Coronavirus in US: Live Updates

Officials have said that the death — which occurred nearly three weeks before a death in Washington State that was previously considered the first Covid-19 death in the United States — was believed to have been the result of community spread, not travel to another country.

“It was probably around unrecognized for quite some time,” said Dr. Jeffrey V. Smith, the Santa Clara county executive and a medical doctor.

The virus has an incubation period of 14 days and people who die of it are often sick for at least three weeks, so the individual who died on Feb. 6 could have been infected — and transmitting the infection to others — in early January, experts said.

Santa Clara County officials also have announced that a second death, which took place on Feb. 17, was also a result of the coronavirus. Both of the deaths in Santa Clara County took place before what had been believed to be the first deaths from the virus in the United States in late February.

Testing at the time was limited by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria to individuals who had traveled abroad.

“This offers evidence of what many of us in the field had been saying” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That restricting testing was going to miss cases that could have a chain of transmission that ended up with somebody dying.’’

This shift in timing raises new questions about when the virus arrived in this country, how it spread and how government officials approached a strategy to slow the spread. At the time of the first death, American officials were restricting travel from China and urging recent travelers from there to isolate themselves for two weeks.

The list of events being canceled is stretching into the summer and fall, and public health officials are warning that in the absence of a vaccine or reliable therapy, the risk of a “second wave” of infections later in the year remains a grave threat.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he would order a temporary halt in issuing green cards to prevent people from immigrating to the United States, but he backed away from plans to suspend guest worker programs after business groups exploded in anger at the threat of losing access to foreign labor.

“It’s really worrying news,” said Elsa Ramos, whose 22-year-old son, Eder, is in Honduras, waiting for a green card that would allow him to join his parents and sister in the United States.

“Imagine the excitement that you have that your son is on his way into the country and then Trump destroys that,” Ms. Ramos said. “It’s really hard.”

Lawyers at the Justice Department were still studying whether the president had the legal authority to unilaterally suspend the issuance of green cards, an order that caught officials at the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security off guard, according to people with knowledge of the announcement.

The decision not to block guest worker programs — which provide specific visas for technology workers, farm laborers and others — is a concession to business groups, which assailed the White House on Tuesday.

Rob Larew, the president of the National Farmers Union, said that even talk of restrictions on immigrant farm workers was disruptive. “It just adds to an already stressed food system,” he said.

From South Dakota’s raceways to Atlanta’s barbershops, states grapple with reopening businesses.

Two South Dakota dirt tracks plan to hold auto races this weekend, opening their gates to hundreds of spectators despite the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, urging people to stay away.

In South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster allowed many stores to reopen Tuesday, consumers were slow to return. And Georgia prepared to go ahead with its plans to let a wide variety of businesses reopen in the coming days despite the objections of the mayors of its biggest cities, and of health experts who warn that the virus is still spreading there.

The tensions are playing out across the nation in different ways.

In South Dakota, the organizers of the races at the two tracks near Jefferson said that they would limit the number of fans to avoid crowding: The Park Jefferson International Speedway will allow a maximum of 700 people in its 4,000-seat venue on Saturday night, while Raceway Park will let 500 fans in for its Sunday races.

In South Carolina, where some stores resumed business for the first time on Tuesday, people largely stayed away: the streets were mostly empty in downtown Charleston, bereft of the residents, tourists, students who typically crowd into its picturesque galleries and shops.

Stocks on Wall Street and in major European markets rallied on Wednesday, and oil prices climbed more than 10 percent, reversing some of the tremendous losses that had unnerved investors for several days.

The S&P 500 rose about 2 percent by early afternoon, after a nearly 5 percent drop on Monday and Tuesday.

The selling earlier in the week had been triggered by a collapse in oil prices, as the price of one oil benchmark dipped below zero for the first time, meaning some holders were ready to pay people to take a barrel off their hands.

But on Wednesday, some stability returned to the energy market, with the price of both West Texas Intermediate crude, the American benchmark, and Brent crude, the international benchmark, sharply higher. Shares of companies in the energy industry, like Halliburton and Marathon Oil, were among the best performing stocks in the S&P 500.

Bond prices on Wednesday also signaled some returning investor optimism. U.S. Treasury bond prices fell, a signal that the markets were favoring putting money in places considered less conservative.

Delta Air Lines, though, reported a loss of $607 million between January and March, its first quarterly loss in five years.

The airline said it ended March with about $6 billion in cash on hand, but added that it was also burning through $100 million in cash per day by the end of that month. After cutting costs and expenses, Delta expects to slow that rate to $50 million per day by the end of June.

Under the stimulus passed last month, Delta received $5.4 billion in grants and loans to pay its employees. It said it is also eligible for a $4.6 billion loan under the law, should it decide to take it. The airline also said it plans to cut schedules by 85 percent in the second quarter, in line with competitors like United Airlines, which reported a $2.1 billion quarterly loss on Monday.

Tyson Foods said on Wednesday that it would close its largest pork processing facility, the latest in a string of plant closings that has put a strain on the nation’s meat supply.

The plant in Waterloo, Iowa, had been running at reduced levels in recent days because workers were staying home, the company said.

Tyson said it would invite the Waterloo plant’s 2,800 workers to be tested for the coronavirus at the facility later this week.

“The closure has significant ramifications beyond our company, since the plant is part of a larger supply chain that includes hundreds of independent farmers, truckers, distributors and customers, including grocers,” the head of Tyson’s fresh meats division, Steve Stouffer, said in a statement.

The company had closed another meat plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, but it reopened the facility on Tuesday.

Public health officials in California are expanding testing to include some people who are asymptomatic, going beyond federal guidelines that have so far focused on testing people who were most at risk and showing symptoms.

The new guidelines in California prioritize screening and testing people who are living in communal living facilities, such as prisons and homeless shelters, as well as asymptomatic health care employees working in hospitals or nursing homes.

The expanded testing — which has already begun at a homeless shelter in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Skid Row — could offer an early glimpse of how widely the virus has infiltrated society, even among people who otherwise appear healthy. As many as 25 percent of people infected may not show symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 200 people have been tested so far at the homeless shelter, Union Rescue Mission, and at least 43 people had tested positive as of Tuesday afternoon, said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the public health director in Los Angeles County. Of the 43 who tested positive, she said more than half had not been showing symptoms.

The results mirror findings of asymptomatic cases that have begun to emerge at other facilities in the United States, as officials ramp up aggressive testing.

In Ohio, where an outbreak at a prison has become the country’s largest-known source of infections, officials said that many of the people who tested positive did not appear sick. In Boston, where universal testing was conducted at a homeless shelter earlier this month, officials found that nearly everyone who tested positive had not been showing symptoms.

Dr. Jim O’Connell, president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, said he was “baffled” by how many people without symptoms had tested positive at the shelter.

“The lesson for this is there is so much we don’t know, and in this particular very poor and vulnerable population,” Mr. O’Connell said. “We suspect all around the country, this is probably going to be duplicated.”

He said on Wednesday that the former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had volunteered to help with the state’s effort to test and trace the virus.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that public housing residents would be a priority at six testing sites set to open in the coming days, and that three sites opening next week would be based in public housing.

Lawmakers are making their way back to Washington ahead of an expected vote on Thursday to give final approval to a $484 billion package that would revive a loan program for distressed small businesses and provide additional aid for hospitals and testing.

The Senate approved the measure on Tuesday on a voice vote — a necessity since the chamber is on an extended recess amid the pandemic and most senators are outside of Washington. But that will not be possible in the House, where there is enough dissatisfaction in both parties about the bill that leaders have summoned lawmakers back to the Capitol for a vote. House Republicans have signaled that they would force a roll-call vote on the measure, while some of the most liberal Democrats are deeply opposed to a bill they argue provides far too little for the most urgent needs, omitting funding for struggling cities and localities.

“It is insulting to think that we can pass such a small amount of money — in the context of not knowing when Congress is even going to reconvene — pass such a small amount of money, pat ourselves on the back and leave town again,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on Monday. “I need legislation that is going to save people’s lives.”

The measure was the product
of an intense round of negotiations between Democrats and the Trump administration that unfolded as the small-business loan program — created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law — quickly ran out of funding, collapsing under a glut of applications from desperate companies struggling to stay afloat.

The measure would provide $320 billion to replenish the Paycheck Protection Program, $75 billion for hospitals, $25 billion for testing and a mandate that the Trump administration establish a national strategy to help states and localities, which are required to outline their own plans, deploy testing widely.

While in Washington to pass it, House Democratic leaders are also planning to push through a measure to create a select committee to scrutinize the Trump administration’s coronavirus response and the management of the $2.2 trillion stimulus programs. Mr. Trump has dismissed the idea as a partisan “witch hunt” and Republicans are likely to oppose the move.

The money for schools was automatically divided based on a formula set by Congress, based on the size and income level of a university’s student body. That formula was part of the $2 trillion aid package signed by Mr. Trump on March 27.

“Harvard has not applied for or received any funds from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund,” a Harvard spokesman, Jason Newton, said Wednesday. “We continue to review the additional guidance from the Department of Education related to the fund and will make a determination as to whether we will seek to access the allocation that was made to Harvard by statute.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he had spoken to Harvard’s president, Larry Bacow, who was considering Mr. Trump’s request.

“I actually spoke to the president of Harvard already this morning,” Mr. Mnuchin told the Fox Business Network. “And I think Harvard is thinking seriously about whether it’s appropriate for them to keep the money or give it to other institutions that need it.”

That would be a shift for the university, which said on Monday that it would use all of the relief money to support students affected by the pandemic, and not for institutional costs. But Harvard continued to face criticism because of its massive endowment, valued at $41 billion before the pandemic struck.