time and what it will take to do it safely.
Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado said on Sunday that starting the school year open would not guarantee that they stayed that way. “There might be times, if there’s an outbreak at a school, that it has to convert to online for a period of weeks until it’s reasonably safe to return to school,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Governor Polis said his state was considering measures like staggering start times, class schedules and breaks to minimize crowds in hallways.
California will proceed slowly and methodically in allowing crowds to gather again anywhere, including schools, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Sunday, and that may mean that some schools in the state reopen while others remain closed.
“It’s all predicated on data, on science, not just observed evidence,” he said on CNN. “Each part of California is unique.”
Both governors noted that while children were not often affected as severely by the virus as adults are, they were potential spreaders.
“This is no question from an epidemiological perspective that this is a less severe, almost infinitesimal fatality rate for kids,” Mr. Polis said. “But the thing is, kids live with parents, they live with grandparents, kids are around teachers, so that’s where it gets a little bit more complicated.”
And spreading is not the only serious concern. A rare and baffling inflammatory syndrome, possibly linked to Covid-19, that has affected several hundred children across the country was also on officials’ minds.
Health issues that affect minority groups are making the pandemic worse, Azar says.
Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, suggested in televised remarks on Sunday that the high death toll from Covid-19 in the United States, compared with other nations, was due at least in part to the prevalence of underlying health issues in minority communities.
“Unfortunately, the American population is very diverse, and it is a population with significant unhealthy comorbidities that do make many individuals in our communities, in particular African-American minority communities, particularly at risk,” Mr. Azar said on the CNN program “State of the Union,” adding, “That is an unfortunate legacy of our health care system that we certainly do need to address.”
The host, Jake Tapper, pressed Mr. Azar on whether he was trying to place the blame for the pandemic on its victims. “I want to give you an opportunity to clear it up,” Mr. Tapper said, “because it sounded like you were saying that the reason that there are so many dead Americans is because we’re unhealthier than the rest of the world, and I know that’s not what you meant.”
Mr. Azar responded: “We have a significantly disproportionate burden of comorbidities in the United States — obesity, hypertension, diabetes — these are demonstrated facts that make us at risk for any type of disease burden, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the American people.”
Unable to travel, some turn to backyard camping.
Think s’mores, stars, the air mattress deflating with a cartoony hiss. Picture children’s faces, fire-lit and, for just another minute, little else. It could happen in farmland, suburbia or the Bronx — and it could be lovely. In lieu of summer vacation, there are also ways to vacation at home.
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Karen Barrow, Pam Belluck, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane, Melina Delkic, Rebecca Halleck, Jan Hoffman, Julia Jacobs, Sheila Kaplan, Clifford Krauss, Michael Levenson, Tariro Mzezewa, Bill Pennington, Katherine Rosman, Andrea Salcedo, Eric Schmitt, Hiroko Tabuchi, Jim Tankersley and Neil Vigdor.