A team of government officials — led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — has created a public health strategy to combat the novel coronavirus and reopen parts of the country. Their strategy, obtained by The Washington Post, is part of a larger White House effort to draft a national plan to get Americans out of their homes and back to work.
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday pushed back on President Trump’s optimistic projection of soon reopening the nation’s economy – saying the US still lacks enough coronavirus testing materials and tracing procedures to make that possible. “We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet,” Fauci said in an interview with The Associated Press.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state is “controlling the spread” of the coronavirus, and it appears that “the worst is over ... if we continue to be smart going forward.” There were 671 new deaths recorded in the state on Easter Sunday, bringing the total number fatalities in the state to 10,056. Cuomo called the death tally a “horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow.”
New York City is in danger of running out of swabs for COVID-19 tests and is urging medical providers to continue testing only patients who are gravely ill, the city health department said in a memo to health care providers.