•  Cuomo said on Friday, with the state recording 422 more deaths, the smallest number since April 1. The official state death toll now stands at 16,162.
• “All evidence suggests we are on the downside of the curve”
• The number of virus patients in hospitals has fallen sharply, too, by more than 3,000 people since last Friday, according to statistics he cited.  Net change in hospitalizations is down, net change in intubations is down
• “How fast is the decline and how low will it go?” Cuomo stressed not to jump into re-opening New York  He noted about a possible “second wave”
• He also pointed out that strains of the coronavirus that first infected his state’s residents came from Europe, not China, and that the restrictions on travelers to the US from China announced by Donald Trump on January 31 and implemented on February 2 came too late to halt the spread of Covid-19. Over 2.2 million people landed in NY and NJ airports from January 1st until the shutdown
• “We closed the front door with the China travel ban, which was right, but we left the back door open,” Cuomo told a daily briefing.
• “An outbreak anywhere, is an outbreak everywhere”
• The governor once again raised the question of whose job it was to warn the US about the outbreak, and noted that Trump has put that blame on the World Health Organization. “He’s right to ask the question because this was too little too late,” Cuomo said of the president. “And let’s find out what happened so it doesn’t happen again.”
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Friday that another global pandemic “will happen again,” as he reflected on lessons learned from the deadly coronavirus crisis that’s still plaguing the state. “It will happen again. Bank on it,” Cuomo told reporters during his daily Albany press briefing. The governor added, “Let’s not put our heads in the sand and think this is the only pandemic we’ll ever have.”
• Cuomo discussed Federal aid to the state and criticized Senator McConnell and challenged him to pass a bill allowing states to go bankrupt
• “We still have elections in the midst of all this chaos. We have seen elections held where we had people on lines for a long period of time. It makes no sense to me to tell people you have to put your life at risk, violate social distancing to come out to vote. So, we passed an executive order that said you can vote by absentee. Today, I’m asking the Board of Elections to send every New York voter what’s called a – automatically receives a postage paid application for a ballot. If you want to vote, we should send you a ballot so you can vote, so you don’t have to come out and get in a line.”

By Jared Evan

President Donald Trump on Friday said he was being sarcastic when he asked medical experts about injecting disinfectants into the body to fight coronavirus.

“I was asking a sarcastic and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump said. “That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.”

The president commented to reporters on the establishment media firestorm over disinfectants after signing a bill providing $320 billion in additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program.

When Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked the president to clarify whether he was encouraging Americans to ingest disinfectants, Trump replied, “No, of course not.”

He added, “Interior wise, it’s said sarcastically, it was put in the form of a question to a group of extraordinarily hostile people, namely the fake news media.”

During the White House press briefing on Thursday, Trump questioned whether it was possible to use disinfectants “by injection inside” to kill coronavirus. He later clarified, “it wouldn’t be through injection.”

Here is what the president asked Acting Undersecretary of Science and Technology for the Department of Homeland Security Bill Bryan:

“Then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” he asked. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

This quote quickly escalated into the concept that Trump suggested people inject Lysol and other disinfectants. Clearly Trump asked , if it is possible to do so,  not recommending that people inject it.

AP reported: Trump’s comments on disinfectants came after William Bryan, who leads the Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, spoke at the Thursday briefing about how researchers are testing the effect of disinfectants on virus-laden saliva and respiratory fluids in the laboratory. They kill the virus very quickly, he said. Bryan said injections weren’t part of the disinfectant research.

The White House accused the media of taking Trump’s comments out of context.

“President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”

William Bryan  also said at a White House briefing Thursday that there are “emerging results” from new research that suggest solar light has a powerful effect in killing the virus on surfaces and in the air. He said scientists have seen a similar effect from higher temperatures and humidity. A biocontainment lab in Maryland has been conducting testing on the virus since February, Bryan said.

“The virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity,” Bryan said.

It is important to point out UV treatment is nothing new. Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation (UBI) is a procedure that exposes the blood to light to heighten the body’s immune response and to kill infections. With exposure to UV light, bacteria and viruses in your bloodstream absorb five times as much photonic energy as do your red and white blood cells.

It is important to also point out the “reporter” from the Washington post,  who asked Trump if it’s dangerous to make people think they would be safe by going outside in the heat, considering that so many people have died in Florida, is  being highly intellectually dishonest. The sun is not causing coronavirus, going outside is not causing coronavirus, we know how it is spread and why social distancing is important,  you can’t get coronavirus from walking into your backyard and getting some sun.

The WaPost “reporter” literally implied going outside and getting sun is dangerous.  However  well established science tells us: when your skin is exposed to sunlight, it makes vitamin D from cholesterol. The sun’s ultraviolet B (UVB) rays hit cholesterol in the skin cells, providing the energy for vitamin D synthesis to occur. Vitamin D has many roles in the body and is essential for optimal health.

Vitamin D has several important functions. Perhaps the most vital are regulating the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, and facilitating normal immune system function. Getting a sufficient amount of vitamin D is important for normal growth and development of bones and teeth, as well as improved resistance against certain diseases.

All of this is lost in the shuffle of the media constantly trying to make President Trump appear insane.

One out of every four American adults say someone in their household has lost a job to the coronavirus pandemic, but the vast majority expect those former jobs will return once the crisis passes, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The economic devastation writ by COVID-19 is clear: 26.4 million people have lost their job in the past five weeks, millions of homeowners are delaying mortgage payments and food banks are seeing lines of cars that stretch for miles. Forty-six percent of all Americans say their household has experienced some form of income loss from layoffs, reduced hours, unpaid leave or salary reductions.

And yet, the survey finds a majority of Americans still feel positive about their personal finances. One possible reason: Among those whose households have experienced a layoff, 78% believe those former jobs will definitely or probably return. Another positive sign: The percentage of workers who say their household has lost a source of income is not significantly different from a few weeks ago.

Seventy-one percent of Americans now describe the national economy as poor, up from 60% three weeks ago and 33% in January. At the same time, 64% call their personal financial situation good — a number that remains largely unchanged since before the virus outbreak began.

Some of the resiliency can likely be traced to the nearly $2 trillion rescue package enacted by Congress that expanded jobless benefits, extended forgivable loans to small businesses and provided a government check to most Americans — money that has helped stabilize some families’ finances.

Skylar Banks, 24, used her 2019 tax refund and a separate government check for $3,000 to prepay six months of rent on her house. Her plan: to ensure her family’s housing is secure in case coronavirus infections spike in a second wave later this year and the nation’s economy gets worse.

“We’re not sure how many people actually have COVID-19,” said Banks, who lives in Dyersville, Tennessee, and works at Walmart. “If they open everything back up, we have no clue what is going to happen.”

Indeed, the country is split on whether the economy will rebound over the next year. Forty-five percent expect it will improve, while 37% say it will worsen. Just 17% expect it to stay the same.

The survey found Americans overwhelmingly support stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus — 61% described efforts in their area as about right, while 26% said they didn’t go far enough — even as those actions have forced an untold number of businesses to close.

Lower income households and those with less education appear especially hard hit by job losses – 29% of those whose families earn less than $50,000 a year said their household experienced a job loss, compared with 22% of those who make more. Similarly, 28% of those without a college degree experienced a household layoff, while just 19% with a degree said the same.

As the crisis drags on, 22% of Americans have started to miss payments on housing or debts, the survey found. That includes 11% of Americans who have unpaid rent or mortgage bills, 11% who have missed a credit card payment and 19% who were unable to pay another type of bill. Some were unable to pay more than one kind of bill.

Monique Hewan, a nursing student in Cold Spring, Kentucky, said the outbreak only appears to have intensified political tensions as some Republican governors make plans to allow some businesses to reopen and to ease other restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.

“It all depends on whether you’re red and blue as to how you think about it,” she said. “The calls for older people to die for the sake of the economy — it’s just insanity.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,057 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.

By DAVID CRARY, REGINA GARCIA CANO and ANGELA CHARLTON (AP)

Unemployment in the U.S. is swelling to levels last seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s, with 1 in 6 American workers thrown out of a job by the coronavirus.

More than 4.4 million laid-off Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, the government said Thursday. In all, roughly 26 million people — the population of the 10 biggest U.S. cities combined — have now filed for jobless aid in five weeks, an epic collapse that has raised the stakes in the debate over how and when to ease the shutdowns of factories and other businesses.

In the hardest-hit corner of the U.S., evidence emerged that perhaps 2.7 million New York state residents have been infected by the virus — 10 times the number confirmed by lab tests.

A small, preliminary statewide survey of around 3,000 people found that nearly 14% had antibodies showing they had been infected, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. Just in New York City, with a population of 8.6 million, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said as many as 1 million may have been infected.

In Washington, many House lawmakers wore face masks and bandannas — and some sat in the otherwise vacant visitors gallery to stay away from others — as they debated a nearly $500 billion measure to help businesses and hospitals weather the crisis. The package was expected to win final approval later in the day, then advance to President Donald Trump for his signature.

Anchoring the bill is the administration’s $250 billion request to replenish a fund to help small- and medium-size businesses with payroll, rent and other expenses. Trump said the bill “will help small businesses to keep millions of workers on the payroll.

Abroad, there was mixed news about the epidemic. Some countries, including Greece, Bangladesh and Malaysia, announced extensions of their lockdowns. Vietnam, New Zealand and Croatia were among those moving to end or ease such measures.

 Africa, COVID-19 cases surged 43% in the past week to 26,000, according to John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figures underscored a recent warning from the World Health Organization that the virus could kill more than 300,000 people in Africa and push 30 million into desperate poverty.

Huge lines have formed at food banks from El Paso, Texas, to the Paris suburbs, and food shortages are hitting Africa especially hard.

At a virtual summit, European Union leaders agreed to set up a massive recovery fund to help rebuild the 27-nation bloc’s ravaged economies. While no figure was put on the plan, officials said 1-1.5 trillion euros ($1.1-1.6 trillion) would be needed.

The coronavirus has killed nearly 190,000 people worldwide, including more than 100,000 in Europe and about 47,000 in the United States, according to a tally compiled by John Hopkins University from official government figures. The true numbers are almost certainly far higher.

In the U.S., the economic consequences of the shutdowns have sparked angry rallies in state capitals by protesters demanding that businesses reopen, and Trump has expressed impatience over the restrictions.

Some governors have begun easing up despite warnings from health authorities that it may be too soon to do so without sparking a second wave of infections. In Georgia, gyms, hair salons and bowling alleys can reopen Friday. Texas has reopened its state parks.

On the economic front, few experts foresee a downturn as severe as the Depression, when unemployment remained above 14% from 1931 to 1940, peaking at 25%. But unemployment is considered likely to remain elevated well into next year and probably beyond, and will surely top the 10% peak of the 2008-09 recession.

Janet Simon, laid off as a waitress at an IHOP restaurant in Miami, said she has just $200 in her name and is getting panic attacks because of uncertainty over how she will care for her three children. Simon, 33, filed for unemployment a month ago, and her application is still listed as “pending.”

“I’m doing everything to keep my family safe, my children safe, but everything else around me is falling apart,” Simon said. “But they see it, no matter how much I try to hide my despair.”

Corey Williams, 31, was laid off from his warehouse job in Michigan a month ago and saw his rent, insurance and other bills pile up while he anxiously awaited his unemployment benefits. That finally happened on Wednesday, and he quickly paid $1,700 in bills.

“It was getting pretty tight, pretty tight,” he said. “It was definitely stressful for the last few days.”

While the health crisis has eased in places like Italy, Spain and France, experts say it is far from over, and the threat of new outbreaks looms large.

“The question is not whether there will be a second wave,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO’s Europe office. “The question is whether we will take into account the biggest lessons so far.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized some German states for moving too briskly in trying to reopen their economies. Germany has been praised for its approach to the pandemic and has a much lower reported death toll than other large European countries.

“We’re not living in the final phase of the pandemic, but still at the beginning,” Merkel warned. “It would be a shame if premature hope ultimately punishes us all.”

Governments are bearing that risk in mind with the onset of Ramadan, the holy month of daytime fasting, overnight festivities and communal prayer that begins for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with the new moon this week. Many Muslim leaders have closed mosques or banned collective evening prayer to ward off new infections.

The virus has already disrupted Christianity’s Holy Week, Passover, the Muslim hajj pilgrimage and other major religious events.

Authorities in the capital of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation, extended its disease-fighting restrictions to cover all of Ramadan. Turkey banned communal eating during the holiday.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan bowed to the country’s clerics, refusing to close the mosques despite a warning from doctors that such gatherings could further spread the virus in a country with a fragile health care system.

• 438 deaths were reported on Thursday, down from 474 reported Wednesday. The number of deaths during the first four days of this week is down 33 percent from the first four days of last week. New York State’s death toll is now 15,740. The number of virus patients entering hospitals has stayed around 1,350 per day for the last three days. That is down from around 2,000 per day last week.
• But Cuomo noted the number of new coronavirus hospitalizations was relatively flat  which is “not great news.”
• Cuomo said that 3,000 antibody tests conducted across New York indicate 13.9% of state residents are positive for antibodies. But those figures vary dramatically by region. While 21.2% of New York City residents tested positive, only 3.6% of residents from upstate New York have the antibodies.
• Cuomo said a 13.9% infection rate would translate to 2.7 million people infected statewide. Considering the more than 15,000 deaths recorded by the state, New York’s coronavirus death rate is approximately 0.5%, which is lower than some estimates had predicted.
• Cuomo announced the state would launch an investigation into nursing homes’ handling of coronavirus. Cuomo said the investigation would be jointly overseen by the state department of health and the state attorney general. The governor empashized that nursing homes must be taking every possible step to limit the spread of coronavirus, warning that facilities found to be negligent could be subjected to a fine or lose their license.
• Nearly a quarter of New York’s 15,740 coronavirus deaths have come from long-term care facilities, prompting criticism of officials’ oversight of the facilities, Guardian noted
• More than 3,500 people have died in nursing homes since the outbreak began, according to state data — roughly 20 percent of all deaths in New York
• Andrew Cuomo criticized Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell for suggesting states should declare bankruptcy rather than receive more federal funding. The governor warned that states declaring bankruptcies could cause “a collapse of this national economy.
• Cuomo also lamabasted McConnell for suggesting relief money for states would represent a bailout for Democratic states, which have generally been harder hit by the virus. “If there’s ever a time for humanity and decency, now’s the time,” Cuomo said. “How irresponsible and how reckless.”

BERNARD CONDON, MATT SEDENSKY AND JIM MUSTIAN (AP)

After two months and more than 10,000 deaths that have made the nation’s nursing homes some of the most terrifying places to be during the coronavirus crisis, most of them still don’t have access to enough tests to help control outbreaks among their frail, elderly residents.

Neither the federal government nor the leader in nursing home deaths, New York, has mandated testing for all residents and staff. An industry group says only about a third of the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes have ready access to tests that can help isolate the sick and stop the spread. And homes that do manage to get a hold of tests often rely on luck and contacts.

“It just shows that the longer that states lapse in universal testing of all residents and staff, we’re going to see these kinds of stories for a very long time,” said Brian Lee of the advocacy group Families for Better Care. “Once it’s in, there’s no stopping it and by the time you’re aware with testing, too many people have it. And bodies keep piling up.”

That became clear in some of the nation’s biggest nursing home outbreaks. After a home in New York City’s Brooklyn borough reported 55 coronavirus deaths last week, its CEO acknowledged it was based entirely on symptoms and educated guesses the dead had COVID-19 because they were unable to actually test any of the residents or staff.

At a nursing home in suburban Richmond, Virginia, that has so far seen 49 deaths, the medical director said testing of all residents was delayed nearly two weeks because of a shortage of testing supplies and bureaucratic requirements. By the time they did, the spread was out of control, with 92 residents positive.

Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities, says “only a very small percentage” of residents and staff have been tested because the federal and state governments have not made nursing homes the top priority.

“We feel like we’ve been ignored,” Parkinson said. “Certainly now that the emphasis has gone away from hospitals to where the real battle is taking place in nursing homes, we should be at a priority level one.”

Two-thirds of U.S. nursing homes still don’t have “easy access to test kits” and are struggling to obtain sufficient resources, said Chris Laxton, executive director of The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

“Those nursing home leaders who have developed good relationships with their local hospitals and health departments seem to have better luck,” said Laxton, whose organization represents more than 50,000 long-term care professionals. “Those that are not at the table must fend for themselves.”

Public health officials have long argued that current measures like temperature checks aren’t sufficient. They can’t stop workers with the virus who aren’t showing signs from walking in the front door, and they don’t catch such asymptomatic carriers among residents either. What is needed is rigorous and frequent testing — “sentinel surveillance,” White House virus chief Deborah Birx calls it — to find these hidden carriers, isolate them and stop the spread.

The U.S. is currently testing roughly 150,000 people daily, for a total of 4.5 million results reported, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. Public health experts say that needs to be much higher. “We need likely millions of tests a day,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

The federal Health & Human Services Department told The Associated Press that ”there are plenty of tests and capability for all” priority categories and that all should be tested. The agency also noted one of President Donald Trump’s briefings this week in which he underscored the states’ role in coordinating testing.

Only one governor, West Virginia’s Jim Justice, appears to be mandating testing for all nursing homes without conditions. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan ordered tests at all 26 nursing in the city, using new kits that can spew out results in 15 minutes. Massachusetts abruptly halted a program to send test kits directly to nursing homes this week after 4,000 of them turned out to be faulty. New Hampshire teamed with an urgent-care company to test care workers. Several states including Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and Wisconsin have dispatched National Guard testing strike teams.

“It’s a snapshot,” New Hampshire Health Care Association President Brendan Williams said of the national piecemeal approach. “We need a motion picture.”

While the federal government promised this week to start tracking and publicly releasing nursing home infections and deaths, which could help identify hotspots, that work was only beginning. In the meantime, The AP’s own tally from state health departments and media reports put the count at 10,217 deaths from outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities nationwide. About a third of those are in New York.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has described COVID-19 in nursing homes as “fire through dry grass,” said he would ideally like to see any resident, staffer or visitor seeking to enter a nursing home take a rapid test that would come back in 20 minutes. But, he said, “that’s millions of tests.”

Dr. Roy Goldberg, medical director of a nursing home in New York City’s Bronx borough that this past week reported 45 deaths, said his facility still can’t test asymptomatic patients because of shortages that have limited testing to those showing fever or a cough.

“This isn’t what anyone signed up for,” Goldberg said. “It just breaks my heart that the long-term care industry is going to end up being totally scapegoated on this.”

Amid the tragedies have emerged hopeful cases in which early and aggressive testing has made huge difference.

After the first of two deaths at a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, nursing home and other residents and staffers started falling ill, administrator Colinda Nappa got on the phone and pleaded with state officials: “I got to know what is going on,.”

A 65-member National Guard testing unit soon showed up, donned head-to-toe protective suits and quickly tested nearly 100 residents and 150 staffers.

In all, 19 residents and staffers tested positive and all are either now housed in a special section of the building or quarantined at home. There have been no more deaths.

In the Seattle area, which had the nation’s first major nursing home outbreak that eventually claimed 43 lives, health officials are targeting their testing efforts on homes that have shown little sign of the disease.

Their plans for testing at 19 such facilities are aimed at trying to head off hotspots by quickly identifying and containing cases. In conjunction with ramped-up capacity for tracing contacts of patients, it’s considered an important prerequisite to reopening he economy.

This past week, medical professionals led by the University of Washington’s Dr. Thuan Ong went room by room through a nursing home in a highly orchestrated ballet of swabbing and bagging. In all, 115 residents were tested and results came back the next day as all negative — a development that drew cheers from the facility’s staff.

“One of the greatest values,” Ong said, “is to catch it before it spreads.”