Coronavirus Live Updates: With Relief Measures Set to Phase Out, Some Face Economic Ruin
28 May 2020
Masks become a flash point for businesses, with many requiring them — and a few banning them. Cases are still rising in Wisconsin, where a court overturned the governor’s stay-at-home order. About 1 in 4 American workers have filed for unemployment since March.
RIGHT NOW The Boston Marathon was canceled for the first time in its 124-year history as it became clear that earlier plans to postpone the race until September were too optimistic, officials said.
Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
With pandemic relief programs set to run out, a reckoning lies ahead.
The multitrillion-dollar patchwork of federal and state programs intended to address job losses from the pandemic has not prevented tens of millions of layoffs or long lines at food banks. But it has mitigated the damage.
Now the expiration of those programs represents a looming cliff.
The $1,200 payments have already gone out to most eligible households. The lending program that helped millions of small businesses keep workers on the payroll will wind down if Congress does not extend it. And the $600 a week in extra unemployment benefits that have allowed tens of millions of laid-off workers to pay rent and buy groceries will expire at the end of July.
The economic damage wrought by the virus has been widespread. More than 40 million people — the equivalent of one out of every four American workers — have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. It is an astonishing tally that rivals the bleakest years of the Great Depression. And people continue to lose their jobs: the government reported Thursday that 2.1 million people had filed unemployment claims last week.
Now there are questions about how long the federal aid meant to cushion the blow will last.
Even the possibility that the programs will be allowed to expire could have economic consequences as consumers and businesses rein in spending, said Aneta Markowska, the chief financial economist for the investment bank Jefferies. “This economy is clearly going to need more support,” she said.
Economists including Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, have called for further action. But a partisan standoff on Capitol Hill makes it likely that any aid will be far more limited than the $3 billion package passed this month in the Democratic-controlled House.
“I think about a month from now, we’ll take a look at how things are going and be able to make a more intelligent decision than a grab-bag of $3 trillion,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, said on Thursday.
President Trump and other Republicans have played down the need for more spending, saying the solution is for states to reopen their economies. Extending benefits, they say, could impede the recovery by giving people an incentive not to return to work.
An early rally in the stock market Thursday faded late in the day after Mr. Trump said he would hold a news conference about China amid rising tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
A French study found 1 in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19 died within a week of being hospitalized.
One in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, died within a week of being hospitalized, according to a study published on Thursday by French researchers. Another 20 percent were put on a ventilator to assist with breathing by the end of their first week in the hospital. Just 18 percent were discharged within a week.
“I don’t want to scare people, but what is true is we did not expect to see such high mortality, with 10 percent of people admitted dying in the first seven days,” said Dr. Samy Hadjadj, a professor of endocrinology at University of Nantes in France and one of the authors of the paper.
The majority of patients in the study had Type 2 diabetes. Many people with diabetes also have cardiovascular disease, which itself raises the risk of death in patients with Covid-19.
But the new study, which included of 1,317 patients at 53 French hospitals, found that microvascular injuries — involving tiny blood vessels supplying the eyes, kidneys and peripheral nerves — were also linked to a higher risk of death.
Obstructive sleep apnea also raised the risk of early death in these patients, while obesity and advanced age were linked to a greater likelihood of severe disease, the study found.
“This is serious,” Dr. Hadjadj said. “If you have diabetes, and are elderly or have complications, be very careful. Keep away from the virus. Go on with social distancing, wash your hands carefully, keep people away who can bring you the virus.”
“You are not the kind of person who can afford to disregard these rules,” Dr. Hadjadj said.
The paper was published Thursday in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Masks become a flash point for businesses, with many requiring them — and a few banning them.
Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
The guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clear. The agency recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where it is difficult to maintain social distancing, mentioning grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations as examples, even as it continues to emphasize how critical social distancing remains.
But masks have unexpectedly crossed over from public health measures to politically charged symbols, with many shops and restaurants banning customers who do not wear them — and a few others moving to ban customers who do.
In Kentucky, a gas station told customers that no one was allowed inside its convenience store if they had their face covered. In California, a flooring store near Los Angeles has encouraged hugs and handshakes but does not permit face masks or protections. And a bar in Texas taped a poster to its front door this week that said “sorry, no masks allowed.”
In New York, the hardest-hit state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday that he would issue an executive order authorizing businesses to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings.
“That store owner has a right to protect themselves,” Mr. Cuomo said. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”
Mask-wearing has even come up on the presidential campaign trail, where Mr. Trump has eschewed masks and this week retweeted a post that mocked his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for wearing one. Mr. Biden responded by calling Mr. Trump an “absolute fool” for not wearing one and argued that people in power should lead by example.
Dennis Townsend, a Republican supervisor in California’s rural Tulare County, said that as his conservative district reopened for business, masks had become an ongoing point of contention.
“People tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better be wearing masks in there.’ And then other people tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better not make me wear a mask,’” he said.
Mr. Townsend, whose county in the state’s Central Valley farm belt is represented in Congress by the Republican representatives Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy, said he was “not real big on wearing masks” himself but had done so when shopping.
“What I tell people is that with every freedom we have comes additional responsibility,” Mr. Townsend said. “We’ve had one freedom suppressed for a little while, but now it’s back, and that’s going to require additional personal responsibility on our parts.”
Some Republicans are trying to keep masks from turning into a partisan issue.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, said this week that there was “no stigma attached to wearing a mask.” And in North Dakota, Gov. Doug Burgum recently lamented that a “senseless dividing line” had arisen between Americans over the use of masks in public. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio went as far as to tell CNN that wearing a mask was “about loving your fellow human being.”
The House passed a bill to give small businesses more time and flexibility to use pandemic relief loans.
The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved legislation that would relax the terms of a federal loan program to help small businesses weather the pandemic, allowing companies more time and flexibility to use the money.
The measure would alter the Paycheck Protection Program to allow small businesses 24 weeks instead of eight weeks to spend the loan funds and extend the period of eligibility to apply for a loan under the program from June 30 to Dec. 31. Without congressional action, that eight-week period is set to begin expiring within a few days.
But the bill’s fate is uncertain in the Senate, where a bipartisan group last week unveiled their own revisions that have some differences, including a shorter, 16-week time period for spending the loan money.
House Democrats’ decision to expedite the bill reflected a growing sense of urgency among some moderates to put aside that broader dispute and find areas of agreement with Republicans where possible.
House Democrats this month pushed through a $3 trillion pandemic relief package over Republican opposition, but that bill is doomed in the Senate and faces a veto threat from President Trump.
The small business measure, however, saw bipartisan support that was strong enough that it was considered on Thursday under faster procedures reserved for noncontroversial bills, passing 417-1. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, was the lone “no” vote.
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