Trump fumes over report social distancing was delayed as deaths pass 22,000

Supreme Court to start hearing oral arguments by teleconference next month

The Supreme Court will start hearing oral arguments via teleconference next month after repeatedly delaying arguments due to coronavirus.

“The Court will hear oral arguments by telephone conference on May 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13 in a limited number of previously postponed cases,” the court said in a statement.

Among the cases to be heard virtually next month is Trump’s request to block the release of his financial records, which were subpoenaed by Congress and New York prosecutors.

“We are nearing the peak right now,” Dr Robert Redfield told NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie. “You’ll know when you’re at the peak when the next day is actually less than the day before. … We are stabilizing across the country right now, in terms of the state of this outbreak.”

The federal guidelines on social distancing currently extend through the end of April, but those guidelines could be extended if the country is still seeing high numbers of coronavirus cases.

Trump plans to announce cuts in US funding to the World Health Organization this week, according to the Washington Post. The news comes as Trump has repeatedly tried to blame the spread of coronavirus on the UN agency.

The Post reports:

Trump hinted at a temporary hold on U.S. funding Friday but said he wanted to wait until after Easter to announce anything. He said his administration would discuss the organization ‘in great detail’ this week, saying he did not want to go further ‘before we had all the facts.’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. officials are expected to recommend to Trump how to dock or condition payments to the agency as Republicans in Congress seek documentation of WHO dealings with China, said people familiar with White House and State Department discussions who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

Trump has accused the WHO of being “very, very China-centric,” suggesting the agency was not responsive enough when the first cases of coronavirus were reported.

The president’s complaints come as a number of experts have criticized his administration’s early response to the virus, and a new report suggests Trump resisted enacting social distancing earlier in the year, which could have saved thousands of lives.

Stephanopoulos’ wife, Ali Wentworth, announced her own diagnosis nearly two weeks ago, saying she had “never been sicker,” but the anchor said his case had been asymptomatic.

“I’ve never had a fever, never had chills, never had a headache, never had a cough, never had shortness of breath,” Stephanopoulos said. “I’m feeling great.”

Stephanopoulos, who previously served as Bill Clinton’s White House communications director, said his family had been practicing the “home version of social distancing” since Wentworth’s diagnosis.

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The Navy said in a statment that the sailor had tested positive for the virus on March 30 and been admitted to the ICU on Thursday after being found unresponsive. The sailor was declared dead today, making him the first active-duty service member to die of coronavirus.

Captain Brett Crozier, the former commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was removed from his post earlier this month after he raised concerns about the spread of coronavirus on the ship.

“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” Crozier wrote in a letter to Navy officials. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.”

The letter was leaked, costing Crozier his job, but most of the ship’s crew members were allowed to disembark and quarantine after the warning was made public.

At least 550 of the ship’s crew members, including Crozier, have now tested positive for the virus, the Navy said Saturday.

In a Monmouth University poll released last week, Fauci was named as the most trusted government official in connection to the pandemic. More than a third (35%) of Americans listed Fauci as the official they trust more when looking for information on the virus, in comparison to 20% for Trump.

Considering the expert’s sudden rise to fame, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the president, who has historically resisted sharing the spotlight with other officials, retweeted a message last night suggesting Fauci should be fired.

Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large. Time to #FireFauci…

29 February is a key date in the coronavirus outbreak, as this exhaustive timeline from the Washington Post shows. It was the day on which the first US death from Covid-19 was reported, in Washington state. (Where, as Hallie Golden examines here, efforts to tackle the outbreak have been relatively successful.)

Here’s Fauci speaking on 29 February, on NBC’s Today Show. The hosts point out it was the day after Trump told a rally the outbreak, or fears over it, was “the Democrats’ new hoax”.

Fauci refuses to comment on that but discusses “community spread”, then making it “more difficult to track down what the original source was”. He discusses federal efforts to monitor people coming in from China and problems with the availability of coronavirus tests.

“Right now the risk is still low but this could change. I’ve said that many times, even on this programme. You’ve gotta watch out because the risk is low now. You don’t need to change anything you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive.”

Fauci also says “this could be a major outbreak … or it could be something that’s reasonably well controlled … hopefully we can protect the American public from any serious degree or morbidity and mortality.”

According to the New York Times report which Fauci appeared to confirm on CNN on Sunday, public health experts pushed for the introduction of social-distancing protocols in mid-February but were rebuffed. Such federal guidelines were introduced on 16 March:

Axios has an interesting exclusive about Michelle Obama, who the news site reports will “throw her support today behind expanding vote-by-mail options … with her voting rights group embracing legislation before Congress amid coronavirus fears”.

In a statement, the former first lady and co-chair of the rather starry When We All Vote – other co-chairs include Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Janelle Monae – said: “There is nothing partisan about striving to live up to the promise of our country; making the democracy we all cherish more accessible; and protecting our neighbors, friends and loved ones as they participate in this cornerstone of American life.”

There is of course everything partisan about mail-in voting and its desirability or otherwise. In short:

Donald Trump really doesn’t like it – he claims it encourages fraud (experts say it doesn’t) and famously told Fox & Friends the other week that attempts to make voting easier mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.

Republicans really don’t like it – and stood against it in Wisconsin last week, where elections played out amid a pandemic with voters risking their lives to cast their ballots.

But Democrats do like it, a lot, because in general the more people vote, and particularly minorities and women, the better Democrats do.

The fate of the presidential election in November, of course, remains at serious issue as the pandemic continues.

The legislation Obama is supporting is the Resilient Elections During Quarantines and Natural Disasters Act of 2020, introduced by three Democrats in the House and one Democratic senator.

Here’s Guardian voting rights reporter Sam Levine’s look at what unfolded in Wisconsin:

“I challenge you,” said Navarro, “show me the 60 Minutes episode a year ago, two years ago, or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration that said, ‘Hey, global pandemic’s coming, you gotta do x, y and z and by the way we gotta shut down the economy to fight it.

“Show me that episode. Then you’ll have some credence in terms of attacking the Trump administration for not being prepared.”

60 Minutes duly ran clips from a 2009 feature on the fight against H1N1, or swine flu – “a pandemic, meaning it’s a global epidemic, the first flu pandemic in 41 years” – and a 2005 section on H5N1, or avian flu, which the show said had “the potential to cause an influenza pandemic similar to the one that killed 50m people in 1918”.

And here’s world affairs editor Julian Borger’s rather amazing – and distinctly amazingly headlined – profile of Navarro from last week, written in the wake of news that one of the advisers who warned Trump about Covid-19 was … Peter Navarro. (Though not, so far as we know, Ron Vara.