Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Recommends Wearing Masks


Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Recommends Wearing Masks

A day of mourning in China, amid doubts over its virus toll.

The Chinese government held a nationwide day of mourning on Saturday, the day of the annual Tomb Sweeping Festival, a traditional time for honoring ancestors. Flags flew at half-staff, and alarms and horns sounded for three minutes starting at 10 a.m. Xi Jinping and other leaders of the ruling Communist Party attended a ceremony in Beijing.

It will probably not be enough to soothe many families in the city of Wuhan, who have chafed against the state’s efforts to assert control over the grieving process.

President Trump said on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was urging all Americans to wear a mask when they leave their homes, but he undercut the message by repeatedly calling the recommendation voluntary and saying he would not wear one himself.

“With the masks, it is going to be a voluntary thing,” the president said at the beginning of the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. It may be good. It is only a recommendation, voluntary.”

“Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know,” he added, though he stopped receiving foreign dignitaries weeks ago. “Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement, followed by his quick dismissal, was a remarkable public display of the intense debate that has played out inside the West Wing over the past several days as a divided administration argued about whether to request such a drastic change in Americans’ social behavior. Senior officials at the C.D.C. have been pushing the president for days to advise everyone — even people who appear to be healthy — to wear a mask or a scarf that covers their mouth and nose when shopping at the grocery store or while in other public places.

The president’s briefing was particularly contentious: He insulted reporters, jousted with his own administration and generally returned to pugilistic form.

At one point, he would not say, in response to a question, whether he was taking steps to ensure that the 2020 presidential election would take place as scheduled, should the coronavirus still be present in November. But he insisted the election would not be postponed.

Mr. Trump added that he did not approve of voting by mail, an idea gaining currency amid concerns that in-person voting would expose people to the coronavirus.

“I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in in voting,” he said. “It should be, you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the office leading the U.S. government’s coronavirus response nationwide, is running short of employees who are trained in some of its most important front-line jobs, according to interviews with current and former officials.

At the same time, the agency has been forced to halt a major hiring initiative and has closed training facilities to avoid spreading the infection.

The number of available personnel qualified to lead field operations has fallen to 19 from 44 in less than six weeks, as many of those leaders have been assigned to run operations in states with virus-related disaster declarations. Additional staff members are also being pulled from responding to other disasters.

Training centers in Maryland and Alabama have been shuttered until mid-May, and an effort to recruit new employees is on hold, according to a senior administration official with direct knowledge of FEMA’s operations.

With wildfire season looming and hurricane season starting in less than two months, the shortfalls could complicate federal response to disasters nationwide.

Two French medical experts have been accused of racism after they suggested that coronavirus vaccines should be tested in Africa because the continent was underdeveloped.

One of the experts, Jean-Paul Mira, the head of the intensive care unit at Cochin Hospital in Paris, said in a television interview on Wednesday that Africa made sense as a testing site because countries there “haven’t got masks” or intensive care systems.

He also compared the use of a potential Covid-19 vaccine to tests of experimental AIDS treatments that have been administered to sex workers in African countries, saying that people on the continent “are highly exposed and don’t protect themselves.”

The other guest, Camille Locht of the national research institute Inserm, agreed. He said that trials would be conducted in African countries to test a tuberculosis vaccine against the new coronavirus.

The sequence drew an intense backlash on social media, and the hashtag #AfricansAreNotLabRats was still trending on Twitter as of Saturday.

“Do not take African people as guinea pigs,” the Ivorian soccer player Didier Drogba wrote.

Mr. Mira apologized on Friday. The Inserm institute, where Mr. Locht works, said the video had been shortened and misinterpreted. The institute said that trials against the new coronavirus were being conducted in Europe, and that if a vaccine were deployed, it would be tested in Europe as well as in Africa.

A provocative idea in Italy: Blood tests to decide who goes back to work.

The weeks of locking down Italy, which has had the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, may be starting to pay off, as officials announced this week that the numbers of new infections had plateaued.

That glimmer of hope has turned the conversation to the daunting challenge of when and how to reopen without setting off another cataclysmic wave of contagion. To do so, Italian health officials and some politicians have focused on an idea that might once have been relegated to the realm of dystopian novels and science fiction films.

Having the right antibodies to the virus in one’s blood — a potential marker of immunity — may soon determine who gets to work and who does not, who is locked down and who is free.

That debate is in some ways ahead of the science. Researchers are uncertain, if hopeful, that antibodies in fact indicate immunity. But that has not stopped politicians from grasping at the idea as they come under increasing pressure to open economies and avoid inducing a widespread economic depression.

At least five inmates have died at the federal prison in Oakdale, La., and two have died at the federal prison near Elkton, Ohio. Officials with unions that represent prison workers have said that the reported numbers are likely undercounting the number of infected staff, given the paucity of testing.

President Trump said on Friday night that he planned to nominate a member of the White House counsel’s office to be the special inspector general to oversee the Treasury Department’s $500 billion bailout fund.

Mr. Trump’s selection, Brian D. Miller, is a former federal prosecutor who spent nine years as the inspector general of the General Services Administration. Mr. Miller was nominated for that post in 2004 by President George W. Bush.

The special inspector general is one of several oversight mechanisms created as part of the $2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed last week. The position will be closely scrutinized, as lawmakers from both parties have been calling for Mr. Trump to fill the role expeditiously to ensure that stimulus money is doled out with transparency and that fraud and favoritism are avoided.

The president raised alarms last week when, after signing the legislation, he released a statement that suggested he had the power to decide what information the new inspector general could share with Congress.

Germany has reported more than 91,000 coronavirus infections and over 1,200 deaths. But thanks to widespread testing and other measures, its percentage of fatal cases — 1.3 percent — has been remarkably low.

Around the country, the total number of coronavirus cases spiked sharply as of Friday afternoon, exceeding 275,000 — more than a quarter of a million people worldwide who have been infected.

Reporting was contributed by Jason Horowitz, Elian Peltier, Constant Méheut, Christopher F. Schuetze, Katrin Bennhold, Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, Matthew Haag, Peter Eavis, Niraj Chokshi, David Gelles, Christopher Flavelle, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Alan Feuer, Helene Cooper, Katie Benner, Alan Rappeport, Michael D. Shear, Sheila Kaplan, Sarah Mervosh, Jack Healy, Amy Qin, Cao Li, Yiwei Wang, Albee Zhang and Alexandra Stevenson.




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