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Mnuchin warns Congress of a risk of ‘permanent damage’ to the economy if states extend restrictions for months.

In a joint appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, offered a stark assessment of the fragile state of the economy, warning of more severe job losses in the months to come.

But they offered contrasting views of how best to buttress the economy: Mr. Powell suggested that more fiscal support to states and businesses might be needed to avoid permanent job losses. Mr. Mnuchin suggested that without an expeditious reopening, the economy might never fully recover. Here are key highlights from their testimony.

• Mr. Mnuchin warned that the economy might never fully recover if states extend their shutdowns for months. He cited a risk of “permanent damage” — comments that reflected a change in focus by the Trump administration, which has tried to shift the economic discussion away from more financial support to allowing states to reopen.

• Mr. Powell warned that the economy could face long-term damage if the policy response was not forceful enough and reiterated that the economy might need more help to make it through the pandemic without lasting scars. But he was careful to avoid giving Congress explicit advice and made sure to cushion his suggestions as a conditionality.

  “There is clear evidence that when you have a situation where people are unemployed for long periods of time, that can permanently weigh on their careers and their ability to go back to work,” he said, and that can weigh on the economy for years. “Equally so with small and medium-sized businesses, which are the jobs machine of our great economy.”

• Mr. Powell suggested that the central bank might expand its program to buy municipal debt and agreed that state and local governments could slow the economic recovery if they laid off workers amid budget crunches.

  “I try to stay at a fairly high level on this. I will just echo though, that I think something like 13 percent of the work force is in state and local government,” Mr. Powell said, pointing out that balanced budget requirements could result in job and service cuts “when revenue goes down sharply.”

• Mr. Mnuchin, who previously said he expected that Treasury would return all $454 billion from Congress, changed that benchmark on Tuesday, saying the “base case” now was that the government would lose money.

  “Our intention is that we expect to take some losses on these facilities,” he said. Some lawmakers have been pressing Treasury and the Fed to deploy their capital aggressively and not worry about taking losses.

• Mr. Powell sounded a more cautious tone, explaining that a full recovery would not come until the health crisis was resolved.

  “The No. 1 thing, of course, is people believing that it’s safe to go back to work. And that’s about having a sensible, thoughtful reopening of the economy, something that we all want — and something that we’re in the early stages of now,” he said. “It will be a combination of getting the virus under control, development of therapeutics, development of a vaccine.”

Those comments were underscored by new economic projections released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which suggested the recovery would depend in large part on the virus’s trajectory. The budget office projected that gross domestic product would contract by 11 percent in the second quarter and the jobless rate would hit 15 percent, with industries such as travel, hospitality and retail bearing the brunt of the losses.

“The range of uncertainty about social distancing, as well as its effects on economic activity and implications for the economic recovery over the next two years, is especially large,” the report noted, adding that “future waves could be smaller, of a similar size or larger than the initial wave experienced this spring.”

Last month, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, lauded Florida’s Covid-19 data dashboard for its breadth of information about the number of cases, demographics and other crucial statistics.

That dashboard was created in part by Rebekah D. Jones, a geographic information systems manager in the Florida Department of Health’s division of disease control and health protection.

Ms. Jones informed colleagues in an email on Friday that she had been removed from her position on May 5. She suggested that her ouster was retribution because she did not want to suppress data from the public, according to the email, which was obtained by The New York Times and first reported by Florida Today.

“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months,” Ms. Jones wrote. “After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it.”

In her email on Friday, Ms. Jones noted that the dashboard had experienced problems in the days since her removal, including a period during which “the functionality essentially crashed.” Ms. Jones declined to be interviewed on Tuesday. A Health Department spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Terrie Rizzo, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, demanded an independent investigation.

President Trump threatened on Monday night to permanently cut off all funds t
o the World Health Organization Monday, a significant escalation of his repeated attempts to deflect blame for his handling of the pandemic, which has killed more than 90,000 people in the United States during the last several months.

In a late-night, four-page letter to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., Mr. Trump accused the global health group of failing to act quickly and aggressively against the virus in its early days. In effect, he denounced the organization for the very missteps and failures that have been leveled at him and his administration.

Public health experts have said that the president’s public denials of the dangers of the virus slowed the U.S. response, which included delayed testing and a failure to stockpile protective gear.

In the letter, the president said that the W.H.O. “belatedly declared the outbreak of a public health emergency of international concern on Jan. 30,” more than a month after the virus was first detected. But Mr. Trump did not declare a national emergency until weeks later, despite being aware of the virus.

Mr. Trump’s letter also contained falsehoods and misleading statements. He wrote that the W.H.O. “consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from The Lancet medical journal.”

But in a statement Tuesday morning, The Lancet pointed out that the journal “published no report in December 2019 referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China.” The journal said its first reports about the virus were published on Jan. 24, four days before the W.H.O. declared an international emergency.

The president has railed against the W.H.O. for weeks as his own political and public health crisis at home has intensified, saying the group is in the thrall of China, where the virus originated. In the letter, he said the group was responsible for many deaths because it failed to challenge the version of events from President Xi Jinping of China regarding the origin of the virus and its initial spread.

But that criticism from Mr. Trump was particularly ironic given his own similar comments about China early in the pandemic, when he was trying to complete negotiations on a trade deal with the country. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Member states agreed on Tuesday to start an inquiry into the global response to the pandemic. The resolution, which was sponsored by the European Union and supported by more than 100 countries, was adopted without objections.

The resolution calls for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” into the international response to virus, including by the W.H.O. Mr. Trump had been insisting that the health agency investigate the origins of the virus and whether it was created in a Chinese lab.

Scientists who have studied the genetics of the virus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.

China did not object to the resolution, but Mr. Xi said on Monday that any such inquiry should wait until the health crisis was brought under control. In a statement, the United States praised the resolution and claimed that it included a mandate to investigate the origins of the virus, though the resolution language contained no such mention.

Addressing the assembly as the meeting neared its close, Dr. Tedros said: “I will initiate an evaluation at the earliest appropriate moment. We welcome any initiative to strengthen global health security and to strengthen W.H.O. W.H.O. remains fully committed to transparency, accountability and continuous improvement.”

At the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that the W.H.O. would “have to clean up their act, they have to do a better job. They have to be much more fair to other countries, including the United States, or we’re not going to be involved with them, and we’ll do it in a separate way.”

Fever checkpoints at the entrances to academic buildings. One-way paths across the grassy quad. Face masks required in classrooms and dining halls. And a dormitory-turned-quarantine building for any students exposed to the virus.

Similar discussions are taking place at almost every college and university in the United States. Administrators are fiercely debating whether they can safely reopen their campuses, even as most provide students with encouraging messages about the prospects of returning in the fall.

On Monday, Notre Dame became one of the first major universities in the country to announce detailed plans for bringing back students, saying it would establish a regimen of testing and contact tracing, put quarantine and isolation protocols in place, and require students to maintain social distancing and wear masks in public.

Notre Dame said it would start its fall semester early, on Aug. 10, and skip fall break so that students could go home at Thanksgiving and not return. The University of South Carolina announced a similar schedule
, saying its students would finish the semester online after Thanksgiving because its “best current modeling predicts a spike in cases” at the beginning of December. Rice University in Houston also plans a shortened fall semester, with a mixture of remote and in-person classes. And Ithaca College will go in the other direction, starting its fall semester late, on Oct. 5, to provide more time to prepare for returning students.

New York University plans to hold in-person classes in the fall, the university’s provost said on Tuesday. “We’re planning to convene in person, with great care, in the fall (subject to government health directives), both in New York and at our global sites,” the provost said.

Those decisions are in contrast to an announcement last week by the California State University System, which will keep its 23 campuses largely shut and teach nearly half a million students remotely.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday released a report about an outbreak in March at a rural Arkansas church. Of the 92 people who attended the church between March 6 and March 11, 35 tested positive and three died, the report said. The report said investigators found that 26 other people who were in contact with the people from the church events later tested positive. One person died.

Allison James, an author of the C.D.C. report, praised the pastor for closing the Arkansas church as soon as he heard of people getting sick.

“They were very proactive in closing the church to prevent further transmission,” Dr. James said. “At the time, they knew people were getting sick, but they didn’t know necessarily that it was Covid or flu or any other infectious disease. They just knew they had a cluster of something going on, and they wanted to prevent transmission. I really commend them for acting quickly.”

Visitors will be allowed at 16 hospitals around New York State, nine of them in New York City, as part of a pilot program, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday. They will be required to wear personal protective equipment, including masks, and will be subject to temperature checks.

In March, state officials issued guidance asking hospitals
to suspend visitation as the virus appeared to be rapidly spreading.

“It is terrible to have someone in the hospital and then that person is isolated, not being able to see their family or friends,” Mr. Cuomo said. He added that the program was “to see if we can bring visitors in and do it safely.”

The governor’s announcement comes as only three regions in downstate New York will remain under the state’s shutdown orders; the Albany area can begin reopening on Wednesday, he said.

New York City, Long Island and the counties just north of the city known as the Mid-Hudson region all have yet to meet at least two of the seven health-related benchmarks that the governor set for parts of the state to start restarting their economies. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City reiterated on Monday that he ​did not ​expect​ the city ​to meet the ​state’s criteria to begin to reopen until “the first half of June.”​

Mr. Cuomo — who arrived at his daily briefing wearing a face mask — also said that the state would allow Memorial Day festivities, so long as they had no more than 10 people. The state will also allow vehicle parades, provided that they are held safely and participants adhere to social distancing.

Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday that nearly 16 percent of the city’s 1.1 million students would be asked to attend online summer school for about six weeks after the academic year ends on June 26 — about four times as many as were asked to attend summer school last year.

On Monday, police officers answering a complaint found about 60 students studying at a Hasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn, the latest of several episodes that have ignited tensions between the authorities and Hasidic Jews over enforcement of social-distancing rules. The school was closed.

Statewide, another 105 people had died, Mr. Cuomo said Tuesday. Data was released on Monday that offered the most granular picture yet of the ​pandemic’s rampage through New York City, reinforcing earlier ​signs​ that ​the virus had disproportionately affected immigrant​, black and Hispanic residents.

The nominee, Brian D. Miller, is currently a White House lawyer. Mr. Schumer said that in a private conversation, Mr. Miller would not share details about his current work responsibilities and refused to comment on Mr. Trump’s abrupt dismissal of a handful of inspectors general in recent weeks, apparently for political purposes.

Mr. Schumer’s criticism is a strong indication that Senate Democrats will oppose Mr. Miller en masse when they vote on his nomination in the weeks to come. Mr. Miller ha
d tried to win over Democrats in a confirmation hearing earlier this month, pledging to resist any undue influence.

When the subject came up on Tuesday at a cabinet meeting, Mr. Trump turned to Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A. Mr. Azar did not dwell on the risks the F.D.A. had highlighted, noting instead that hydroxychloroquine had long been F.D.A. approved to prevent or treat lupus, malaria and rheumatoid arthritis.

Recently, several Canadian provincial leaders have said that they oppose a rapid reopening of the border. The United States has reported about 463 virus cases per 100,000 people, more than double Canada’s rate.

In the months since then, the warehouse in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania has become Amazon’s biggest hot spot.

The company has been hit by the biggest surge of orders it has ever experienced and has paid workers extra to stay on the job.