Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Is Expected to Expand Contact Tracing to Help Reopen Economy

22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks. New York extended its shutdown to May 15. Protesters, some encouraged by anti-government activists, have begun demonstrating against stay-at-home orders.

Right Now

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House of Representatives could soon change its rules to allow for an alternative to in-person voting as Congress remains in an extended recess because of the pandemic.
Here’s what you need to know:

    Trump is expected to call for more contact tracing as he seeks to reopen the country.
    House Democrats consider remote voting as Congress remains in an extended recess.
    The $349 billion lending program for small businesses has run out of funds.
    22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks.
    Protests across the U.S. signal growing opposition to governors’ restrictions.
    Early research suggests that obesity is a big risk factor, but not asthma.
    Extending the shutdown to May 15, Cuomo braces New York for a “new normal.”

Trump is expected to call for more contact tracing as he seeks to reopen the country.

President Trump is expected to announce as soon as Thursday evening that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hire hundreds of people to perform contact tracing in communities around the country as part of his push to allow the country to go back to work and school, a top government official said.

Mr. Trump is also expected to say that the federal government will help states pay for even more medical personnel to help track the spread of the coronavirus by getting in touch with people who test positive to see who they have had contact with three or four days before they started showing symptoms.

“The president will announce a plan in the works to drastically increase the capacity for state and local health departments to do core public health work like testing people, doing contact tracing,” said the official who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the announcement. “We want to beef up state capacity to be able to perform core functions, so that if and when we start to open the country back up, we don’t have a resurgence of cases to require the country to shut back down.”

The president has repeatedly said he wants to get the country back to work by lifting the draconian restrictions that have kept people in their homes, shuttered businesses and schools and severely damaged the nation’s economy. But public health officials and many governors have said Mr. Trump’s desire for normalcy is running into the reality that doing so quickly could lead to more infections and once again overwhelm the nation’s health system.

Although capacity has improved in recent weeks, supply shortages for testing remain crippling, and many regions are still restricting tests to people who meet specific criteria. Antibody tests, which reveal whether someone has ever been infected with the virus, are just starting to be rolled out, and most have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration.

On a conference call Thursday morning, Mr. Trump repeatedly told House lawmakers that people around the country were raring to get the economy moving again. He drew attention to protests in some states, saying that Americans were angry, and hinted that 29 states were ready to reopen, telling lawmakers he would have more to say on that later, according to one who was on the call and described it on condition of anonymity.

Democrats and Republicans tried repeatedly to impress on the president that testing capacity and contact tracing were paramount to reopening. Representative Jimmy Panetta, Democrat of California, gently warned that re-opening too quickly could be dangerous. Another lawmaker suggested creating a testing industry board that could coordinate and speed up the development of test kits. Mr. Trump told the lawmakers that his team was working on expanding availability.

Hiring medical personnel to perform contact tracing is needed, public health experts said. But many have cautioned that hiring several hundred for the entire country will be nowhere near enough to keep track of the virus as it spreads. Thomas R. Frieden, a former C.D.C. director, said there are estimates that the country will need to hire as many as 300,000 such workers.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for a $30 billion investment in testing capacity across the country, including hiring people to perform contact tracing once someone tests positive. And states have already begun hiring their own teams of workers for the job.

In Massachusetts, the governor said his state will hire 1,000 people to trace the contacts of infected patients. It is not clear how much money Mr. Trump will propose to spend helping the states hire their own people.

“There will be this effort in the coming weeks and months to dramatically scale up the public health work force to do the core functions that are needed to try to prevent re-emergency of the virus when we open up the country,” the official said.

As Mr. Trump prepared to release new guidelines on reopening the country, another group of governors — this time, a bipartisan group from the Midwest — announced Thursday that they were forming a regional coalition to weigh their next steps, which they said would be “fact-based” and “data-driven.” They included Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

Regional approaches are already being taken by groups of governors on the East and West Coasts. They began to band together after Mr. Trump insisted that the power to reopen the country rested with him — a claim debunked by legal scholars and officials in both parties.

TESTING DELAYS

Testing in the U.S. is still woefully short of what experts say is needed to restart public life.
House Democrats consider remote voting as Congress remains in an extended recess.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Thursday that the House could soon approve a change to its rules to allow for an alternative to in-person voting, conceding for the first time that the pandemic that has forced Congress into an extended recess could prompt history-making modifications to the way the institution operates.

Her comments marked a distinct shift from Ms. Pelosi’s earlier resistance to even considering any change that would allow lawmakers to vote remotely, although she cautioned that the matter was far from settled.

“It’s not as easy as you may think,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters during a telephone news conference. “I’ve been negative on the status quo of it because so far we haven’t had a good option.”

Congressional leaders have been under mounting pressure to consider an alternative to returning to the Capitol, as it has become increasingly clear that their approach to doing business from afar is bumping up against its logistical and political limits.

“Everybody’s working so hard on all of these initiatives, including on how we can come together, whether it’s by proxy voting or remote voting or whatever it is,” Ms. Pelosi said. “When we are ready, we will do it.”

In a conference call with Democrats on Thursday, Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Rules Committee who has been studying the issue at the speaker’s request, recommended changing House rules to allow remote voting by proxy, according to one person on the private call who described it on condition of anonymity.

Later, he released a statement explaining his idea for what he called “low-tech remote voting,” in which lawmakers who could not travel to Washington because of the pandemic could give specific instructions on each vote to a colleague authorized to vote on their behalf.

“This system would enable members to vote remotely in a secure way, without using the kind of technology that is susceptible to hacking or interference by foreign bad actors,” Mr. McGovern said. He said he hoped the House would agree to the change unanimously, otherwise lawmakers would have to return to Washington to vote on it in person.

Earlier, Ms. Pelosi noted that the House would have to reconvene to approve the creation of a special committee that she has proposed to oversee the federal government’s response to the coronavirus, and it could move then to change the voting rules.”

When people ask about remote voting or proxy voting and the rest, that requires a change in the rules of the Congress,” Ms. Pelosi said. “At that time, I would hope that we could approve the committee.”
The $349 billion lending program for small businesses has run out of funds.

A federal loan program intended to help small businesses keep workers on their payrolls has proved woefully insufficient, with a staggering 22 million Americans filing for unemployment in the last four weeks.

The program, called the Paycheck Protection Program, was in limbo as the Small Business Administration said Thursday that it had run out of money. Millions of businesses unable to apply for the loans while Congress struggled to reach a deal to replenish the funds.

Congress initially allocated $349 billion for the program, which was intended to provide loans to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The money has gone quickly, with more than 1.4 million loans approved as of Wednesday evening.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Jovita Carranza, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, warned on Wednesday night that “by law, the S.B.A. will not be able to issue new loan approvals once the programs experience a lapse in appropriations.”

The loans have been sought after as small businesses struggle with quarantines and closures, which have quickly depleted cash flows as businesses remain shuttered and customers stay home.

The program underwrites bank loans for small businesses that will never need to be repaid if owners use most of the money to keep paying employees for two and a half months. Economists and business lobbyists warned when the bill was being debated that the money was nowhere close to the $1 trillion or more that companies would need.

Mr. Mnuchin is expected to resume negotiations with lawmakers about adding another $250 billion to the fund on Thursday, while Treasury staff members were expected to meet with aides to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader.

While both parties agree on the need to replenish the program, talks have broken down over whether to simply fill the pot, as Republicans and the White House want, or make significant changes to how money is allocated to businesses, as Democrats have called for.

Democrats have insisted on attaching new restrictions to ensure that the money flows to minority-owned businesses and other companies that are traditionally disadvantaged in the lending market. They also want to add more money for hospitals, food-stamp recipients and state and local governments whose tax receipts have plunged.

The Senate is expected to convene in a procedural session on Thursday, but it is unclear whether Senate Republicans will try to pass the funding. Such a maneuver would require unanimous agreement from all 100 senators

And, just as the money ran out, the Federal Reserve’s backstop for the program came on line. The facility, which takes the loans banks make to small businesses as collateral, became fully operational as of Thursday. Banks that make loans are now able to essentially get financing from the Fed to extend that credit by using the loans they are making as collateral.

The promise that the program was coming has most likely encouraged lending by assuring banks that they would not have to keep the loans on their balance sheets.