As many public health officials call for stricter, not looser restrictions on public interactions, Trump said he was already looking toward easing the advisories that have sidelined workers, shuttered schools and led to a widespread economic slowdown.

“I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” he said during a Fox News virtual town hall. Easter is just over two weeks away — Apr. 12.

Health experts have made clear that unless Americans continue to dramatically limit social interaction — staying home from work and isolating themselves — the number of infections will overwhelm the health care system, as it has in parts of Italy, leading to many more deaths. While the worst outbreaks are concentrated in certain parts of the country, such as New York, experts warn that the highly infectious disease is certain to spread.

The U.S. is now more than a week into an unprecedented 15-day effort to encourage all Americans to drastically scale back their public activities. The guidelines, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are voluntary, but many state and local leaders have issued mandatory restrictions in line with, or even tighter than, those issued by the CDC.

On Monday, the U.S. saw its biggest jump yet in the death toll from the virus, with 609 America deaths attributed to COVID-19 since the outbreak began. Trump’s comments come after dire warnings by officials in hard-hit areas, including New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Tuesday that his state’s hospital capacity will soon hit a breaking point, even with the restrictions already in place.

“I gave it two weeks,” Trump said during the virtual town hall from the Rose Garden. He argued that tens of thousands of Americans die from the seasonal flu or in automobile accidents and “we don’t turn the country off.”

“We’ll assess at that time and we’ll give it some more time if we need a little more time, but we need to open this country up,” he added. “We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought.”

Trump’s Easter target was not immediately embraced by Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator for Trump’s task force, who indicated any move would have to be guided by data still being collected. She suggested that public health professionals could recommend a general easing, while pushing for local restrictions to remain in the hardest-hit areas.

Trump acknowledged that some want the guidance to continue, but claimed without providing evidence that it would lead to “deaths” from suicides and depression.

“I’m sure that we have doctors that would say ‘let’s keep it closed for two years,'” Trump said. “No, we got to get it open.”

He added: “This cure is worse than the problem.”

Trump also criticized Cuomo, who has grown critical of the slow pace of federal aid to his state, particularly to fill its urgent need for ventilators.

The reassessment comes as the White House is encouraging lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pass a roughly $2 trillion stimulus package to ease the financial pain for Americans and hard-hit industries.

Appearing before the president at the virtual town hall, Vice President Mike Pence said Trump has asked for recommendations from the White House coronavirus task force for how he can send people back to work while minimizing the public health risk. He said Trump wants to find a way “to open America back up.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for getting people back to work comes as he takes stock of the political toll the outbreak is taking. It sets up a potential conflict with medical professionals, including many within his government, who have called for more social restrictions to slow the spread of the virus, not fewer.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, did not appear at the virtual town hall, but Trump denied there were any tensions between the two men.

Lawmakers have suggested that they’ll look to Fauci for guidance on when the restrictions should be lifted.

“I’m going to take my lead from Anthony Fauci.” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., on CNN. “That’s the person I trust, that’s the person Americans trust.

Fauci told WMAL on Tuesday that Trump has always heeded his recommendations.

“The president has listened to what I have said and to what the other people on the task force have said, when I have made recommendations he has taken them. He’s never countered or overridden me, the idea of just pitting one against the other is just not helpful,” Fauci said.

Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told reporters Tuesday that “public health includes economic health.”

“That’s the key point. And it’s not either-or. It’s not either-or, and that’s why we’re taking a fresh look at it,” he said.

During a private conference call with roughly 30 conservative leaders on Tuesday, Pence reinforced Trump’s eagerness to lift coronavirus-related work and travel restrictions “in a matter of weeks, not months.”

Pence said there would be no formal decisions made until the current 15-day period of social distancing was complete when pressed on a specific timeline for lifting restrictions, according to a conference call participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the private discussion.

Pence told the group that accommodations would need to be made for the highest-risk populations if and when restrictions begin to be lifted.

Despite Trump’s rosy talk, other elements of the government were digging in for the long haul. Top defense and military leaders on Tuesday warned department personnel that the virus problems could extend for eight to ten weeks, or even into the summer.

Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Defense Department town hall meeting that it could go into late May or June, and possibly even July. He said there are a variety of models from other countries, so the exact length of the virus and its restrictions are not yet clear.

——

AP writers Lita Baldor in Washington and Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this report.

Now, as the coronavirus crisis threatens his presidency, and upends his campaign for reelection, Trump is rapidly losing patience with the medical professionals who have made the case day after day that the only way to prevent a catastrophic loss of life is to essentially shut down the country — to minimize transmission and “flatten the curve” so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed with critical patients.

The president also has been furious that his efforts to halt the harrowing drop in the stock market have so far proven ineffective. He has been calling friends and economists at all hours and berated aides and reporters who try to persuade him to recognize the severity of the outbreak.

Beyond the crisis, he has been agitated that he can’t run the campaign he wants against Democrat Joe Biden, and he has used daily, hour-long briefings as near proxies for his campaign rallies, guaranteed to attract attention and to maintain the backing of his fervent political case.

This account is based on interviews with a dozen White House aides, former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a sign of his growing restiveness, Trump tweeted just before midnight:

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

He followed up early Monday with a series of retweets that seemed to endorse re-opening American society upon the conclusion of the initial 15-day restrictions, meant to slow the spread of the virus, on March 30.

It reflected the view from a growing number senior of administration officials who believe the closing of the economy was too harsh but that re-opening it would directly contradict the advice of health experts, a bipartisan group of governors and mayors and potentially set up a confrontation with his own medical advisers, including top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Trump tried to minimize the threat of the virus from the outset and in recent days has vacillated between acknowledging the crisis and suggesting that it would all soon be over.

With his Mar-a-Lago club shuttered and his frequent trips to the golf course now off limits, Trump has been largely stuck in the White House. Even in good times, other presidents have likened life in the White House to being like prison.

For Trump, that feeling is magnified by walling himself off during the crisis. Unable to travel and unsure of what to do, he’s been crashing West Wing meetings, often forcing staffers to hurriedly adjust agendas as the president frequently gets in the way of health professionals trying to chart a course of action.

While some around him have suggested that he should only appear when there is big news to announce, Trump has been missing the spotlight and has told people that he knows the nation is watching the briefings and doesn’t want to give up the stage.

On Sunday, he asked the briefing, originally slated for 4:30 p.m. to be pushed back later into the evening, when more people would be watching — including those tuning in for “60 Minutes,” the president’s favorite broadcast news magazine.

Trump has rebuked reporters whose questions he does not like, and behind closed doors, it has been much the same. The president has snapped at aides delivering news that contradicts his relentless belief the crisis will be resolved soon.

Upon his return from a trip to India last month, Trump lit into aides about Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who had provided a dire warning about the virus’ potential impact. He chided Vice President Mike Pence in a West Wing meeting for defending Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a one-time Democratic presidential contender, for his handling of the crisis. And he angrily upbraided medical providers who called on his administration to do more, saying they should be upset instead with their local leadership.

And he has railed against journalists for investigating his sluggish response, driven, in part, by a desire to discredit the media at a time when he knows the headlines are only going to get worse.

“I watch and listen to the Fake News, CNN, MSDNC, ABC, NBC, CBS, some of FOX (desperately & foolishly pleading to be politically correct), the @nytimes, & the @washingtonpost, and all I see is hatred of me at any cost,” he tweeted over the weekend. “Don’t they understand that they are destroying themselves?”

That line has been picked up by others in the administration who also made clear that they don’t see value in reporters digging into how the administration prepared for the looming crisis.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate right now for the press to be going backwards,” echoed White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. “There’s no reason to go backwards and figure out tick-tocks of what happened when. We’ve got a crisis on our hands, we’ve got a coronavirus in this country, and the press should — they’ve got a real opportunity…to also spread great information to this public and give information that our task force is trying to get out there.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Mere weeks ago, Trump and his reelection campaign had planned to use his massive financial advantage to try to define his opponent to the public in the race’s early months, much like former President Barack Obama did to Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

Trump had planned to frame the race as a contest between a decisive president who had ushered in an economic golden age, versus either an avowed socialist like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders or a creature of the Washington establishment, Biden, who was struggling to raise money and enthusiasm.

But instead of facing a wounded Democrat at the end of a drawn-out nomination fight, an emboldened Biden has emerged as his party’s clear front-runner, having coalesced much of the party around him while addressing his cash shortage. And now Trump is staring at a recession, a potentially lethal political blow for any incumbent, but particularly one who has so tethered his fortunes to the stock market and a once buoyant economy.

Unable to hold his rallies, Trump has lost his favorite outlet and deprived his campaign of compiling valuable voter data. And while his campaign’s war chest remains robust, any sort of TV ad campaign has been sidelined, though anti-Biden digital spots are still being produced and aides have expressed surprise and relief that the former vice president has largely ceded Trump the spotlight the last two weeks.

With no chance of any trips anytime soon aboard Air Force One, where Trump often spends his time talking out campaign strategy and socializing with old friends and allies, he’s unleashed his anger on Twitter — including at Democratic governors who dare criticize him — and has been on the phone constantly, peppering people with calls.

In recent days, the president tried to reach one economist late at night but the person slept through multiple calls.

So Trump just kept calling. Eventually, the economist woke up.

__ Lemire reported from New York

The nation’s top infectious disease expert told Science magazine in an interview that Trump listens “even though we disagree on some things.”

“He goes his own way. He has his own style,” Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in the telephone interview with the magazine Sunday. “But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”

Trump complained at a recent briefing that China should have told the world about the virus much earlier. The new coronavirus originated in China. Fauci said he told the “appropriate people” after Trump made the comment that “it doesn’t comport, because two or three months earlier would have been September.” The coronavirus emerged in central China in December.

Fauci said Trump’s aides may caution him against repeating the statement but if the president chooses to say it again, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”

Trump and Fauci sparred politely but publicly last week over whether a malaria drug would work to treat people with the coronavirus disease.

Asked about being present when things are said that he disagrees with, Fauci said: “I don’t disagree in the substance. It is expressed in a way that I would not express it, because it could lead to some misunderstanding about what the facts are about a given subject.”

“I like Dr. Fauci a lot,” Trump said when the questioning turned to Fauci’s absence from Monday’s briefing.

On Friday, the doctor put a hand over his face when Trump injected a conspiracy theory into the proceeding by referring to the State Department as the “Deep State Department.”

Fauci’s brief hand movement and facial expression became an internet meme.

Asked if he’d been criticized for it, Fauci said, “No comment.”

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus.

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According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said they had spoken by phone with President Donald Trump during the long night of negotiations. While the two sides have resolved many issues in the sweeping package, some remain.

At midnight Monday, they emerged separately to say talks would continue into the night.

“We look forward to having a deal tomorrow,” Mnuchin told reporters after exiting Schumer’s office.

“The president is giving us direction, we’re working at his direction, and the president would like to have a deal,” Mnuchin said. “He’s hopeful we can conclude this.”

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Moments later, Schumer agreed that a deal was almost within reach. “That’s the expectation — that we finish it tomorrow and hopefully vote on it tomorrow evening,” he said.

The long evening of shuttle negotiations came after a long day trying to close the sweeping aid package amid the growing crisis. Mnuchin said talks were expected to resume at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

Tensions flared Monday as Washington strained to respond to the worsening coronavirus outbreak, with Congress arguing over a nearly $2 trillion economic rescue package and an impatient Trump musing openly about letting the 15-day shutdown expire next Monday, March 30.

As the U.S. braces for an onslaught of sick Americans, and millions are forced indoors to avert a spike that risks overwhelming hospitals, the most ambitious federal intervention in modern times is testing whether Washington can act swiftly to deal with the pandemic on the home front. By evening, there were no further votes set for Monday, as talks pushed into the night.

“It’s time to get with the program, time to pass historic relief,” said an angry Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell earlier in the day as he opened the chamber after a nonstop weekend session that failed to produce a deal. “This is a national emergency.”

Fuming, McConnell warned Democrats — pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to quit stalling on “political games,” as he described Democratic efforts to steer more of the aid toward public health and workers.

Trump, who has largely been hands off from the negotiations, weighed in late Monday from the White House briefing room, declaring that Congress should vote “for the Senate bill as written,” dismissing any Democratic proposal.

“It must go quickly,” Trump said. “This is not the time for political agendas.”

The president also sounded a note of frustration about the unprecedented modern-day effort to halt the virus’s march by essentially shutting down public activities in ways that now threaten the U.S. economy.

Even though Trump’s administration recommended Americans curtail activities starting a week ago, the president said: “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. At the end of the 15-day period, we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.”

“Let’s go to work,” he said. “This country was not built to be shut down. This is not a county that was built for this.”

Trump said that he may soon allow parts of the nation’s economy, in regions less badly hit by the virus, to begin reopening, contradicting the advice of medical and public health experts across the country, if not the globe, to hunker down even more firmly.

Pelosi assailed Trump’s idea and fluctuating response to the crisis.

“He’s a notion-monger, just tossing out things that have no relationship to a well-coordinated, science-based, government-wide response to this,” Pelosi said on a health-care conference call. “Thank God for the governors who are taking the lead in their state. Thank God for some of the people in the administration who speak truth to power.”

The White House team led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin worked on Capitol Hill for a fourth straight day of talks as negotiators narrowed on a bipartisan accord.

In the nearly empty building, the virus continued to strike close. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who announced he tested positive for coronavirus, is now among five senators under self-quarantine. Several other lawmakers have cycled in and out of isolation. And the husband of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is in a hospital with pneumonia after testing positive, she said Monday.

First lady Melania Trump, meanwhile, has tested negative for the coronavirus, Trump said.

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With a wary population watching and waiting, Washington labored under the size and scope of a rescue package — larger than the 2008 bank bailout and 2009 recovery act combined.

Democrats are holding out as they argue the package is tilted toward corporations and should do more to help suddenly jobless workers and health care providers with dire needs.

In particular, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wants constraints on the largely Republican-led effort to provide $500 billion for corporations. Democrats call that a “slush fund.”

Yet, he said, “We’re very close to reaching a deal.” Even so, another attempt to move the package forward snagged, blocked as Democrats refused to quit negotiating.

Democrats won one concession — to provide four months of expanded unemployment benefits, rather than just three as proposed, according to an official granted anonymity to discuss the private talks. The jobless pay also would extend to self-employed and so-called gig workers.

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But Republicans complained Democrats were holding out for more labor protections for workers, wanting assurances that corporations taking federal aid will commit to retaining their employees.

Pelosi came out with the House Democrats’ own sweeping $2.5 trillion bill, which would provide $1,500 directly to the public and $200 billion to the states, as governors are pleading for aid. She urged Senate negotiators “to move closer to the values” in it.

Trump has balked at using his authority under the recently invoked Defense Protection Act to compel the private sector to manufacture needed medical supplies like masks and ventilators, even as he encourages them to spur production. “We are a country not based on nationalizing our business,” said Trump, who has repeatedly railed against socialism overseas and among Democrats.

From his home, Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden criticized Trump for stopping short of using the full force of emergency federal authority.

“Trump keeps saying he’s a wartime president,” Biden said in an online address. “Well, start acting like one.”

On the economic front, the Federal Reserve announced Monday it will lend to small and large businesses and local governments as well as extend its bond-buying programs as part of a series of sweeping steps to support the flow of credit through an economy ravaged by the viral outbreak.

Central to the emerging rescue package is as much as $350 billion for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home. The package also proposes a one-time rebate of about $1,200 per person, or $3,000 for a family of four, as well as extended unemployment benefits.

Hospitals would get about $110 billion for the expected influx of sick patients, said Mnuchin. But Democrats are pushing for more health-care dollars for the front-line hospitals and workers.

The urgency to act is mounting, as jobless claims skyrocket and financial markets are eager for signs that Washington can soften the blow of the health-care crisis and what experts say is a looming recession.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Bev Banks contributed. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Colleen Long, Hope Yen, Mary Clare Jalonick, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Alan Fram and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Warning that the outbreak is accelerating, the head of the World Health Organization called on countries to take strong, coordinated action.

“We are not helpless bystanders,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, noting that it took 67 days to reach 100,000 cases worldwide but just four days to go from 200,000 to 300,000. “We can change the trajectory of this pandemic.”

Partisan divisions stalled efforts to pass a colossal aid package in U.S. Congress, and stocks fell again on Wall Street even after the Federal Reserve said it will lend to small and large businesses and local governments to help them through the crisis.

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Britain became the latest European country to order a near lockdown, imposing its most draconian peacetime restrictions.

The scramble to marshal public health and political resources intensified in New York, where a statewide lockdown took effect amid worries the city of 8.4 million is becoming one of the world’s biggest hot spots. More than 12,000 people have tested positive in the city and almost 100 have died.

The governor announced plans to convert a mammoth New York City convention center into a hospital with 1,000 beds. The mayor warned that the city’s hospitals are just 10 days away from shortages in basic supplies.

“This is going to get much worse before it gets better. We are still in the relative calm before the storm,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

In Italy, the hardest-hit country, declines in both new cases and deaths for a second consecutive day provided a faint glimmer of hope, though it is too soon to say whether the crisis is leveling off.

Italian officials said Monday that the virus had claimed just over 600 more lives, down from 793 two days earlier. All told, the outbreak has killed more than 6,000 Italians, the highest death toll of any country, and pushed the health system to the breaking point there and in Spain.

The risk to doctors, nurses and others on the front lines has become plain: Italy has seen at least 18 doctors with coronavirus die. Spain reported that more than 3,900 health care workers have become infected, accounting for roughly 12% of the country’s total cases.

British health workers pleaded for more gear, saying they felt like “cannon fodder.” In France, doctors scrounged masks from construction workers, factory floors, an architect.

“There’s a wild race to get surgical masks,” François Blanchecott, a biologist on the front lines of testing, told France Inter radio. “We’re asking mayors’ offices, industries, any enterprises that might have a store of masks.”

The way U.S. officials respond to the severe pressure on hospitals — and people’s willingness to keep their distance from others — will prove critical in coming days, public health experts said.

“Actions taken right now will have a huge impact on the course of this epidemic in the U.S.,” said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington. “It’s an important moment.”

President Donald Trump told reporters he believes the U.S. economy, which has been virtually shut down, could be reopened in weeks, not months. Trump wouldn’t say when businesses would be up and running but that he wasn’t “looking at months, I can tell you right now. We’re going to be opening up the country.”

Amid complaints of hospitals running low on masks, gloves and other critical gear, Trump signed an executive order making it a crime to stockpile supplies needed by medical workers. Attorney General William Barr said investigators will go after those hoarding goods on “an industrial scale” and price gouging.

“If you are sitting on a warehouse with surgical masks, you will be hearing a knock on your door,” Barr told reporters.

China is now sending planeloads of protective gear and doctors to Europe as the crisis kept easing in the country where the virus first emerged late last year. Additionally, Chinese officials announced Tuesday that lockdowns in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, will end April 8.

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“The U.S. is completely wasting the precious time that China has won for the world,” said Geng Shuang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, promised that medical supplies are about to start pouring in and will be “clearly directed to those hot spots that need it most.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden criticized Trump for not using the full force of federal authority to combat the virus.

“Trump keeps saying he’s a wartime president,” Biden said in an online address. “Well, start acting like one.”

On Capitol Hill, a nearly $2 trillion plan that would prop up businesses and send checks to American households has stalled. Democrats argued it was tilted toward corporations rather than workers and health care providers.

Meanwhile, industries big and small continued to shut down. Boeing announced it was suspending production in the Seattle area, where it has two mammoth aircraft plants employing about 42,000 people.

More than 375,000 people worldwide have been infected and over 16,000 have died from the virus, according to a running tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. More than 1.5 billion people around the globe have been instructed to stay in their homes.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson added to those orders Monday and directed shops that don’t sell essential goods to shut down. He warned that police would be authorized to break up public gatherings of more than two people. Johnson faced pressure for tougher measures because many have ignored advice on social distancing.

After just a few weeks, the U.S. has more than 43,000 cases and more than 500 deaths. Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia joined states including California, Illinois and New York in asking or ordering residents to stay home and keep businesses closed — directives that cover more than one-third of the U.S. population in a patchwork of rules imposed by governors or cities.

Former Hollywood studio boss Harvey Weinstein tested positive at the prison in New York where he is serving a 23-year sentence for rape and sexual assault, the head of the guards union said.

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For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever or coughing. But for some older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. Over 100,000 people have recovered, mostly in China.

Authorities kept up their push to get people to stay home, but some were not listening. Social media showed snapshots of packed London Underground trains.

In New York, Cuomo fumed over gatherings of young people in violation of his order that everyone stay 6 feet (2 meters) apart, saying, “It’s reckless and it’s violative of your civic spirit and duty as a citizen, as far as I’m concerned.”

In a city where many people live in buildings with small elevators, a 21-story high-rise in the Chelsea neighborhood posted a notice in the lobby warning that there should be just one person per elevator, and those going to the laundry room shouldn’t use a washing machine next to another one in use.

“People are really only going to get food and going back. That’s what we need,” said Matt Comet, making a brief dash into the nearly empty streets of his Manhattan neighborhood to pick up a carryout meal.

“I’m OK to have a book and watch TV for a bit, but if it continues for another month, another two months, it’ll be pretty crazy,” he said.

India took the extraordinary step of shutting down the nation’s vast rail system, the lifeblood of the country of 1.3 billion people.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that postponing this year’s Summer Olympics in Tokyo could be unavoidable. The International Olympic Committee said it will examine the situation over the next few weeks.

Nepal has ordered a weeklong lockdown, while Myanmar reported its first two cases of the virus.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate cease-fire in conflicts around the world to tackle the pandemic.

“It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives,” he said.

Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.

It was an extraordinary moment in Washington: Congress undertaking the most ambitious federal effort yet to shore up households and the U.S. economy and an angry president lashing out at all comers. All while the global pandemic and its nationwide shutdown grip an anxious, isolated population bracing for a healthcare crisis and looming recession.

When one reporter asked Trump what he would tell a worried nation, the president snapped, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter.”

Despite the enormous pressure on Washington to swiftly act, the challenges are apparent. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and administration officials labored late into the evening over eye-popping sums and striking federal interventions, surpassing even the 2008-09 bank bailout and stimulus.

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“Everybody is working very hard,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, exiting one closed-door session and heading into another, as it approached 9:45 p.m. EDT Friday.

But hopes for a tentative deal by the close of Friday faded as the night dragged on.

“Our nation needs a major next step, and we need it fast,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier in the day to an empty chamber, the iconic U.S. Capitol closed to visitors.

Preliminary Senate votes are set for Sunday. McConnell said the goal is passage by Monday.

At one point, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters, “We’re making good progress.” But Schumer said trying to wrap up “tonight is hard.”

Mnuchin launched negotiations with McConnell, Schumer and senators from both parties using McConnell’s GOP offer as a starting point.

But Mnuchin also conferred privately Friday with Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the two leaders pressed for Democratic priorities. Pelosi late Friday called the GOP plan a “non-starter.”

The GOP plan aims to pump billions into $1,200 direct checks to Americans and billions to small businesses to pay idled workers during the global pandemic.

But Democrats say McConnell’s plan is insufficient, arguing for greater income support for workers and a “Marshall Plan” for the U.S. healthcare industry, which is preparing for an onslaught of newly sick patients.

At the White House, Trump welcomed the stimulus plan, believing it is needed to stabilize the economy.

But Trump spent much of Friday’s daily briefing in a fury, an angry president lashing out at reporters’ questions.

At times, he seemed to refuse to want to hear the reality of an increasingly dire situation. It was when one reporter noted the hard facts in the U.S. — that more than 200 are dead, more than 14,000 infected and millions scared — that he snapped back.

Trump also sowed further confusion about whether he is using the powers of the Defense Production Act to force American businesses to manufacture needed medical supplies.

In Friday phone calls with Trump, Schumer said he specifically implored the president to invoke the Korean War-era act to ramp up production of desperately needed ventilators and other gear.

Trump told the Democratic leader he would do it — and then Schumer said the president could be heard yelling to someone in his office “get it done.”

But Trump told reporters he had put the order he invoked Wednesday “into gear” Thursday night. He said he had directed companies to launch production. But then he walked it back, saying, “You know, so far, we haven’t had to” because companies are volunteering.

The administration also announced a further closing of the nation’s border, as the U.S. and Mexico agreed to limit crossings to all but essential travel and trade, while the U.S. moved to restrict entry to anyone without documentation.

Later Friday, the White House said a member of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff had tested positive for the new coronavirus. Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller said the staff member, who is not being identified, did not have “close contact” either the vice president or Trump.

Unveiled Thursday, McConnell’s rescue proposal from Republicans builds on Trump’s request for Congress to “go big.”

The GOP plan proposes $300 billion for small businesses to keep idled workers on payroll and $208 billion in loans to airlines and other industries. It also seeks to relax a just-enacted family and medical leave mandate on small to medium-sized businesses from an earlier rescue package.

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It puts McConnell’s imprint on the GOP approach after the Senate leader left earlier negotiations to Pelosi and Mnuchin, which angered some of his GOP senators feeling cut out of the final product.

Keeping paychecks flowing for workers not at work is a top priority for both Democrats and Republicans as jobless claims skyrocket.

But how best to send direct payments to Americans — as one-time stipends, ongoing payroll support or unemployment checks — is a crucial debate.

Under McConnell’s approach, small businesses with 500 or fewer employees would be able to tap up to $10 million in forgivable loans from the federal government to continue cutting paychecks.

Democrats prefer sending the money to workers via the existing unemployment insurance system. Schumer called it “unemployment insurance on steroids.”

Both income support approaches have benefits and drawbacks, lawmakers said. Republicans say their plan would keep workers linked to employers, for easy recall once the crisis abates. Democrats argue the unemployment system provides a ready-made distribution channel, though states could also become overwhelmed by the surge of jobless claims.

Meanwhile, industries of all kinds are lining up for help.

As the Senate chairmen hammered out the details — and House chairmen funneled their input — the total price tag is sure to grow beyond $1 trillion, lawmakers said.

The House, which adjourned last weekend, is not expected to resume until the new package is ready.

Lawmakers on conference calls with leaders this week said they preferred not to board airplanes amid the virus outbreak. Despite calls to change the rules, Congress does not have a mechanism in place for remote voting.

Trump has already signed into law a $100 billion-plus bill to boost testing for the coronavirus and guarantee paid sick leave for millions of workers hit by it. Earlier, Trump signed an initial $8.3 billion package from Congress.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Darlene Superville, Matthew Daly, Mary Clare Jalonick, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Alan Fram and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Ford and GM have yet to start production, and it would take them months, if not longer, to begin production, if it’s even possible.

A look at the claim:

TRUMP: “Ford, General Motors and Tesla are being given the go ahead to make ventilators and other metal products, FAST! @fema Go for it auto execs, lets see how good you are?” — tweet Sunday.

TRUMP, on addressing a shortage of ventilators: “General Motors, Ford, so many companies — I had three calls yesterday directly, without having to institute like: ‘You will do this’ — these companies are making them right now.” — briefing Saturday.

THE FACTS: No automaker is anywhere close to making medical gear such as ventilators and remain months away — if not longer. Nor do the car companies need the president’s permission to move forward.

Neither GM or Ford is building ventilators at present, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that his company was “working on ventilators” but he didn’t specify how long it might take. His tweets also questioned the need and said it couldn’t be done immediately.

Unless automakers can move with unprecedented speed, redirecting plants to make completely different products will take a long time — possibly too long to help with medical gear shortages.

“When you are repurposing a factory, it really depends on how similar the new product is to the existing products in your product line,” said Kaitlin Wowak, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on industrial supply chains. “It’s going to be a substantial pivot to start producing an entirely different item.”

GM announced on Friday that it is working with ventilator maker Ventec Life Systems to ramp up production. The automaker said it would help with logistics, purchasing and manufacturing, but stopped short of saying it would make ventilators in its own factories, which have been idled for two weeks after workers who’d been fearful of the contagion put pressure on the company.

Any manufacturing at GM would come much later. GM does have a lot of 3D printers and could make parts and other things to help, but it does not need permission from Trump. In fact, GM manufacturing engineers were at Ventec late last week working on this, well before Trump’s tweet.

Ford, which also suspended factory production along with other automakers with operations in North America, confirmed that it too was in discussions with the Trump administration about helping, but had not started.

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“We’re looking at feasibility,” Ford spokesman T.R. Reid said. “It may be possible, but it’s not you go from Rangers (small pickups) one day to ventilators the next. We’re figuring out what is possible now.”

Trump said last week that he invoked the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, which allows the government to marshal the private sector to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. But he did not give examples as to how he was using it.

On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, indicated that Trump had not used the act to trigger production of medical equipment.

“What the president was saying is that these companies are coming forth on their own,” Fauci told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Peter Gaynor, agreed. “I think it’s an insurance policy. Right? It’s a lever. If we have to throw that lever we will,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Yen reported from Washington.

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But that hasn’t stopped the president from holding forth almost daily about the coronavirus pandemic and its economic implications without waiting until markets have closed for the day.

While many of his predecessors worked consciously to not affect the markets, Trump has overtly made market movements and performance a measure of his effectiveness and central to his argument for a second term.

Earlier this week, public health officials announced a surge of infections in the U.S. as leading economists predicted unemployment spiking to 10% or more. Trump, meanwhile, took the White House podium in the middle of the trading day to offer an optimistic take on his administration’s response to the crisis.

“One of the elements that is being worked on very much so on the Hill is to keep the jobs going so that when we do get rid of the virus, we’re going to be able to just really…go like a rocket,” said Trump on Thursday as at the market spiked more than 300 points, then dove into negative territory and then inched back into positive territory over the course of his 77-minute press conference. “I think the economy is going to be fantastic.”

The president headed to the same place again on Friday while the markets were open for an even longer news conference, where he vacillated between expressing optimism and lashing out about “nasty” journalists’ negativity.

Amid more difficult news—the number of confirmed infections around the globe surpassed 250,000 cases—the Dow Jones industrial average closed down more than 4.5% on Friday.

At the end of the market’s heaviest losses in more than 30 years, the market closed at 19,173.98, below where it stood on the day before Trump was inaugurated and erased the so-called “Trump bump” that he’s pointed to throughout his presidency as evidence of his prowess as the economic steward.

Nevertheless, in the midst of one of the most volatile moments ever for the U.S. economy, Trump has wagered that his voice is the daily balm needed to soothe investor concerns.

Over the course of the last eight days–all on which he held extended news conferences about the coronavirus response in the midst of trading — his comments haven’t stopped the bleeding. The Dow has lost more than 17% since March 13, and has plummeted more than 34% since the market hit an all-time high Feb. 19.

The president’s decision to offer daily affirmations to the health of the stock market, and the economy writ large, is not surprising. But no president has tied his fortunes to Wall Street more closely than Trump, who until the market crash bragged that the rising stock market was evidence of his success leading the economy.

“Maybe, he should take it offline,”’ said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody Analytics. “But this president? He’s not going to do that.”

Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush avoided talking about the stock market with substance, let alone trying to impact the market in the midst of trading. Bill Clinton took to heart his economic adviser Robert Rubin’s advice that markets go up and markets go down.

Barack Obama was ridiculed as the stock-picker-in-chief less than two months into office when he suggested in the midst of a market slide that it was a good time to buy undervalued stocks.

For much of his next six years in office, the 44th president was often measured when even talking about the improved health of the economy: his first term started in throes of the Great Recession but he left office with 75 straight months of job growth. By the latter part of his presidency, Obama began claiming credit for the bull market on occasion.

“The stock market is booming,” Obama declared in a speech in a July 2014 speech in Kansas City.

Those close to Trump said he was fully aware that the coronavirus posed an enormous threat to the very same once-booming markets he touted as the calling card of his presidency, even as he was publicly downplaying concerns about the virus.

In the weeks that the pandemic ballooned into a public health emergency, Trump had become increasingly frustrated as he privately expressed concerns to his advisers about the effect the virus could have on the markets and ultimately his reelection effort, according to White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing.

Trump throughout his presidency has viewed the market’s performance as his “daily report card” of his job performance, Zandi said. With the pandemic thrusting the economy toward a recession, Zandi said that Trump now appears to be turning to the market for an “hourly report card” to gauge the effectiveness of his response.

“In the past, sometimes it worked and sometimes it doesn’t,” Zandi said of the president’s years-long cheerleading of the market. “Recently, it hasn’t. He’s in fact, as of late, done less to instill confidence and more to upset investors. They don’t view his actions as very productive in terms of this crisis. It’s worked against him.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump has used off-the-cuff diatribes to try to shame major, publicly-traded companies whose business dealings are at odds with his political interests, tapped out timely, friendly tweets about China’s Xi Jinping to calm market concerns about trade wars, and repeatedly berated Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell about the central bank’s policies during market dips.

Trump has repeatedly made clear that the battered market is top of his mind, as trillions of dollars in wealth and nearly all the gains for the Dow Jones Industrial tallied since his inauguration have been erased. He has sought to will a comeback with his daily updates about his administration’s efforts to contain the virus in the midst of trading day, Zandi said.

It mostly hasn’t worked.

Trump held a Rose Garden press conference on March 13, just before the New York Stock Exchange closed for the weekend, to declare a national emergency, to announce greater availability of virus testing kits were in the pipeline, and to declare he was ordering the purchase of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Later that weekend, he boasted during another news conference that the market responded to his performance with its biggest single-day gain ever. Left unsaid by the president was the fact that market had its single-worst day since the 1987 Black Monday the day before the record gain.

“I think we should do one of them every day, perhaps. How about five times a day?” Trump remarked. “We’ll do one five times a day. But that was something to watch and — I had no idea.”

The huge Friday gains that Trump bragged came from his market-whispering were followed by a wipe-out Monday that saw a historic, nearly 3,000-point slide for the Dow.

Investors dumped stocks after the Fed’s surprise move on Sunday evening to cut interest rates to near zero, a move that appeared to only exacerbate investor worries about a global recession. The Fed rate cut came the day after Trump again publicly berated Powell over lending rates.

Jason Furman, a Harvard University economist who served as Obama’s chief economic adviser, said Trump should provide important coronavirus updates whenever he and his team sees fit. But Furman also advised that Trump should “let the stock market take care of itself.”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, said the “genie is out of the bottle” with Trump’s consistent attempts to shape the market through Twitter and the media. And with the global nature of the marketplace, when Trump makes his comments remains less important than the substance of his remarks, she said..

“This is where facts matter, information matters and very focused communication matters,” Swonk said. “His experts should be all the focus. His job should be to be the steward right now. Often, the alpha dog isn’t the first one in the pack.”

——-

Associated Press writer Zeke Miller contributed reporting to this article.

The staffer’s name and exact position were not released, but Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, said, “Neither President Trump nor Vice President Pence had close contact with the individual.

“Further contact tracing is being conducted in accordance with CDC guidelines,” Miller said.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

A look at his claims at a news briefing:

TRUMP: “And we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately, and that’s where the FDA has been so great. They — they’ve gone through the approval process. It’s been approved.”

THE FACTS: The drug, known chemically as chloroquine, has been available for decades to treat the mosquito-borne illness malaria. Technically, doctors can already prescribe the drug to patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing. But Trump falsely suggested to reporters that the FDA had just cleared the drug specifically for the viral pandemic spreading in communities across the U.S. That would mean that the drug had met the FDA’s standards for safety and effectiveness.

Minutes later, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn emphasized that the drug still needs testing to determine if it can help patients. He said chloroquine would have to be tested in “a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information.”

Drug trials typically require hundreds or thousands of patients and, even when accelerated, take weeks or months to complete. In his remarks, Hahn reflected on his background as a cancer doctor and warned against giving patients “false hope” before drugs are fully vetted.

While chloroquine has shown promise in preliminary laboratory studies, some experts are skeptical it will prove effective in human testing.

“I think it could be a game changer, and maybe not,” Trump said, discussing the drug.

But the FDA reiterated in a statement Thursday that there are “no FDA-approved therapeutics or drugs to treat, cure or prevent COVID-19.”

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TRUMP: “If chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine works, or any of the other things that they’re looking at that are not quite as far out … your numbers are going to come down very rapidly.”

THE FACTS: The drugs he is referring to are for treatment in patients already infected. That doesn’t prevent spread of the virus. One study is testing chloroquine to try to protect health care workers at highest risk of infection, because a vaccine is likely a year or more away.

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AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione contributed to this report.

When Dr. Mike Pellini, a physician and biotech investor, read the news about the spread of a virus that caused pneumonia-like symptoms, he decided to keep on hand a supply of an anti-malarial drug called chloroquine. 

Pellini, who tweeted about the decision to his followers in early February, was early to this thinking. A month later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sparked massive interest in the drug after tweeting that chloroquine was “maybe worth considering” as a potential treatment for the COVID-19 coronavirus.

On Thursday, the White House took notice.

President Donald Trump said he had directed the Food and Drug Administration to investigate whether chloroquine, which is available by prescription only, should be given to patients with the virus. Bayer, the international drugmaker, then noted in a press release that it would donate 3 million tablets of the drug Resochin, or chloroquine phosphate, to U.S. patients. Trump also pointed to another existing drug, remdesivir, an anti-viral developed by drugmaker Gilead, which is already being used in China to treat COVID-19. 

Neither drug is currently approved by the FDA to treat the coronavirus. So it is important “not to provide false hope,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House’s daily press briefing. But Trump has “asked us to be aggressive” and “break through exciting, lifesaving treatment, and we’re doing that at the FDA,” he added. 

Early promising data 

So what is chloroquine, and why is it considered so promising by the scientific community?

The drug has been around since the 1940s and is known for being generally safe and well tolerated in mild to moderate doses, although it can be toxic in high doses. It has been used to treat malaria, in addition to some autoimmune disorders. It is available as a generic, which means it could be a scalable and potentially affordable treatment.

“Nothing is definitive yet, but chloroquine is a drug used for more than 70 years with minimal side effects at a modest dosage,” said Pellini. 

Malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus. But some studies have found that chloroquine has been effective at treating a virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, a close relative of COVID-19. It is also being studied at research labs throughout the world as a way to alleviate symptoms for patients diagnosed with COVID-19. 

“It has been found in mice to be effective to treat a variety of viruses,” noted Dr. Kristian Olson, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It also appears it’s active in vitro (via test tube experiments) against COVID-19.”

Some of the early data is promising. A group of researchers in France are testing a less toxic derivative of the chloroquine drug called hydroxychloroquine on a few dozen patients with COVID-19, and early reports of the trial indicate that the drug might help shorten the amount of time that people with the disease are infectious. 

Because of these early signs, some biotech experts say it’s worth putting more research dollars into studying the drug. 

“I don’t see Trump’s willingness to jump into humans quickly (to test the drug) as a panicked response,”  said Vas Bailey, a life sciences-focused investor at Artis with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “It could be a potentially efficient way of using real-world evidence to help us triage which of these safe drugs will work in alleviating symptoms and treating COVID-19.”

Lack of concrete evidence and lots of unknowns

But we’re still far from having an approved treatment for COVID-19, and the evidence behind chloroquine is not firm.

As Bailey points out, there is no data yet from a randomized clinical trial, which is considered the gold standard to minimize the possibility of bias in the findings. One of the biggest problems, scientists say, is that the tests have not been blinded. If physicians have prior knowledge of the intervention, that might influence how to treat the patient. That introduces other variables that are hard to separate from the effect of the drug. 

There’s also further work needed to understand whether the drug reduces hospital time and mortality rates, and whether it impacts ventilation use. There are also some big unknowns about when, how and to whom the drug should be administered. 

“What I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows is the degree of anti-viral activity and if it can be used to treat the most critical patients,” said Olson. “We still also don’t understand the optimal dose treatment for covid-19, and whether it might be used at a lower dose for prophylaxis (meaning to take preventatively) than for treatment.”

As Olson points out, there are still side effects, like nausea and vision issues, and it remains to be seen whether the drug will be tolerated well in very sick patients. Furthermore, overdosing on the drug in high doses can cause serious health outcomes. 

Because of these gaps in understanding, the World Health Organization said last month that there is “no proof” the drug is effective in treating the coronavirus.

Overall, however, some biotech experts say there’s some reason for optimism that the drug can help. “You wouldn’t see qualified medical professionals from China, France and Korea looking into this if there wasn’t something to it,” Bailey said.

Don’t stockpile

Still some doctors including Dr. James Wantuck have a warning for consumers.

Wantuck said that healthy patients have been calling him repeatedly to ask for prescriptions for chloroquine, after viewing tweets from Musk and others. That takes away doctors’ time from treating those who are sick, and it might mean that supplies don’t last for those who really need it. 

With Trump informing millions about the drugs’ potential, that’s even more of a concern. 

“I think that stockpiling is a worry with any anti-viral drug,” notes Olson. “I could imagine that happening as there’s more evidence around it.”

This story first appeared on CNBC.com. More from CNBC:

• Trump wants to send $1,000 to adults, $500 to kids in coronavirus stimulus bill, Mnuchin says
• Bank of America says the recession is already here: ‘Jobs will be lost, wealth will be destroyed’
• Three pillars of Trump’s case for reelection are collapsing all at once

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“I strongly believe that when one is part of a team, and one cannot in good faith support the direction of the team, then the proper thing to do is to resign,” Haley wrote to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and board chairman Larry Kellner, in a letter dated March 16 and provided Thursday to The Associated Press. “As such, I hereby resign my position from the Boeing Board.”

Earlier this week, Boeing said it was seeking $60 billion in federal aid for itself and its supply chain, both of which are struggling amid the COVID-19 outbreak, which has halted major travel and shuttered many businesses. The Trump administration has said it would back Boeing, which is also a top U.S. defense contractor.

Haley, 48, joined the Boeing board last year after her departure from President Donald Trump’s administration. Popular in her home state, Haley moved back to South Carolina — where Boeing has a major production facility — founded a nonprofit organization, and wrote and promoted a memoir.

As governor of South Carolina prior to joining the Trump administration, Haley fought attempts by unions to represent workers at the North Charleston plant where the company assembles its Boeing 787 jetliners. At the time, she said unions weren’t needed because companies in her state take care of their workers.

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In 2017, workers at the plant voted about 3-to-1 against representation by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, a resounding setback for unions that have long hoped to make inroads in the South.

Boeing is among the companies whose stocks are tumbling amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Earlier this month, the Chicago-based company said it had imposed a hiring freeze in response to the virus outbreak, which is undercutting air travel and threatening to kill airlines’ appetite for new planes.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also said it will take “weeks to months” for social-distancing measures in his country to be lifted amid the pandemic.

On Thursday, NBC News reported that President Donald Trump is planning to place new limits on travel between the U.S. and Mexico, similar to those put in place earlier this week with Canada, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Both the U.S. and Canada have been in talks in recent days to negotiate a mutual halt to tourism and family visits but leaving the flow of trade intact. Canada relies on the U.S. for 75% of its exports and about 18% of American exports go to Canada.

Essential cross-border workers like health-care professionals, airline crews and truck drivers will be permitted to cross.

“People not should not be traveling between Canada and the U.S. and the U.S. and Canada to be tourists or for recreational purposes,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said. “If you have an important essential reasons to cross the border you can continue to do that.”

Freeland emphasized truck drivers are critical as they supply grocery stores and medical goods in both directions. Much of Canada’s food supply comes from or via the U.S.

The flow of travelers on the northern border, the world’s longest between two nations, has been relatively open. Freeland said crossings can continue in border communities such as Campobello, New Brunswick.

“Trade, which is essential, will continue,” Freeland said. “Don’t make discretionary trips and that is what border officials will be enforcing.”

Trudeau said his government is following the advice of health experts and won’t lift restrictions on public activities and movements in Canada until it is safe to do so.

Trudeau made his comments in front of his residence where he is self-isolating after his wife tested positive for the virus.

Canadian Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne is also self isolating at home and is being tested for the virus after experiencing flu-like symptoms after traveling. He said he expects the results of his test very shortly

The leaders of seven major industrial nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — will instead huddle by video conference, White House spokesman Judd Deere said.

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Trump spoke with G-7 leaders Monday by video conference in a meeting convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. Deere said Trump, who takes on the leadership of the group this year, would hold those virtual meetings monthly as the world struggles to response to the virus outbreak and its economic repercussions.

Deere said White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow informed his colleagues of the change to allow “each country to focus all of its resources on responding to the health and economic challenges of COVID-19.”

The announcement comes as nations across the globe have implemented stiff travel restrictions and distancing measures to try to curb the spread of the virus. It wasn’t immediately clear how long those restrictions would be kept in place.

Trump had originally hoped to hold the summit at his private golf resort outside Miami before moving it to Camp David after a public uproar.

During another fast-moving day in the capital, Trump and his administration took additional, once-unthinkable steps to try to contain the pandemic. The State Department issued a new alert urging Americans not to travel abroad under any circumstances. And Trump said the government should take partial ownership of companies bailed out during the pandemic, a step that would mark an extraordinary federal reach into the private sector.

Hoping to inject some good news into the dreary outlook, Trump held a White House briefing trying to highlight new efforts underway to find treatments for COVID-19 as infections in the country climbed past 11,000, with at least 168 deaths.

He offered an upbeat promotion of therapeutic drugs in early testing that he said could be “a game-changer” in treating those suffering. But critics quickly accused him of spreading misleading information and overly optimistic projections after the head of the Food and Drug Administration made clear that the drugs Trump discussed were still being tested for their effectiveness and safety. That process takes months and may or may not yield any results.

The FDA later reminded the public in a statement that there are “no FDA-approved therapeutics or drugs to treat, cure or prevent COVID-19.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers worked urgently toward a $1 trillion aid package to prop up households and the U.S. economy that would put money directly into American’s pockets. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has proposed making direct payments of $1,200 per person, $2,400 for couples and $500 for each child, according to a copy of the legislation obtained by The Associated Press.

Congress has also been discussing loans that would have to be paid back to shore up airlines and other industries and was working to increase production of medical supplies and build temporary field hospitals under new authorities unlocked when Trump invoked the Defense Production Act Wednesday.

At the White House, where temperature checks continued and officials and journalists sat separated from one another as they practiced social distancing, Trump also stepped up his criticism of China, chastising the country he had previously praised for not warning the world earlier about a disease that started in Wuhan, but has since spread across the globe.

Indeed, the death toll in Italy from the coronavirus overtook China’s on Thursday, with at least 3,405 deaths in a country with a population of 60 million.”

“If people would have known about it, it could have… been stopped in place, it could have been stopped right where it came from,” Trump said.

“But now the whole world almost is inflicted with this horrible virus and it’s too bad,” he added, lamenting how the U.S economy was healthy “just a few weeks ago.”

Trump grew agitated when one reporter noted the economy had essentially ground to a halt. “We know that,” Trump snapped. “Everybody in the room knows that.”

More than eight weeks after the first U.S. case of the virus was detected, the federal government is still struggling to respond. Testing in the U.S. lags dramatically behind other developed nations, and states still say they cannot conduct wide-scale testing because they don’t have the swabs or other materials necessary to process them.

And as the number of confirmed cases mounts, doctors and nurses are sounding warnings about the shortage of crucial supplies, including masks and other gear needed to protect health care workers, along with ventilators to treat respiratory symptoms of the virus.

Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week issued guidance telling health care workers that if no masks are available, they could turn to “homemade” options “(e.g., bandana, scarf) for care of patients with COVID-19 as a last resort.”

But Trump insisted against the evidence Thursday that there are more than enough supplies available to meet needs. And he said that it was up to states to obtain them.

While willing to “help out wherever we can,” he said “governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.”

“The federal government’s not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping,” Trump said. “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

After the briefing, Trump traveled to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has now been tasked with leading the national coronavirus response, for a teleconference with governors — some of whom have complained about a lack of guidance from Washington.

Again and again during the call, governors said they were having difficulty securing supplies, including the materials needed to process tests, with some sounding panicked. Some said they were competing with the federal government for purchases. Officials in the room, however, insisted there was plenty available on the market to purchase.

Among those expressing concern was Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who told Trump he feared the state would begin to exceed its capacity to deliver health care in as soon as a week.

“I’m asking for help in terms of surging our medical capacity here in Louisiana,” he told the president. He said the state was “going to do everything we can to mitigate and slow the spread, but in the time that we have, we’ve got to increase our surge capacity. That is my biggest concern.”

For most people, COVID-19 causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

As the virus threat has become more acute, Trump has begun to describe himself as a “wartime president.” As he and members of Congress craft bailout packages, Trump said he believed the government should take partial ownership of some companies hard hit by the pandemic and aided by taxpayers. Some Republicans in Congress have pushed back on the idea, saying it amounts to the government picking winners and losers, as they criticized President Barack Obama of doing after the 2008 financial crisis.

On the medical front, Trump and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, described several existing drugs and treatments currently under testing to see if they can help those with COVID-19. Among them: chloroquine, a drug long used to treat malaria; remdesivir, an experimental antiviral that’s being tried in at least five separate studies; and antibodies culled from the blood of COVID-19 patients when they recover.

Chloroquine is widely available already and could be used off-label, but Hahn said officials want a formal study to get good information on whether it helps people with COVID-19 and is safe. No new and imminent treatments were announced at the briefing.

“We’re looking at drugs that are already approved for other indications” as a potential bridge or stopgap until studies are completed on drugs under investigation, Hahn said.

Social distancing has proved to be a challenge in the tight quarters of the White House briefing room. When task force members walked out for the briefing, they spread out widely. “We practice what we preach,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said.

But moments later, the vice president’s press secretary popped out into the briefing room and directed them to move closer together, presumably to make room for her boss.

Trump, who is at increased risk of serious illness because of his age, stood so close to some of the officials answering questions at the podium that they could not stand fully in front of it.

Trump took note of the cramped quarters, too, and claimed that social distancing was making the media “nicer.” Yet he later laced into reporters, suggesting he would like to limit briefings to two or three of his favorite supporters. And he assailed some of his coverage, slamming as “fake news” outlets whose reporters have worked to hold his administration accountable for its delayed response.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.

The picture, taken by a Washington Post photographer, shows the word crossed out in what appears to be Sharpie and in the president’s own handwriting.

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The image comes as Trump has ramped up his description of the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus” as he’s been questioned about whether he considers the label to be racist.

“It’s not racist at all,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “It comes from China, that’s why.”

At a recent briefing with his coronavirus task force standing behind him, Trump turned to Dr. Jerome Adams and declared the previously low-profile 20th surgeon general among the administration’s “stars” to emerge from this crisis.

“I watched him the other day. It was such a fantastic job you did, and I really appreciate it,” Trump said.

Trump didn’t specify what media appearance he was referring to. But during the span of a few days, Adams had said that Trump sleeps less than he does but was in better health, echoed Trump’s argument that most Americans should be more worried about the seasonal flu than the new virus and defended the Republican president’s claim that Democratic lawmakers’ politicization of the crisis was, in Trump’s words, a “new hoax.”

At the same news conference where Trump praised him, Adams scolded the media for “bickering” and “partisanship” in their coverage of the administration’s missteps.

“No more criticism or finger-pointing,” Adams said.

Surgeons general rarely garner much attention. The most impactful announcement from a surgeon general came in 1964 when Dr. Luther L. Terry told the nation that there was a link between lung cancer and smoking.

More recently, they have been in the public eye because their medical advice caused political problems for the president.

Dr. C. Everett Koop was at odds with the Reagan White House with his calls for AIDS education for elementary school students and support of condoms for disease prevention. Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired by Bill Clinton after she affirmed at an AIDS conference that it may be appropriate to promote masturbation to help dissuade young people from engaging in risky sexual activity. Dr. Richard Carmona said after he left the office that the George W. Bush administration tried to “water down” his report on the dangers of secondhand smoke .

Adams, an anesthesiologist, has gained notice during the coronavirus crisis for his eager defense of the president.

Days after Vice President Mike Pence tapped him to join the task force, Adams conducted a radio interview where he appeared to stray far outside the scope of medicine to defend Trump’s comment at a South Carolina rally that Democrats were pushing a “new hoax” by spotlighting the coronavirus.

“I will tell you when he said hoax, he was not referring to the coronavirus,” Adams said. “He said, and this is from his mouth to your ears, he was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party in terms of impeachment, in terms of criticizing the coronavirus response so far, in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down.”

Adams also raised eyebrows this week for incorrectly referring to South Korea as an authoritarian country. he was trying to make the point that as a democracy, the U.S. should tread carefully in how it goes about stemming the virus.

“We are not an authoritarian nation, so we have to be careful when we say, ‘Let’s do what China did. Let’s do what South Korea did,’” Adams said during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” equating South Korea’s democratic republic with communist China’s unelected government.

In recent days, Adams, a 45-year-old married father of three children, has been at the center of the administration’s public push to underscore to the young and healthy to avoid gatherings of 10 or more and practice social distancing for the sake of older generations.

Adams was dispatched Thursday to do a round of appearances on the morning news programs, conveying the message that people’s actions can help save lives and limit the spread of the virus.

Later, he joined the president at a news conference where he echoed Trump’s praise of Food and Drug Administration officials as “tireless” in their efforts to bring drugs to the market for those stricken by the virus. The White House also says that Adams and other high-profile administration officials will appear in nationally broadcast public service announcements that highlight how Americans can protect themselves and those most at risk.

A spokeswoman for Adams said he was not available to comment.

It was his relationship with Pence that brought Adams to Washington. When Adams arrived on the job in 2017, he was well-regarded by public health experts and industry insiders and in his adopted state of Indiana, where he served as state health commissioner when Pence was governor.

Adams played a key role in persuading Pence to back a needle exchange after an HIV outbreak in rural Indiana among intravenous drug users. After Trump appointed Pence to take over the administration’s coronavirus response in late February, the vice president added Adams.

“I have seen him communicate well and organize well and he brings around him a team of people that know things he doesn’t know — always the sign of a good leader,” said Beth Meyerson, a health policy expert at the University of Arizona who worked closely with Adams during the HIV outbreak in Indiana.

Others in the public health community say he’s strayed from the traditional role of the surgeon general as “the nation’s doctor” and administration’s chief medical adviser.

“Jerome Adams came in with a great reputation,” said Kavita Patel, a Johns Hopkins Medicine internist who served as a senior adviser in the Obama administration. “There was the comment he made about South Korea. At times, it feels like there is a little too much politics in how he’s been speaking about the administration’s coronavirus efforts. That’s where, unfortunately, he loses credibility. The office should not be political.”

Adams was a “bright and engaging” doctor while he was Indiana’s state health commissioner, said Charlie Brown, who was the top Democrat on the Indiana House public health committee at the time of the 2015 HIV outbreak in southern Indiana.

More than 180 HIV cases were tied to needle-sharing among intravenous drug users who were injecting a liquefied painkiller. Pence, citing law-and-order objections, had resisted calls to allow needle-exchange programs to stem the spread of diseases. Eventually, with the guidance of Adams, Pence came to reluctantly agree to the distribution of clean needles.

“He was right on point with those issues that were impacting health care in Indiana when he was here,” Brown added. “But now it is like a different world. It’s unreal. The Jerome Adams that I knew and the one that I see step before the microphone now just does not make any sense.”

Elders, the Clinton administration-era surgeon general, said she first came to know Adams during his time as Indiana’s state health commissioner and was quickly impressed. She described him as the type of medical professional who can provide Trump and Pence with sound advice in shaping policy.

“His heart’s in the right place, he’s a good physician and good scientist,” Elders said.

But Elders added that Adams’ wading into politics undermines the credibility of the surgeon general’s office.

“I don’t think it’s the surgeon general’s place to be scolding the media about politics,” Elders said.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three weeks to six weeks to recover.

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Davies reported from Indianapolis.

___

The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Not since the Great Recession of 2008, and before that the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001, has the federal government attempted to mount such an ambitious response to an emergency, and so quickly. The country’s once-revered, now often-maligned institutions — from the White House to Congress to the Federal Reserve — are being summoned into action.

It starts with a massive $1 trillion rescue package that includes sending $1,000 checks to Americans, with a goal of pushing it through Congress and onto President Donald Trump’s desk in a matter of days.

What Washington’s leaders do, or fail to do, will shape the road ahead for millions of anxious Americans who are suddenly facing a deeply uncertain future.

“The consequences of inaction are tremendous,” said Sara Binder, a professor at George Washington University and scholar at the Brookings Institution. “For both parties.”

Washington, particularly Congress, hasn’t done big things for a long time, ground down by partisan infighting, polarizing extremes and an increasingly skeptical public. The erosion of trust in government and civic institutions has sapped the energy to, as Trump asked, “go big.”

When Washington has tackled major policy endeavors in recent years, it’s often been along party lines.

President Barack Obama’s landmark health care legislation passed Congress in 2010 with only Democratic votes. In 2017, Republicans muscled through a sweeping tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and big businesses with only GOP support. Late last year, the Democratic House voted to impeach Trump, while the Republican Senate voted to acquit.

The result: Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi don’t talk much anymore, and Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader McConnell talk only as needed.

Trump has deepened the toxicity, bashing Pelosi and other congressional leaders with cruel nicknames and publicly humiliating members of his own party who stray. Republicans, who were once skeptical and uncomfortable with Trump as their party leader, now rally around him with near unanimity, resigned to his stranglehold on the same voters they need to back their own political campaigns.

But in this moment, Trump needs more than just Republicans. He’s relying on the leaders of both major political parties — and them on each other — to confront one of the most difficult tasks any of them has faced in public office.

Lawmakers in both parties declared this week that Washington is indeed up to the challenge. Crises tend to bring out the muscle memory.

“History shows Congress has the capacity to step up and do big things,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. He said there were glimmers of activity as senators — from both parties — are now talking to one another more.

“There’s a deep sense of our responsibility here,” Murphy continued. “There’s a sense we have an increased obligation because the executive branch is not going to be able to handle this by themselves. We’ve got to be the adults in the federal government.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close Trump ally, said the nation has faced tougher challenges.

“We won two world wars. We can do this,” Graham said. “It’s not hard to do. It’s just expensive.”

There is indeed a palpable sense of urgency at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. McConnell vowed “warp speed” on the White House’s $1 trillion request, and Pelosi tapped her chairmen to get to work on their priorities.

“The Congress has an enormous role to play in responding to this challenge,” McConnell said as he opened the chamber Wednesday. Even as the rest of Washington emptied out, and businesses around the country closed down, McConnell declared that the Senate would stay in town as long as it takes: “We aren’t leaving until we deliver.”

It was a dramatic shift for McConnell, who relishes his “Grim Reaper” moniker for having turned the Senate into a legislative graveyard, burying bills from Pelosi’s House.

Even as late as Friday, he’d cut senators loose for the weekend. McConnell and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom McConnell helped confirm to the high court after hearings that focused on sexual misconduct allegations, flew to the senator’s home state of Kentucky for a reception for another rising, if controversial, judicial star. All the while, the House was working to pass its aid package.

The Senate did overwhelmingly pass the measure on Wednesday, sending the $100 billion package of sick pay and food aid to the president’s desk. Meantime, negotiations deepened over the next, larger round of rescue money.

The dynamics between the White House, McConnell’s Senate and Pelosi’s House are delicate at best. Not only are the two chambers often at odds, but Republican senators also can find themselves out of step with Trump, whose personal ideology is fluid and frequently lands on the outskirts of what was once Republican orthodoxy.

That’s sometimes left Pelosi to negotiate with the Trump administration, as she did last week. At McConnell’s behest, it was the Democratic leader who produced an initial deal with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

One person Pelosi didn’t speak with during the negotiations? The president.

Mnuchin and Pelosi were talking again, on the phone late Wednesday.

In the cases of 9/11 and the Great Recession, divided government in Washington moved with great speed, passing emergency appropriations and tax rebates. Lawmakers and the administration were fueled by a sense of national urgency, and the knowledge that failure could cost them politically.

President George W. Bush sent $300 checks to Americans after the 2001 attacks and created an entirely new government entity, the Department of Homeland Security.

As the country plunged into recession, Congress hesitated for a crucial few days as the stock market nosedived before approving the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008.

A few months later, after Obama’s inauguration, Congress muscled through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, carrying an initial price tag of $787 billion, on a nearly party-line vote. That’s several hundred billion dollars smaller than what the White House is seeking now — and both parties acknowledge there will almost certainly be more spending to come.

The steps Washington took left a toxic hangover for both parties, a lingering unease that someone other than ordinary Americans was benefiting. A new generation of Republicans declaring themselves the tea party swept into office vowing to control government spending, while liberal Democrats deepened their disdain for the excesses of Wall Street, an industry that had flourished after its taxpayer bailouts.

Even as Congress appears to be barreling toward more massive spending, there were those this week trying to raise some alarms.

“Right now, the plan around here is basically to just start shoveling money out of a helicopter,” scoffed Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., in a speech on the Senate floor. He urged a better way.

Yet most lawmakers appeared ready to press forward, well aware that the details of the package are only part of what the public is watching for. They have to show Washington can work.

“Both sides know that the public expects us to do something,” said veteran Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho. “Or there’s going to be hell to pay.”

The double-barreled approach of a $1 trillion proposed fiscal stimulus program and Federal Reserve policy could help soften the blow of an economic recession and head off a potential financial crisis. 

The White House is seeking a stimulus package worth between $850 billion and $1 trillion that could result in emergency funds for individuals and assistance for small businesses and credit for industries hard hit by the reaction to the virus.

But even with proposed stimulus, the view of economic forecasters has become more dire in recent days as companies seeking cash strain credit markets and the shutdown of business activity sends shock waves across the economy.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration’s plan could put cash directly in the pockets of Americans. And administration sources told CNBC said there could be $500 billion to $550 billion in direct payments or tax cuts; $200 billion to $300 billion in small business assistance and $50 billion to $100 billion in airline and industry relief. 

As a big swath of the U.S. economy shuts down or retrenches to prevent spread of the virus through contact in large groups of people, economists have increasingly forecast a short recession instead of a short period of flat to negative growth. Many expect a rebound in the fourth quarter.

“Under any scenario, if we get a good stimulus package, I still think it’s a big hit. It’s hard to gauge but my guess is we’ll be down 2% to 3% in Q1 and around the same in Q2, assuming we get a lot of fiscal stimulus,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It’s one of those things we won’t know for a year down the road.”

Zandi expects a flat third quarter and a return to growth of 1.5% in the fourth quarter. 

New York and other states have shut down restaurants and bars, and San Francisco has told citizens to shelter in place, something New York is also considering.

“You see all these different measures being taken. That’s good to stop the virus, but it’s bad for economic activity,” said Shawn Snyder, head of investment strategy at Citi Personal Wealth Management. 

Congress will have to approve the proposed stimulus package. The Fed has already cut interest rates to zero, boosted liquidity in the repo market and launched a new $700 billion quantitative easing program.

It also announced a new facility early Tuesday to help the commercial paper market, which had stalled out. After the market close Tuesday, it announced a program for primary dealers.

“We know that monetary policy operates with a lag,” said Snyder. “It’s not going to instantly solve the problem but what it does is help deteriorating financial conditions and hopefully stems that … Fiscal policy could react quicker. But there’s a lot of questions.”

 Snyder said it would help furloughed workers to receive $1,000 checks and other measures aimed at funding business would also help.

“To me, the question is when it comes to recession, is it about the second quarter? The question is what happens to the third quarter? Are we able to stop this soon enough to only get one bad quarter,” he said.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton said she expects the second quarter to be really weak with a contraction in the nation’s gross domestic product of 6%, even with a stimulus package she estimated at $700 billion. The big drop in the second quarter comes after an expected half percentage point increase in first quarter growth. For the third quarter, she expects a decline of 2.7% before a return to growth of 2.9% in the fourth quarter.

“Frankly, it [fiscal stimulus] would go a lot further towards preserving future revenues and keeping this from morphing into something much more disastrous,” Swonk said. “You can’t stop the recession from happening, but you can put a floor on losses and stop a vicious cycle of hemorrhaging and layoffs, and you’re keeping consumers solvent so once they return to work, they still have a balance sheet. This is a health crisis, it shouldn’t be a financial crisis.”

Swonk expects to see a big jump in the unemployment rate to 6.3% from February’s 3.5%, as 4.8 million jobs are lost.

Zandi said the proposed stimulus will help, but even more action is needed to prevent a financial crisis.

“It helps households and small business with cash. It keeps the economy together for at least a while,” said Zandi. “To address the financial crisis, the Treasury is going to have to do more work and provide a facility to provide funding to all businesses. That’s the only way to address the liquidity crisis that’s looming.”

This story first appeared on CNBC.com. More from CNBC:

• Mark Cuban says bailed out companies should never be allowed to buy back their stocks ever again
• Why there will soon be tons of toilet paper, and what foods could be scarce: supply chain experts
• WHO considers ‘airborne precautions’ after study shows coronavirus can survive in air

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Details on Trump’s economic rescue plan remain sparse — and it’s sure to grow with lawmaker add-ons — but its centerpiece is to dedicate $500 billion to start issuing direct payments to Americans by early next month. It would also funnel cash to businesses to help keep workers on the payroll as widespread sectors of the $21 trillion U.S. economy all but shut down.

In a memorandum, the Treasury Department proposed two $250 billion cash infusions to individuals: the first set of checks issued starting April 6, with a second wave in mid-May. The amounts would depend on income and family size.

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The Treasury plan, which requires approval by Congress, also recommends $50 billion to stabilize the airlines, $150 billion to issue loan guarantees to other struggling sectors, and $300 billion for small businesses. The plan appears to anticipate that many of the loans would not be repaid.

Taken together, the administration plan promises half of the $1 trillion to families and individuals, with the other half used to prop up businesses and keep employees on payroll.

Direct payments would go to U.S. citizens only, and would be “tiered based on income level and family size.” The two payments would be identical, with the second wave starting by May 18.

The Treasury outline provides a basis for lawmakers to work from in an unprecedented government response and is likely to be broadened to include additional emergency funding for federal agencies.

The price tag for the upcoming economic package alone promises to exceed Treasury’s $1 trillion request, a rescue plan not seen since the Great Recession. Trump is urging Congress to pass the eye-popping stimulus package in a matter of days.

The Senate plans to remain in session until the third coronavirus bill passes, with weekend sessions possible. The process ahead is uncertain, but pressure is enormous on lawmakers to act fast and not allow gamesmanship to get in the way of results.

Economists say the country is probably already in recession and the stock market continued its free fall Wednesday. The panic has many lawmakers shedding their ideological baggage to grapple with an enormous undertaking for a crisis that exceeds the scope of the 2008 financial panic — a virtual weeks-long shutdown of many businesses and unemployment that could spike to 20% by some estimates.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prepared his colleagues for unprecedented steps to deal with the epidemic’s assault on the economy.

“I will not adjourn the Senate until we pass a far bolder package,” McConnell said. “We aren’t leaving until we deliver.”

But first, the Senate approved a $100 billion-plus House-passed package of sick pay, emergency food aid, free testing and more money for Medicaid, despite Republican objections over the potential impact on small businesses saddled with a new mandate to pay sick leave. The government would reimburse businesses, but business advocacy groups say the plan isn’t workable for many small firms. Still, only eight Republicans voted no.

“This legislation is not perfect, but we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” said GOP Sen. Todd Young of Indiana.

Trump, whose support of the package swayed most Republicans, quickly signed it Wednesday night.

McConnell is trying to take control of the third coronavirus effort, putting GOP chairmen in charge and promising to consult with Senate Democrats later. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York blasted McConnell’s approach, saying it’s “too cumbersome, too partisan and will take far too long, given the urgency and need for cooperation.”

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Schumer has spoken with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, however, and retains considerable influence as the Senate plans to work into the weekend to try to pass the measure. Pelosi and McConnell have talked as well.

Pelosi issued a statement late Wednesday saying her priorities for the bill include expanding eligibility for unemployment insurance and aid to small businesses that ensures workers will be paid. Democrats are also sure to seek aid to states whose budgets are falling out of balance.

Wednesday’s Treasury plan includes $300 billion in “small business interruption loans” that would be 100% guaranteed by the federal government to cover six weeks of payroll during the crisis. These loans would be made through private banks — and forgiven in many instances.

“Every penny that they borrow and use for purposes of keeping people employed, they will not have to pay back,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., chief author of a detailed Senate plan.

The plan would also establish a $50 billion lending program dedicated to imperiled airlines, which would be required to keep flying as a condition of securing loans. Another $150 billion would underwrite loans to other business sectors. Details on the loan programs were fuzzy, but terms are sure to be heavily subsidized.

Fresh from primary campaigning, Sen. Bernie Sanders floated his own ideas — having the federal government keep paying employees’ paychecks and Medicare cover unmet healthcare needs stemming from the outbreak.

“The fastest way to deal with the economic crisis is for the federal government to guarantee that all employers will be able to meet their payroll and keep their workers on the payroll,” Sanders told reporters. “It is an expensive proposal, but I think that is the fastest and best way to make sure that working people in this country continue to have a paycheck.”

Overnight, the White House sent lawmakers a separate $46 billion emergency funding request to boost medical care for military service members and veterans, fund production of vaccines and medicines, build 13 quarantine centers at the southern border for migrants, make federal buildings safer, and reimburse Amtrak for $500 million in anticipated revenue losses, among other purposes.

The Trump request also reverses cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health that Trump proposed in his February budget for next year and would create a $3 billion fund for unanticipated needs.

Economists doubted that the massive economic rescue package being drafted would enough to stop millions of job losses, even if in the short term. It’s aimed at helping Americans without paychecks avoid foreclosure and other financial hardships and preventing businesses from sliding into bankruptcy.

The Treasury plan is on par with the $700 billion 2008 bank bailout or the nearly $800 billion 2009 recovery act. The White House proposal aims to provide a massive tax cut for wage-earners, $50 billion for the airline industry and $250 billion for small businesses. But nothing is set in concrete, and all the pressure is for the package to keep growing.

The amount that would be sent out in checks Americans is not yet decided. The White House said it liked GOP Sen. Mitt Romney’s idea for $1,000 checks, though not necessarily at that sum and not for wealthier people.

Senate Democrats produced their own $750 billion proposal, which includes $400 billion to shore up hospitals and other emergency operations in response to the global pandemic and $350 billion to bolster the safety net with unemployment checks and other aid to Americans.

In the House, Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., and Ben McAdams, D-Utah, released statements saying they had tested positive for COVID-19 — the first two known cases in Congress. Several other lawmakers have cycled in and out of self-isolation after exposure to individuals who had later tested positive for the virus.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

ICE says that starting Wednesday it is focusing its efforts on tracking down people in the U.S. without legal authorization who pose a risk to public safety or would be subject to mandatory detention on criminal grounds. The agency had been aggressively detaining anyone in the country without authorization as part of stepped up enforcement under the Trump administration.

The agency said in a statement that its investigations unit will focus on public safety and national security. That would include drug and human trafficking as well as anti-gang operations and child exploitation cases.

ICE said the change was temporary and intended to ensure the welfare and safety of the public and its agents.

It will not carry out enforcement operations at or near health care facilities except in “the most extraordinary circumstances” during the crisis.

Stocks fell in Tokyo, Sydney, Hong Kong and Seoul in early trading Thursday. Investors are in search of cash as fears of a prolonged coronavirus-induced recession take hold.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index gave up 0.7% to 16,5602.26, while in South Korea, the Kospi sank 6.5% to 1,487.85. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index slipped 4% to 21,397.56 and the Shanghai Composite index shed 1.9% to 2,676.79.

Australia’s S&P ASX/200 declined 2.3% to 4,840.80. Shares also fell in Southeast Asia.

The losses followed a more than 1,300 point, or 6.3%, decline Wednesday in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has now lost nearly all of its gains since President Trump’s inauguration. The Dow closed at 19,898.92.

Futures for the Dow and the S&P 500 were both down 1.5% early Thursday Asia time.

New York’s losses deepened after a temporary halt was triggered in the early afternoon. Even prices for investments seen as very safe, like longer-term U.S. Treasurys, have fallen as investors rush to raise cash.

The New York Stock Exchange said Wednesday it will temporarily close its iconic trading floor in lower Manhattan and move to all-electronic trading beginning Monday as a precautionary step amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Signs that the outbreak’s impact will be far reaching and prolonged have undermined efforts to staunch the bloodletting on the markets as investors find themselves without their usual safe havens from risk.

The price of oil fell 24% on Wednesday, dropping below $21 per barrel for the first time since 2002. By early Thursday, they had recovered some losses, with U.S. crude up 7.4% at $21.88 per barrel.

Brent crude, the international standard, was up 59 cents at $25.47 per barrel.

Markets have been incredibly volatile for weeks as Wall Street and the White House acknowledge the rising likelihood that the outbreak will cause a recession. The typical day this month has seen the U.S. stock market swing up or down by 4.9%. Over the last decade, it was just 0.4%.

The Dow, now at its lowest level since 2016, had surged more than 5% on Tuesday after Trump promised massive aid to the economy, but the number of infections keeps climbing, topping 200,000 worldwide.

The S&P 500, which dictates how 401(k) accounts perform much more than the Dow, is down nearly 30% from its record set last month, though it’s still above its level on Election Day 2016.

The S&P 500’s slide was so sharp that trading was halted for 15 minutes Wednesday. The losses deepened after trading resumed. The S&P 500 recouped some losses to close 5.2% lower, at 2,398.10.

The Nasdaq composite index shed 4.7% to 6,989.84.

As big swaths of the economy retrench while much of society comes to a halt in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus, investors have clamored for Congress, Federal Reserve and other authorities around the world to support the economy until it can begin to reopen.

They got a big shot of that Tuesday, when the Trump administration briefed lawmakers on a program that could surpass $1 trillion and the Fed announced its latest moves to support markets.

Investors are struggling with uncertainty about how badly the economy is getting hit, how much profit companies will make and how many companies may go into bankruptcy due to a cash crunch.

“It’s, it’s a very tough situation,” Trump said at a news conference, during which losses for stocks accelerated. “You have to do things. You have to close parts of an economy that six weeks ago were the best they’ve ever been…. And then one day you have to close it down in order to defeat this enemy.”

“The volatility is going to be here to stay,” said Brian Nick, chief investment strategist at Nuveen. “It’s about the virus and not the economic response.”

Even prices for longer-term U.S. Treasurys, which are seen as some of the safest possible investments, fell as investors sold what they could to raise cash. That pushed the yield on the 10-year Treasury sharply higher, to 1.24%. It had recently dropped below 1% for the first time ever.

Gold also fell, though Thursday it was up $5.20 per ounce at $5,483.10.

Investors are selling their highest-quality bonds to raise cash, thinking they will be the easiest to sell and will hold up the best. That’s paradoxically undercutting their prices further.

For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough, and those with mild illness recover in about two weeks. Severe illness including pneumonia can occur, especially in the elderly and people with existing health problems, and recovery could take six weeks in such cases.

All the uncertainty has pushed many people toward safety. Last month, investors pulled $17.5 billion out of stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, even though stocks set all-time highs in the middle of the month. Money-market funds, meanwhile, drew $25.5 billion, according to Morningstar.

The turmoil is also rocking foreign exchange markets as investors scrounge for U.S. dollars.

The dollar was at 109.20 Japanese yen Thursday, up from 108.07 late Wednesday. The euro fell to $1.0899 from $1.0913.

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AP Business Writers Alex Veiga, Damian Troise and Stan Choe contributed.

In a letter to Judge William Pauley on Tuesday, Roger Bennet Adler, Cohen’s attorney, argued that Cohen’s sentence should be modified “as a consequence of the Bureau of Prison being demonstrably incapable of safeguarding and treating B.O.P. inmates who are obliged to live in close quarters and are at an enhanced risk of catching coronavirus.”

Prisons and correctional facilities can be overcrowded and unhygienic, making inmates particularly vulnerable to an outbreak of the virus. The tight living quarters can make it hard to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines on social distancing, and in many facilities, disinfectants such as hand sanitizer are not allowed due to the alcohol content.

In his letter to the judge, Cohen’s lawyer attached blog posts and articles highlighting hygiene concerns and pointing to other states that have recently taken steps to shrink their prison population in order to protect inmates and those that work in prisons from a deadly outbreak.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday he has believed the coronavirus outbreak was “a pandemic, long before it was called a pandemic” — but in January, he explicitly played down concerns when asked about it.

“No, not at all,” Trump told CNBC in a Jan. 22 interview on CNBC when “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen asked him if there were worries about an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China becoming a “pandemic.”

“It’s going to be just fine,” Trump assured Kernen during the interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We have it totally under control.”

Trump’s revisionist claim to the contrary on Tuesday came as he discussed aggressive measures to stem the progress of a pandemic that has rocked financial markets and led to widespread restrictions in the United States on travel, schools, restaurants, theaters, shopping centers and other gathering places.

Trump was speaking at a White House press conference when a reporter asked about what many have noted was a change in tone on how he has spoken about the outbreak.

In recent days Trump has announced new, strict guidelines designed to slow the rate of virus transmission, called for cash payments to Americans to alleviate their financial distress from the pandemic, and said he was contemplating other actions.

At the same time, U.S. deaths from coronavirus have increased to at least 85, with more than 4,660 reported cases. Worldwide, there are more than 183,000 cases of coronavirus, and at least 7,167 deaths.

Some news reports have tied Trump’s new stance on coronavirus response to a projection that more than 2.2 million people in the United States alone would die from COVID-19 if the government and individuals did not take radical steps to restrict interactions between people.

That projection was made by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London, whose lead author, Neil Ferguson, has said he sent the analysis to the White House last week, according to The New York Times.

“Was there a shift in tone?” the reporter asked the president.

Trump said, “I didn’t feel different.”

“I’ve always known this is a, this is a real, this is a pandemic,” the president said.

“I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

“All you had to do was look at other countries, I think now it’s in almost a 120 countries, all over the world.

“No, I’ve always viewed it as serious,” he said. “There was no difference yesterday from days before. I feel the tone is similar but some people said it wasn’t.”

But during his Jan. 22 interview on CNBC, Trump claimed the virus was “totally under control.”

Kernen opened that interview by noting that “a case of coronavirus” had been identified in Washington state by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Have you been briefed by the CDC?” Kernen asked.

“I have,” Trump replied.

Kernen then asked: “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”

Trump said: “No. Not at all.”

“And, we’re, we have it totally under control,” Trump said.

“It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

On Feb. 28, Trump said that Democrats are using the coronavirus outbreak as a “hoax” to damage him and his administration.

“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” the president said at a campaign rally in South Carolina.

“One of my people came up to me and said: ‘Mr. President they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well.’ They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax that was on a perfect conversation,” he continued.

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said.

He also said that same day, “We have to take it very, very seriously. … We are preparing for the worst.”

″“My administration has taken the most aggressive action in modern history to prevent the spread of this illness in the United States. We are ready. We are ready. Totally ready.”

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Arizona, Florida and Illinois pressed ahead with their presidential primaries, recommending such precautions as putting tape on the floor to keep voters a safe distance apart, while Ohio called off its election hours before the polls were to open.

The official reaction to the crisis varied wildly across the U.S., despite new, more urgent warnings from the Trump administration, which called on Americans not to gather in groups of more than 10 and advised older people to stay home.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator for the federal response to the virus, urged millennials to lead the charge. Speaking at a White House briefing with members of the coronavirus task force, Birx said the nation needs young adults doing everything they can to avoid infection, but also protecting their parents and grandparents.

“We’re asking the younger generations to stop going out in public places, to bars and restaurants, and spreading asymptomatic virus onto countertops and in grocery stores and grocery carts,” Birx said.

Coronavirus infections across the country reached approximately 5,200, and the death toll climbed to at least 97, with more than half of the dead from Washington state. Worldwide, more than 7,300 have died.

President Donald Trump outlined Tuesday new FDA policies aimed at increasing testing in the U.S, including allowing states to authorize tests developed “within their borders” and expanding coverage of Medicare’s telemedicine services to help seniors with health problems stay home to avoid contracting the virus.

The president acknowledged Monday for the first time that the outbreak may send the economy into a recession and suggested that the nation may be dealing with the virus until July or August.

Amid the growing economic crisis, the White House is proposing a roughly $850 billion economic rescue package, a sweeping stimulus not seen since the Great Recession of 2008. The request will be outlined to Senate Republicans Tuesday and will aim to provide relief for small businesses and the airline industry and include sending checks to Americans in the next two weeks, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday.

“By making shared sacrifices, we can protect the health of our people and our economy and I think our economy will come back very rapidly,” Trump said. “If we do this right our country and the world frankly, but our country can be rolling again, very quickly. We can protect the health of our people and we can protect our economy.”

He added, “We have to fight that invisible enemy.”

Birx has said that millennials, those born in the 1980s and early ’90s, are vital to stopping the spread of the virus, in part because they grew up with social media and understand how to work and communicate without meeting in person.

But not all those millennials were listening. With beaches on Florida’s Gulf coast near Tampa still open, at least one was full of spring breakers. Gov. Ron Desantis said he would leave beach restrictions up to individual communities.

“It’s not probably advisable to have spring break gatherings,” but small beach groups are probably OK, he said. “I think the communities can work that out.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, praised the federal government’s response as he took only limited action amid the outbreak. Unlike other governors of heavily populated states, Abbott has not made explicit calls for limiting mass gatherings.

“This is not a time to panic,” he said. “It’s not as if we have never been through this before. We’ve been through this many, many times.”

The rapid work stoppage had Americans fretting about their jobs and their savings, threatened to overwhelm unemployment benefit programs, and heightened fears the country could plunge into a recession.

Election officials in the three states holding primaries said they were taking precautions to make sure voters could safely cast their ballots. The immediate problem: Hundreds of poll workers dropped out, forcing state officials to scramble.

“Please, please heed our call and volunteer,” said Marisel Hernandez, head of the election commission in Chicago. “Help us.”

Election officials in Illinois’ Cook County, home to Chicago, urged poll workers to use blue painter’s tape to mark the floor every 6 feet so voters could keep their distance while waiting in line.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans were holed up at home, with many thrown out of work until further notice as the list of businesses forced to close across the U.S. extended to restaurants, bars, gyms and casinos.

In Detroit, bus riders were stranded Tuesday after most drivers didn’t report to work, apparently concerned about the spread of the virus and confused as to whether Michigan’s new restrictions on gatherings included vehicles loaded with commuters.

The city canceled bus service shortly after 8 a.m. because of the shortage of drivers. Surprised riders waiting at stops across the city pulled out phones to try to get a lift from friends or family.

“Just now?” a maintenance man, Amadou Sanders, asked. “How am I going to get to work?”

Officials in six San Francisco Bay Area counties issued a “shelter-in-place” order affecting millions, requiring most residents to stay inside and venture out only for food, medicine or exercise for three weeks.

“I know today’s order is a radical step. It has to be. We need to act now, all of us,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the San Francisco Health Department.

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Health officials say that “social distancing” — encouraging people to avoid close contact with others — is a key to slow the spread of the virus and keep U.S. hospitals from being overwhelmed with a sudden deluge of patients.

Most people who come down with the disease have relatively mild symptoms, but it can be deadly for some, especially the elderly and those with underlying health problems. Most people infected with the virus recover in a matter of weeks.

The shutdowns touched every corner of the country: blackjack dealers in Las Vegas, theme park workers in Orlando, Florida, restaurant and bar employees nationwide, and winery workers in California. At least eight states called on all bars and restaurants to close at least part of the day.

With schools closed for tens of millions of children across the country, parents began using lesson plans that included flash cards, online learning, dog walks and creativity sessions. Many did this while juggling work conference calls, emails and memos. Others scrambled to find child care.

Associated Press writers Ed White in Detroit, Angela Charlton in Paris; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Kelli Kennedy and Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Sophia Tareen and Tammy Webber in Chicago; John O’Connor in Springfield, Illinois; Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta; Julie Watson in San Diego and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.

After giving an address Monday afternoon in which he said the country may be headed toward recession and urged social distancing, he later tweeted his confidence in and support for U.S. businesses while including the offensive remark.

“The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!” he wrote.

Many officials, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have criticized the phrase as inaccurate and potentially harmful in promoting racist associations between the virus and those from China.

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry condemned Trump’s comments, saying his tweet smeared China. “The U.S. should first take care of its own matters,” said Geng Shuang.

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But the military faces limits. Its health care system is geared more toward handling combat casualties than infectious diseases. And there are logistical and legal concerns about expanding the military’s role in civilian affairs, such as tasking it with enforcing quarantines. Defense officials also want to be careful not to do anything to weaken its ability to defend the nation.

A look at the military’s role in the crisis:

WHAT THE MILITARY IS DOING

At the request of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Pentagon has made housing available at four military bases for some passengers taken from the Grand Princess cruise ship, which was hit with a cluster of coronavirus cases. It also has made available housing at other bases for people entering the U.S. at certain civilian airports and needing monitoring.

At those bases, the people being given housing are cared for by civilian agencies, not the military.

Also, Army scientists are researching and testing vaccines for the coronavirus, in coordination with civilian agencies.

The most extensive role for the military thus far is by the National Guard, which is being called up by governors in several states to provide a range of support. More than 1,600 National Guard members have been called up so far. Some are helping at state emergency operations centers; others are providing transportation for civilian health care providers; and some are collecting and delivering test samples.

President Donald Trump has not federalized the National Guard as was done after the 9/11 attacks.

U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for defending the U.S. homeland, said in a statement Monday that any Defense Department assistance to the coronavirus crisis “would be secondary to our primary mission to defend the United States. A range of planning efforts cover scenarios which include aiding in the establishment of medical treatment sites, providing shelter for displaced persons, assisting with food transportation, and numerous other logistical efforts.”

WHAT THE MILITARY IS CONSIDERING

There are many ways the military could assist in the COVID-19 crisis, but few decisions have been made. Air Force Brig Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the top doctor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that defense officials are trying to identify “what’s within the realm of the possible,” while also spelling out what the trade-offs for that would be.

For example, Friedrichs said, if large numbers of National Guard members were mobilized for medical assistance, they would be taken away from their civilian jobs, which in some cases are in health services already engaged in fighting COVID-19.

The military could deploy mobile hospitals, but they generally are designed to deal with combat casualties, not infectious disease.

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The military also operates 36 fixed hospitals inside the United States; they could be used for the COVID-19 emergency, but in most cases they are relatively small. They exist to support active-duty military members, their families and some military retirees.

Some have questioned why the military cannot contribute to the civilian stockpile of ventilators, which might be in short supply in the weeks ahead. Jonathan Hoffman, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to say how many ventilators the Pentagon has in stock. Asked why, he replied, “Because the number deals with our deployable medical capability, which is a number that we’re not prepared to give out.”

The Pentagon also has two hospital ships, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy. They can be equipped to perform surgeries and provide other medical services, but the medical professionals who would be called on to staff the ships are currently performing those roles at domestic military hospitals and clinics or at private medical facilities.

WHAT THE MILITARY COULD DO IN AN EXTREME EMERGENCY

The Defense Department has a detailed pandemic response plan that lays out the myriad of things the military can do if requested, including a last-resort role in helping to impose quarantines and border restrictions.

The military could be called on to help establish “mass casualty” treatment sites, provide shelter for displaced persons, and help provide postal, power, water and sewer services, food deliveries and mortuary tasks. Troops also could provide logistics, communications and other support for law enforcement and the National Guard. Drafted and overhauled several times in recent years, the military’s plan is closely guarded and officials decline to discuss details publicly.

Officials, however, say that there is a broad assumption that local law enforcement, border control officers and the National Guard under the governors’ command would be the first line of defense to stem the spread of any virus through travel restrictions at the borders and along state lines or outbreak areas.

The plan assumes that intelligence oversight laws and the Posse Comitatus Act would remain in effect. Under that Civil War-era act, federal troops are prohibited from performing domestic law enforcement actions such as making arrests, seizing property or searching people. In extreme cases, however, the president can invoke the Insurrection Act, also from the Civil War period, which allows the use of active-duty or National Guard troops for law enforcement.

Under the military’s pandemic plan, the key goals are to defend the country, maintain the force and provide whatever support is needed to protect the national infrastructure and ensure that the government continues to function.

NATURE OF THE THREAT

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering were among three companies and 13 individuals charged in 2018 by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of a conspiracy to spread disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential race. The effort included social media postings and campaigns aimed at dividing American public opinion and sowing discord in the electorate, officials said.

Of the 13 Russians and three Russian companies charged by Mueller in a vast social media disinformation effort, Concord was the sole defendant to enter an appearance in Washington’s federal court and contest and the allegations.

Concord is controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman known as “Putin’s chef” for his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been hit with U.S. sanctions over Russian interference in the 2016 election and is charged alongside his company in the indictment brought by Mueller.

The company, with the help of a high-powered law firm, filed a series of motions over the last two years, including to dismiss charges and to exclude certain evidence from the case.

In January 2019, prosecutors said confidential material from the Russia investigation, which had been handed over to defense attorneys for Concord, was altered and released online as part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the special counsel’s Russia investigation. The files surfaced online in a link posted by a pro-Russia Twitter account. But the Justice Department stopped short of accusing Concord of leaking the material.

Still, they argued that the company’s request to have sensitive new evidence sent to Russia “unreasonably risks the national security interests of the United States.”

Some of the court appearances in the case have been unusually contentious, with the federal judge overseeing it chastising a lawyer for the company, Eric Dubelier, for references in court filings to Looney Tunes and the 1978 raunchy comedy “Animal House” to criticize the Mueller investigation.

“I’ll say it plain and simply: Knock it off,” U.S District Judge Dabney Friedrich told Dubelier at a January 2019 court appearance.

Dubelier, who has referred to the case as involving a “made up” crime, has made allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and even once accused the judge of bias.

But with the case approaching trial, prosecutors said they had to weigh the risk of potentially exposing sensitive national security information against the benefits of continuing with the case against a company that likely wouldn’t face any significant punishment in the U.S. In the court filing on Monday, prosecutors said Concord had been “eager and aggressive in using the judicial system to gather information about how the United States detects and prevents foreign election interference.”

“In short, Concord has demonstrated its intent to reap the benefits of the Court’s jurisdiction while positioning itself to evade any real obligations or responsibility,” prosecutors wrote in Monday’s filing. “It is no longer in the best interests of justice or the country’s national security to continue this prosecution.”

Concord Catering did not have attorneys appear in court, but prosecutors said they would seek to drop charges against that company as well because it too was controlled by Prigozhin and “based on the likelihood that its approach to litigation would be the same as Concord.”

Prosecutors vowed to continue to pursue their case against the 13 Russians who were named in Mueller’s indictment, along with the troll farm that Concord was alleged to have funded, the Internet Research Agency.

Trump meandered from denial to grudging acceptance, and he seeded conflicting, inaccurate and eyebrow-raising commentary on a country desperate for unvarnished, even shock-to-the-system, guidance.

Throughout the global coronavirus crisis, Trump’s statements have been colored by baseless optimism. Sometimes, his commentary has been flatly wrong. Frequently, it’s been amplified by aides and allies with the help of conservative media.

As he confronts the most serious national crisis of his presidency, the lack of precision has cut into Trump’s credibility at a moment when he needs it more than ever, analysts say.

“It started out with really what can only be described as full-blown denial,” said Brian Ott, a communication studies professor at Texas Tech University who has done extensive research on the president’s social media rhetoric. “Then as the crisis spread and as it became a pandemic … it just wasn’t viable rhetoric anymore because it wasn’t at all where the American public was at.”

Early on, the president downplayed the coronavirus as something similar to the seasonal flu — nothing that Americans should be overly concerned about and something that would quickly pass.

His optimistic public comments often didn’t match the reality on the ground or even how U.S. public health agencies were approaching the looming crisis behind the scenes.

In one of his first substantive public remarks on the virus, during a visit in late January to an auto parts manufacturer in Michigan, Trump acknowledged that the U.S. had seen a smattering of infections but predicted a “very good ending for it.”

At that moment, there were only a handful of known cases in the United States, but the virus had already infected thousands in China, and the World Health Organization had declared the virus a “public health emergency of international concern.”

“We think we have it very well under control,” Trump told the assembled workers. “We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. …. That I can assure you.”

The next day the Trump administration said it would suspend entry into the United States by any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the past 14 days, excluding the immediate family members of U.S. citizens or permanent residents. By then, more than 200 people had died, and nearly 9,800 had been infected worldwide.

Weeks later — on Feb. 25 — his top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, sought to ease volatile markets by assuring investors that the administration had the virus “contained” and “it was pretty close to airtight.” Kudlow added that coronavirus may be a “human tragedy” but predicted it wouldn’t be an “economic tragedy.” At one point, when the stock market was plunging, he even mentioned the prospect of “buying the dip.”

The optimism was jarring. As Kudlow was attempting to reassure markets, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of an incoming “disruption to everyday life.” The spread of the coronavirus in the U.S., agency officials warned, was “not so much of a question of if” but rather “a question of when.”

Even as Democratic criticism of his approach mounted, the president — backed by aides and allies — turned to lashing out that his enemies were trying to use the catastrophe to score political points. By late February, after confirmed infections in the U.S. had accelerated, Trump accused political opponents and the media of pushing a “new hoax.”

“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right?” Trump lamented during a campaign rally in South Carolina days after the CDC warning. “Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it.”

Trump, throughout the crisis, has also seemed out of tune with aides and public health experts offering him guidance.

At a White House news briefing Sunday evening, Trump claimed that his administration had “tremendous control” in containing the virus, even as the infection rate is surging in the U.S. Minutes later — and after Trump had left the news conference — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease specialist, told reporters, “The worst is yet ahead for us.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that Trump’s efforts to downplay the health crisis was particularly galling because public health officials had already warned that the virus was going to be explosive.

“The trustworthiness of a president in a time of national crisis is his most important asset,” Jamieson said. “And when he says things that are proven to be untrue, or problematic from a public health standpoint, that erodes his credibility and the capacity of the country to prepare adequately.”

Days later, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham echoed the president’s frustration on Fox News. “I just want to stress to politicians and the media to stop using this as a tool to politicize things and to scare people,” Grisham said on “Fox & Friends.”

But it’s not only Democrats who have been frustrated by the president’s messaging throughout the crisis.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Trump should “step back” and let a public health official do the talking.

“I think that the messaging at the federal level has been inconsistent, and when you are dealing with a novel virus like this, it’s very important that health professionals be out front and that there be a consistent message,” Collins said.

The White House effort to blame Democrats and the media for putting too bright of a spotlight on the health crisis was further amplified by some commentators on Fox News and its related operations.

Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren sought to minimize the crisis by raising the California homelessness epidemic. “Call me crazy, but I am far more concerned with stepping on a used heroin needle than I am getting the coronavirus, but maybe that’s just me,” she said.

Fox Business host Trish Regan said the president’s opponents were trying to “create mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off” to undercut his reelection effort. Conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested that the president is the target of “virus terrorism.”

Not all Fox News personalities bought into the conspiracy peddling. Last week, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum expressed exasperation when Seema Verma, Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, repeatedly ignored her question about whether American hospitals had enough ventilators and intensive care units to deal with patients who may be stricken.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, without uttering the president’s name, questioned the wisdom of baseless optimism, and he offered Trump some advice.

“In a crisis, it’s more important than ever to be calm,” Carlson said. “But staying calm is not the same as remaining complacent. It does not mean assuring people that everything will be fine. We don’t know that. Instead, it’s better to tell the truth. That is always the surest sign of strength.”

By Saturday, the president had abruptly changed course, tweeting “SOCIAL DISTANCING!” to his more than 70 million Twitter followers.

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Associated Press writer David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.

The debate was relocated from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., amid growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Check out the blog below to see how the debate unfolded in real time.

Under the restrictions, American citizens, green card holders and others are still allowed to return home to the U.S., but will be funneled to 13 airports and be subjected to health screenings and quarantine orders, according to two people familiar with the plan who spoke on condition of anonymity before the official announcement expected Saturday.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that she and the Trump administration are close to agreement on a coronavirus aid package to reassure anxious Americans by providing sick pay, free testing and other resources, hoping to calm teetering financial markets amid the mounting crisis.

Final details were being worked out, but the top House Democrat, who held daylong talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, expected an announcement Friday. The House could then swiftly vote.

“We have — are near — to an agreement,” Pelosi said, emerging from her office at the Capitol shortly before 9 p.m. Thursday.

The potential deal between Congress and the White House would cap a tumultuous week in which Washington strained for a comprehensive response to the outbreak that is testing the nation’s political, financial and health care systems.

It builds on an emergency $8.3 billion package approved last week and is aimed at providing additional health and financial resources to arrest the sudden spread of the pandemic and the kind of economic fallout unseen in a generation. Pelosi promised in a letter to colleagues that a third package was yet to come.

The new sick leave benefit would require businesses to provide up to 14 days of paid leave to workers who are home quarantined with the virus, with the federal government reimbursing them through tax credits. The bill enhances unemployment benefits for the jobless and boosts food and nutrition programs for working families, students and seniors.

The late announcement was intended to boost confidence, Democrats said.

“We felt that putting together something that the American people can see cooperation on between the two parties in this difficult moment would be a confidence builder,” said Rep. Richard Neal, D-N.J., the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, joining Pelosi at the Capitol, “and I think that we approached it that way.”

Meanwhile, the Capitol, White House and Supreme Court all declared themselves off limits to the public for now, symbols of a nation hunkering down.

Democrat Joe Biden, President Donald Trump’s chief rival, criticized him for playing down the threat for weeks and promised if he becomes president to “always tell you the truth.”

Amid a wave of closures and cancellations, the coronavirus question got personal for Trump and some members of Congress.

Just days after meeting Trump and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., the communications chief for Brazil’s president, Fábio Wajngarten, tested positive for the coronavirus. A photo of the president, the senator and Wajngarten shows the trio shoulder-to-shoulder at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last weekend.

It was the first time someone infected with the virus was known to have been in close proximity to the president.

Scott said he was isolating himself. Trump, 73, said he was unworried.

“We had dinner in Florida at Mar-a-Lago with the entire delegation,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “But we did nothing very unusual. We sat next to each other for a period of time.” Asked whether he should be tested, Trump replied, “I am not concerned.”

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said “the White House is aware of public reports that a member of the Brazilian delegation‘s visit to Mar-a-Lago last weekend tested positive for COVID-19” though; confirmatory testing is pending.

She said: “Both the President and Vice President had almost no interactions with the individual who tested positive and do not require being tested at this time.” GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was also at Trump’s club on the weekend, joined a growing list of lawmakers who have chosen to isolate themselves as a precaution.

On Wednesday, Trump announced a month-long restriction on travel from most of Europe, set to begin at midnight Friday night. He said Thursday that he was considering other major restrictions, such as limiting travel to domestic hot spots like California and Washington state, without spelling out how he would manage such an extraordinary effort. The State Department issued a global advisory cautioning U.S. citizens to “reconsider travel abroad.”

So far, the administration’s haphazard response and the stalemate in Congress have resulted in more uncertainty as the crisis roils the financial markets and rewrites daily life for Americans.

Biden and Bernie Sanders, the other main contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, delivered their own speeches the day after Trump’s prime-time address to the nation.

Biden called for free virus testing, temporary pop-up hospitals and paid leave for all Americans to help cover paychecks as workers self-quarantine, care for the ill or lose jobs over the virus.

“No president can promise to prevent future outbreaks, but I can promise you this, when I’m president we will be better prepared, respond better and recover better,” Biden declared.

Sanders also proposed swift federal intervention and money to help people suffering in their health or finances.

As talks between Pelosi and Mnuchin continued, lawmakers from both parties expressed alarm after what they called heated and testy briefings with Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, and other public health officials. Lawmakers were particularly frustrated that U.S. officials have tested relatively few patients.

“We’re basically, in my opinion, flying blind,” said Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev.

As classes, sports events, concerts and conferences were canceled across the nation, Trump said he will halt his signature campaign rallies, telling reporters he needs a “little separation until such time as this goes away.” Biden and Sanders said they would no longer hold large political gatherings and their staffs would work from home as the race for the presidency moved online.

The storied Smithsonian said it was canceling all public events and will temporarily close its network of museums and the National Zoo, starting Saturday. And Trump proposed postponing this summer’s Olympics in Japan for a year, too.

The financial markets endured another day of alarming slides and the Federal Reserve moved to try to ease the disruptions by announcing that it will sharply increase its purchases of short-term Treasury bonds.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to be over it.

While Trump said all European travel except from Britain would be cut off, there were clarifications and criticisms of the cornerstone of his attempt to curtail the crisis.

Homeland Security officials said the new travel restrictions would apply only to most foreign nationals who have been in the Schengen Area at any point in the 14 days prior to their scheduled arrival to the United States. The area encompasses most European countries, among them France, Italy, German, Greece, Austria and Belgium.

The restrictions don’t apply to legal permanent residents, immediate family of U.S. citizens or others identified in the proclamation signed by Trump. Vice President Mike Pence said the administration is also asking travelers returning to the U.S. from Europe to voluntarily quarantine for 14 days.

But some health officials, and even a former high-ranking Trump administration official, suggested Trump’s European travel restriction was futile because the virus is already widespread on U.S. soil.

“In two weeks, we will regret wasting time and energy on travel restrictions and wish we focused more on hospital preparation and large scale community mitigation,” Trump’s former homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert, tweeted Thursday.

Trump claimed falsely Thursday that the U.S. is currently screening all Americans and foreigners who are entering the country, saying, “people coming in have to be tested.” And he claimed that those who return are being forced to isolate themselves, adding: “It’s going to be a pretty strong enforcement of quarantine.” No widespread quarantine orders have been announced.

___

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Lauran Neergaard, Martin Crutsinger, Laurie Kellman and Kevin Freking in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

From the Rose Garden, Trump said, “I am officially declaring a national emergency,” unleashing as much as $50 billion for state and local governments to respond to the crisis.

Trump also announced a range of executive actions, including a new public-private partnership to expand coronavirus testing capabilities with drive-through locations, as Washington tries to subdue the virus whose spread is roiling markets, shuttering institutions and disrupting the lives of everyday Americans.

But he asserted “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the slow rollout of testing.

The hard-fought aid package will provide free testing, sick pay for workers, enhanced unemployment benefits and bolstered food programs.

The House passed the bill after midnight on a bipartisan vote, 363-40. It now goes to the Senate.

“We did what we said we were going to do: Put families first,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Trump tweeted his approval, all but ensuring that wary Republicans would join with a robust vote. “Good teamwork between Republicans & Democrats as the House passes the big CoronaVirus Relief Bill,” he tweeted Saturday. “People really pulled together. Nice to see!”

Trump’s tweet of approval instilled fresh energy in the measure, all but ensuring that wary Republicans would join with a robust vote.

The crush of activity capped a tumultuous week in Washington as the fast-moving virus left ordinary Americans suddenly navigating self-quarantines, school closures and a changed way of life.

The White House was dealing with the crisis on multiple fronts as it became increasingly personal to the president.

Trump has been known to flout public health advice — and was eagerly shaking hands during an event Friday — but acknowledged he “most likely” will be tested soon. This, after he was exposed to several people who have tested positive for the virus. The White House physician indicated later that Trump’s interactions were low-risk and testing is not necessary.

Trump took a number of other actions to bolster energy markets, ease the financial burden for Americans with student loans and give medical professionals additional flexibility in treating patients during the public health crisis.

Central to the aid package from Congress, which builds on an emergency $8.3 billion measure approved earlier, are the free testing, sick pay and family leave provisions.

Providing sick pay for workers is a crucial element of federal efforts to stop the rapid spread of the infection. Officials warn that the nation’s healthcare system could quickly become overwhelmed with gravely sick patients, as suddenly happened in Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus.

The ability to ensure paychecks will keep flowing — for people self-quarantining or caring for others — can help assure Americans they will not fall into financial hardship. The legislation also offers three months of paid family and medical leave. Small and mid-sized employers will be reimbursed through tax credits.

Pelosi negotiated the deal with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in days of around-the-clock negotiations with cross-town phone calls, even as Trump was speaking at the White House.

Voting in the Senate is not yet set, with senators out of town for the weekend. But Senate Leader Mitch McConnell canceled a planned recess week and senators were scheduled to return Monday. He said he expects most senators will want to “act swiftly.”

Both Mnuchin and Pelosi promised a third coronavirus package will follow soon, with more aggressive steps to boost the U.S. economy, which economists fear has already slipped into recession.

The financial markets closed on an upswing after one of the worst nosedives since 1987.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to be over it.

Trump on Friday also told people to expect the imminent rollout of a web site “facilitated” by Google that would guide users through a series of questions to determine whether they should be screened for the virus. If testing is recommended, users would be directed to a local testing location, which could include parking lots at Walmart, Target, Walgreens and other chains.

“It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past,” Trump said in a thinly veiled dig at the Obama administration’s disastrous rollout in 2013 of its online health care marketplace.

But how quickly is in question. Google said the website, from its life science division Verily, is still “in the early stages of development.” Verily first plans to roll out testing out in the Bay Area of San Francisco, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time, the company said in a statement.

Trump said he was gratified that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tested negative for the virus, after the pair sat next to each other for an extended time last weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. A senior aide to Bolsonaro tested positive.

The White House physician, Sean Conley, said in a memo late Friday that Trump was also exposed to a second guest at the club dinner, “sharing the table with the president.” That guest has since tested positive for the virus. Still, Conley said he regarded the interactions as low risk and testing “is not currently indicated.”

Trump’s daugher, Ivanka Trump, worked from home Friday after meeting Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, now in isolation at a hospital after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Attorney General William Barr, who also met the Australian official, stayed home Friday, though he “felt great and wasn’t showing any symptoms,” according to his spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec.

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Alan Fram, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Lauran Neergaard, Martin Crutsinger, Laurie Kellman, Michael Balsamo and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Trump has now had multiple direct and indirect contacts with people who have tested positive for the pandemic virus, which on Friday prompted him to declare a state of emergency as schools and workplaces across the country shuttered, flights were canceled and Americans braced for war against the threat.

Trump spent time last weekend at his private club in Florida with at least three people who have now tested positive. The Brazilian Embassy in Washington announced late Friday that the country’s chargé d’affaires, Nestor Forster, tested positive after sitting at Trump’s dinner table. So, too, have a top aide to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and an individual who attended a fundraiser Sunday with Trump, according to two Republican officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private health matters.

Several top administration officials, including Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump, also met last week with an Australian Cabinet minister who on Friday was confirmed positive.

Multiple lawmakers and citizens across the country who have had the same degree of exposure have opted to voluntarily quarantine themselves and get tested out of an abundance of caution.

But Trump, who has long tried to minimize the threat posed by the virus, insisted Friday — contrary to the advice of many medical professionals — that he did not need to isolate himself because he wasn’t exhibiting symptoms. He conceded that he would “most likely” submit to testing “fairly soon,” but continued to flout public health officials’ advice by repeatedly shaking with attendees hands during a Rose Garden press conference on efforts to combat the pandemic.

Even so, Trump told the nation, “All Americans have a role to play in defeating this virus.”

“Anyone can be a carrier for the virus and risk transmission to older Americans and those with underlying health conditions,” Trump said, adding, “We must take all precautions and be responsible for the actions that we take and that we see other people take.”

The president, according to two people close to the White House, has been reluctant to take the test for fear it would project weakness or worry. Trump has wanted to appear in full control during the crisis, especially as he tries to calm stock markets amid historic drops, and has expressed concerns that taking personal steps could undermine that appearance.

Asked whether he was being selfish by refusing to isolate himself to avoid potentially infecting others and what advice he had for people who may be receiving contradictory messages, Trump said, “I think they have to listen to their doctors.”

White House officials insist Trump had only minimal contact with Fábio Wajngarten, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s communications director, who has tested positive for the virus. Wajngarten posed for a photo with Trump, shook his hand and attended a birthday party held for Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating the president’s eldest son. Trump had more extensive contact with Forster, but the White House physician said in a Friday night letter that because “all interactions occurred before any symptoms were onset,” the White House considers them “low risk” so “there is no indication for home quarantine at this time.”

In addition to his direct exposure, Trump has also had repeated contact with lawmakers who chose to isolate themselves after being exposed to people who later tested positive. That included Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who traveled aboard Air Force One with the president Monday and found out about the positive test mid-flight; South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was working from home after spending time at Mar-a-Lago and attending his own meeting with Peter Dutton, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs; and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who also interacted with the Brazilian delegation.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said Ivanka Trump, who met with Dutton, worked from home Friday “out of an abundance of caution,” but said Dutton had been asymptomatic during their interaction, so the White House Medical Unit determined she was “exhibiting no symptoms and does not need to self-quarantine.”

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said she’d received the same instructions, “in accordance with CDC guidance.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise those who have been in “close contact with a person with symptomatic laboratory-confirmed COVID-19″ to remain home and practice social distancing, but experts’ guidance has been mixed when it comes to those who are not exhibiting symptoms.

People who are exposed to the virus don’t show symptoms immediately; there is an incubation period of anywhere from two to 14 days. And the CDC is most concerned with close contact, which it defines as being coughed on or within about 6 feet of someone who is sick for a prolonged period of time. The CDC doesn’t consider it risky to walk past someone with the virus or to be briefly in the same room with them.

Many doctors across the country, however, have been advising those with any exposure to take precautions. And Trump, who is 73, is considered to be at higher risk of developing serious complications because of his age.

The president should get tested, even if he is not exhibiting symptoms, said Stephen Morse, a Columbia University expert on the spread of diseases.

”Anyone who’s infected is a risk of spreading it to other people,” he said. “That can be true of people who are infected but don’t have symptoms.”

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at the George Washington University Milken School of Public Health who once served as the health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, said COVID-19 is “highly transmittable” and anyone who comes within six feet of someone who is infected could become infected and spread it, without even knowing they are sick.

“We are at a time of an international public health emergency,” she said, so everybody should abide by public health guidelines, “no matter their position or their title.”

Any administration official with known exposure, she said, “should follow the same guidance as anyone else” and be self-quarantining and monitoring their symptoms.

As for the president, she said, “in order to be the commander-in-chief of the country … he needs to take care of himself.”

___

Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard in Washington and Michael Stobbe in New York contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump refused to accept any responsibility for the slow rate of coronavirus testing in the United States, saying on Friday that he was “given a set of circumstances” that wasn’t meant for the high numbers of potential COVID-19 infections.

“What we’ve done, and one of the reasons people are respecting what we’ve done, is we’ve gotten it done very early, and we’ve also kept a lot of people out,” Trump said during a press conference in the Rose Garden.

During the briefing, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump whether he took responsibility for the testing lag, which one member of his own task force called “a failing.”

“No, I don’t take responsibility at all. Because we were given a — a set of circumstances, and we were given rules, regulations and specifications from a different time. It wasn’t meant for this kind of — an event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about,” Trump responded.

In reality, America’s low rate of COVID-19 testing has drawn criticism from health experts around the world, who say the slow rate of testing obscures the actual rate of infection in the United States, which is likely far higher than tests have so far confirmed. 

During the earliest stages of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed faulty tests to state and local health departments. Once the flawed tests were discovered and discarded,  bureaucratic red tape held up the process of granting exemptions to private labs to make their own tests. 

As criticism of the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing protocol has intensified, and testing in other countries such as South Korea has outpaced the U.S. by orders of magnitude, Trump has sought to shift the blame onto his predecessor, Barack Obama.

On Friday, asked about testing rates, Trump brought up the example of the 2009 swine flu, or H1N1 epidemic, in order to criticize Obama and boast of his success.

“If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this, they didn’t do testing like this, and they lost approximately 14,000 people. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late,” Trump said. 

Former Obama administration official Ron Klain, who managed the 2014 Ebola outbreak, disputed Trump’s assessment. “The Obama administration tested 1 million people for H1N1 in the first month after the first US diagnosed case,” Klain tweeted on Thursday. “The first US coronavirus case was 50+ days ago. And we haven’t event tested 10,000 people yet.”

This is not the first time Trump has attacked Obama’s outbreak response as inadequate, an argument that has political implications as Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, appears increasingly likely to be Trump’s 2020 Democratic opponent.

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion,” Trump said at a White House meeting with airline executives in early March. 

“That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.”

Yet experts and laboratory trade organizations say there was no “decision,” and they don’t know what Trump is referring to.

“We aren’t sure what rule is being referenced,” Michelle Forman, a spokeswoman for the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told The Washington Post in early March. 

“To our knowledge, there were some discussions about laboratory developed test rules but nothing was ever put into place. So we are not aware of anything that changed how LDTs are regulated.”

Moreover, the rules that govern how testing labs respond to emergencies aren’t Obama-era rules at all — they’re George W. Bush-era rules, part of his administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policy. 

In 2004, Bush signed into law the Project BioShield Act, which permitted the FDA to issue Emergency Use Authorizations to labs during public health crises. If a lab had a new treatment or test that seemed promising, the FDA would fast-track its approval process.

But these details do not appear to have hampered Trump.

On Friday, as confirmed U.S. cases topped 1,700, the president again zeroed in on what he said was “a testing problem” that Obama had failed to fix.

“For decades the CDC looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it,” Trump tweeted early Friday morning. “It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President Obama made changes that only complicated things further,” Trump tweeted.

“Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now. The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!” Trump said.

Trump didn’t specify what “changes” Obama made. According to experts, there weren’t any.

This story first appeared on CNBC.com. More from CNBC:

• Circuit breakers, triggered for the first time in 20 years, pass a crucial test
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Declaring a national emergency, President Donald Trump and senior staffers laid out a new testing strategy designed to screen hundreds of thousands of Americans at drive-thru centers based around major retail chains.

Countries including South Korea and Germany have been using that approach for weeks, allowing people to quickly provide a throat or nasal swab for testing without leaving their cars.

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“We want to make sure that those who need a test can get a test very safely, quickly and conveniently,” Trump said at a news conference in the Rose Garden. But he added that the test is not intended for everyone, such as those without symptoms.

The moves come a day after one of the government’s top health officials called the initial testing effort “a failing” and health care professionals, politicians and patients across the country complained about lack of access to testing.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is the leading the coronavirus task force, said the U.S. can currently test 15,000 to 20,000 patients per day, but added that the number would increase “very soon.”

Health officials said Friday that a new website “facilitated” by Google would guide users through a series of questions to determine whether they should be screened. If testing is recommended, users would be directed to a local testing location, which could include parking lots at Walmart, Target, Walgreen’s and other major chains. People will be able to log on to the screening website later to view test results, according to the administration.

Verily, a health care company under Google, confirmed that it is working to “help triage” people for screening and said the effort will first launch in the San Francisco Bay area. The company offered no details about what the tool would look like or when it would launch.

The administration’s coordinator for the virus response acknowledged growing scrutiny of the government’s testing effort.

“I understand a lot of this behind-the-scenes action over the last couple of weeks was invisible to the press and the American people,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, a government researcher and health official.

For weeks, public health experts have warned that the U.S. testing effort is being stymied by the limited number of labs running the COVID-19 tests and confusion among health care workers over who can be tested.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells people to seek testing if they have certain symptoms of the flu-like illness caused by the coronavirus – fever, cough and trouble breathing – and if they have traveled recently to a coronavirus outbreak area or have been in close contact with someone who’s been infected.

Ultimately, it’s up to the doctor to decide who should get tested.

In many states, health officials have parroted the CDC guidance when telling doctors who to test. But in some states, officials have varied a bit, depending on a range of factors, including availability of tests and whether the virus is known to be spreading there.

A New York man said he ran into hurdles trying to get tested after the death of a business associate who was infected with the coronavirus. Joseph Faraldo said he began feeling ill earlier this month and tested negative for the flu. He said he called the state health department and “they were useless,” and then the city health department failed to call him back as promised.

His doctor sent him to a clinic where he was tested Wednesday. He expects results Friday.

“I think I was pretty lucky, they told me come on in,” Faraldo said.

Oklahoma used more than half of the state’s testing capacity Wednesday to test 58 members of the Utah Jazz basketball organization after player Rudy Gobert tested positive. Those tests results showed one other player, Donovan Mitchell, also tested positive.

Oklahoma state epidemiologist Laurence Burnsed said it would have been too risky to transport the team back to Utah for testing without knowing who might be positive.

The CDC also tells doctors to give priority to the elderly or those who have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19, which can cause pneumonia. Doctors are supposed to prioritize medical workers or others who have been in contact with a confirmed case.

The agency recommends people be tested for flu, to rule that out, because many of the symptoms are similar and it is flu season.

Meanwhile, some researchers are trying to estimate how many Americans are actually infected.

Earlier research suggests that for every documented, confirmed case, seven or more people are infected but not diagnosed, said Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University scientist noted for his work on flu predictions.

That suggests there could be 14,000 or more infected people in the United States right now, he said.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. The vast majority of people recover from COVID-19 in a couple of weeks.

The U.S. testing effort has been hobbled by a series of delays, including flaws with the testing kits first distributed by the federal government and bureaucratic hurdles that held up testing by private labs at hospitals, universities and testing chains.

Public health labs across the country are now running the tests, and large commercial labs like LabCorp and Quest are ramping up too. Broad-scale testing is a critical part of tracking and containing viral outbreaks.

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Responding to complaints, the Trump administration named a testing “czar” at the Department of Health and Human Services. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, will be responsible for coordinating between the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as private labs and state and local government.

Medicare also announced it will pay about $36 for the CDC coronavirus test and around $51 for tests from other providers. Private insurers have said they would cover the tests.

Swiss medical company Roche received emergency approval from the FDA to run coronavirus tests on its automated, high-volume testing system.

The approval is expected to help U.S. labs dramatically increase their testing capacity, although Roche’s system is mainly available at large health facilities. Roche said the test takes about 3 1/2 hours to run and can deliver as many as 4,000 results per day.

Currently most U.S. labs are testing using a manual method that involves mixing chemicals and processing small batches. Testing times vary by lab and can range from four to eight hours.

Separately, the FDA posted on Twitter that labs having problems getting supplies for collecting patient samples for testing should call the agency’s toll-free information hotline.

“The demand is very high,” said Dr. Bobbi Pritt, a pathologist and lab director at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “There are going to be shortages at first before we can really ramp this up.”

Hospitals and other health systems will have to prioritize testing for patients who truly need it, versus those who may be worried but don’t have symptoms, Pritt said.

Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe in New York and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.

The person attended a Trump fundraising at the president’s Florida resort on Sunday.

Trump also spent time last weekend with a Brazilian official who tested positive just days later.

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During a White House press conference, Trump said he was gratified that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tested negative for the virus, after the pair sat next to each other for an extended period of time last weekend. A senior aide to Bolsonaro tested positive.

“We have no symptoms whatsoever,” said Trump, who has not gotten tested but said Friday he would “most likely” be tested “fairly soon.”

President Donald Trump has turned to a familiar playbook as he tries to grapple with the spiraling coronavirus outbreak, blaming immigrants for the country’s problems and casting the global health pandemic as another case of the U.S. against the world.

It’s an approach that public health officials say ignores the new reality of a situation that is fueling panic and confusion and fundamentally altering the American way of life.

But it’s business as usual for an isolationist president who once proposed barring Muslims from entering the country and has worked throughout his presidency to fortify the nation’s borders and find novel ways to keep out those he deems unworthy, diseased or unsafe.

The pattern was especially jarring during Trump’s rare Oval Office address to the nation Wednesday night. Instead of calling on Americans to lock arms with other nations to take on a common foe, Trump instead pointed the finger. He blamed Europe for fueling the virus’ continued advancement — even as the U.S. has struggled to provide basic testing, local cases skyrocket and pockets of disease increase.

Trump credited his decision to restrict travel from China for keeping the U.S. case count low and then announced he would be extending his ban to some of America’s closest allies as he took the unprecedented step of sharply restricting travel from much of Europe to the U.S.

“The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots,” Trump said. “As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.”

To be sure, infectious disease experts agree that limiting travel from countries badly affected by a virus can help stop its spread. The impacted region is home to several countries that have been struggling to contain mass outbreaks. And 70% of new cases worldwide are in Europe, Vice President Mike Pence said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

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But public health and homeland security officials say that, at this stage in the outbreak, a different focus is warranted, given that the virus has already spread throughout most of the continental U.S., with hotspots already established in states including New York, California and Washington. The virus is now spreading person-to-person, within U.S. communities across the nation.

“There’s little value to European travel restrictions,” concluded Trump’s former national security adviser Tom Bossert, who called the president’s move a “Poor use of time & energy” in a series of tweets.

“Earlier, yes. Now, travel restrictions/screening are less useful,” Bossert wrote on Twitter. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe. We MUST focus on layered community mitigation measures-Now!”

Bossert added that if the U.S. does not implement aggressive mitigation measures like shutting schools and halting public gatherings to try to halt the virus’s spread, the U.S. could, ironically, “end up infecting or reinfecting Europe.”

European Union officials were quick to slam the president’s “unilateral” decision, declaring the virus a “global crisis, not limited to any continent” that “requires cooperation rather than unilateral action.”

“As you know, it’s a virus that’s gone pandemic. It’s all over the world, knows no borders, knows no nationalities,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told Trump Thursday. “And I think we all need to work together in the world on this.”

More than 127,000 people in more than 110 countries have now been infected by the virus, with the vast majority in four countries: China, South Korea, Iran and Italy. More than 4,700 people have died worldwide.

Most people infected by the new virus have only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough, though symptoms can be severe, including pneumonia, especially in older adults and people with existing health problems. Recovery for mild cases takes about two weeks, while more severe illness may take three to six weeks, according to the World Health Organization.

Throughout his presidency and long before, Trump has painted immigrants — especially non-whites — as posing a public health and safety danger. In his speech launching his 2016 campaign, Trump cast Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, and he has repeatedly used disparaging language that dehumanizes migrants, saying those who enter the country illegally “infest” it and casting their arrival as an “invasion.”

Trump has said he wants to limit immigrants from “s******** nations,” declared a national emergency to fund construction of a border wall to keep out migrants, pushed asylum-seekers back over the border and tried to dissuade people from seeking asylum with a policy that ended up separating more than 2,500 children from their parents at the border in 2018.

Trump tweeted Tuesday, “We need the Wall more than ever!” as he shared a message from a conservative supporter who claimed a border wall would halt the spread of the “China Virus spreading across the globe.”

That history has prompted Democratic lawmakers to warn that immigrants might not come forward to seek tests for the virus or medical care in the face of potential infection.

“Immigrants afraid of seeking medical care. It’s downright dangerous during a public emergency,” tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal, whose district includes hard-hit Seattle.

Through it all, Trump has declined to align himself with fellow world leaders fighting the same crisis, with no global working group, no teleconferences and no words of brotherhood.

“I will never hesitate to take any necessary steps to protect the lives, health and safety of the American people,” Trump said in his address. “I will always put the well-being of America first.”

One nation, alone.

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“The IOC and the organizing committee are not considering cancellation or a postponement — absolutely not at all,” Seiko Hashimoto, an Olympic bronze medalist, told a news conference on Friday in Tokyo.

The International Olympic Committee and Tokyo organizers have stayed on message since the viral outbreak in China three months ago spread across Asia and then the globe: The games will open as schedule on July 24.

“I just can’t see having no people there. In other words, not allowing people,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “Maybe, and this is just my idea, maybe they postpone it for a year.”

Television broadcasters and sponsors have billions invested in the Olympics, and the crowded international sports calendar has little space for pushing the games back a year. Holding the Olympics without fans has been floated, as has simply canceling the Olympics, which has only happened during wartime.

“As best we can — so athletes will have no confusion or uncertainty — we will put in our maximum effort,” Hashimoto said. She competed in four Winter Olympics as a speed skater, winning bronze in 1992, and three Summer Olympics as a cyclist.

A cancellation or postponement will ripple in thousands of directions, hitting sponsor, television, 11,000 Olympic and 4,400 Paralympic athletes, staffs, airlines, hotels, and $1 billion lost in ticket sales. It also hurts 80,000 unpaid volunteers who will miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The IOC oversaw an Olympic flame-lighting ceremony on Thursday in Greece, another sign it hopes to go ahead in 4 1/2 months. The flame is to arrive in Japan on March 20 and will begin a four-month relay around the country on March 26.

Tokyo organizers have downsized the torch arrival ceremony and will announce a week before the relay begins if crowds will be limited, or the route will be changed.

“This ceremony demonstrates once more our commitment to the success of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020,” Bach said in Greece. He lauded officials who are “taking so many significant measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

___

More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Instead, insurers agreed to cover the full cost of diagnostic tests to see whether people have the disease. That step does not shield insured people from potentially high medical bills as a result of getting sick from the coronavirus.

Trump’s misstatement on health insurance was one of a number of claims in his prime-time address that were at odds with the facts. He inaccurately described part of his own plan to restrict travel from Europe and appeared to hold out false hope that people infected in the current outbreak will see new treatments to hasten their healing.

On Thursday, he misrepresented another aspect of U.S. defenses against the virus, saying inaccurately that everyone coming into the country is being tested for it.

A look at his remarks Wednesday night and Thursday:

TRUMP: “Earlier this week, I met with the leaders of (the) health insurance industry, who have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing.”

THE FACTS: No, they did not say they will cover co-pays for treatment. And Trump’s statement about surprise medical billing is questionable.

As Vice President Mike Pence stated more accurately, the insurers agreed to cover coronavirus testing with no cost sharing — so no co-pays or deductibles. That assurance applies to tests that can confirm or rule out the virus, and doesn’t extend to treatment or to other tests that the patient’s doctor may order. Consumers should check with their insurance company because policies may vary on this. They should not count on the president’s word.

What’s more, in the process of diagnosing COVID-19, other tests may be ordered. Insurers have not pledged to waive cost-sharing for those. Co-pays and deductibles may apply for imaging tests such as X-rays or CT scans of the chest, for example, and hospital stays are also subject to cost-sharing.

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Federal programs including Medicare, Medicaid, children’s health insurance and “Obamacare” all cover the coronavirus tests. Of particular importance, clinical diagnostic tests are covered under Medicare with no cost-sharing, a longstanding policy. However, cost-sharing may apply for other tests, such as imaging.

When people get sick from the coronavirus, there currently is no antiviral treatment that can cure the disease. Instead, the current treatment is geared to relieving patients’ symptoms and helping them to recover. For those who are very sick, that can involve using machinery to help them breathe. Insurers cover such treatment based on the terms of the individual’s health plan, including any applicable deductibles and co-pays.

As for “surprise billing,” that’s not something insurers can waive because they’re not the ones who do it. Doctors and hospitals generally spring those surprises.

Overall, says Karen Pollitz of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation: “We don’t have a rule yet that says all insurers must do ‘x,’ so flip your insurance card over and call the 800 number.”

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

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TRUMP: “If an American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested…. We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if they do come here, we’re quarantining. There’s going to be a pretty strong enforcement of quarantine.” — remarks Thursday.

THE FACTS: That’s not true. All people coming to the U.S. are not subject to mandatory, universal testing, nor are they being forced to quarantine.

As well, his proclamation detailing the broad travel ban that takes effect midnight Friday night on visitors from most of Europe does not specify that everyone allowed in will have to be tested. Trump was probably referring to plans that are expected to be put in place soon to channel those arriving from many European countries to certain airports, where they will receive screening and be subjected to quarantine instructions, just like visitors from China.

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TRUMP: “We are cutting massive amounts of red tape to make antiviral therapies available in record time. These treatments will significantly reduce the impact and reach of the virus.”

THE FACTS: People suffering from COVID-19 or those who get it in the current outbreak should not expect those therapies to be available to them. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health told a congressional committee Wednesday that while antivirals are being tested, “we don’t know if it works. I don’t want to promise anything.”

An antiviral is a medicine that specifically attacks a virus to hasten recovery. An experimental drug named remdesivir, which was being developed to fight Ebola, is being tested in COVID-19 patients in the U.S. and abroad. There also are studies underway using combinations of some HIV-attacking drugs.

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TRUMP: “We will be suspending all travel from Europe, except the United Kingdom, for the next 30 days.”

THE FACTS: That’s not exactly his plan.

First, the restriction does not apply to legal permanent residents of the U.S. or their families when they are returning from Europe. It also does not apply to U.S. citizens coming back from Europe, as Trump acknowledged.

As well, it apparently does not apply to Ireland, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine and several other European states. The proclamation released by the White House says the travel ban will affect the 26 European states in the Schengen Area. That’s most of Europe, but not “all.”

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TRUMP: “These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.”

THE FACTS: That is also wrong. The White House quickly clarified that the restriction on movement from Europe “only applies to human beings, not goods and cargo.”

But at the White House, President Donald Trump has flouted his own government’s advice on how to stay safe. As the fast-moving coronavirus edged into more U.S. states, Trump continued to shake hands with supporters and visitors, hold large events and minimize the threat posed by an outbreak that has infected more than 127,000 people and killed over 4,700 worldwide.

Trump has already had personal contact with several individuals known to have been exposed to the virus. They include Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who traveled aboard Air Force One with the president on Monday and found out mid-flight that he was among a handful of GOP lawmakers who were exposed to a person who tested positive for the virus after last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Trump ally, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., who also had contact with the same person at CPAC, was pictured shaking the president’s hand Friday when Trump visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters.

Gaetz and Collins have voluntarily quarantined themselves, as has several other legislators who had contact with the infected person at the conservative conference, including Trump’s incoming chief of staff.

During his weekend in Florida, Trump hosted Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at the Mar-a-Lago resort. Bolsonaro was joined by his communications director, Fábio Wajngarten, who tested positive for coronavirus just days after returning to Brazil. Wajngarten posted a photo of himself posing beside Trump and video from the event also showed him standing directly behind both presidents as they spoke to the crowd.

It marks the first time that someone known to have the virus was in close proximity to the president.

But despite all that, Trump continued Thursday to play down concerns that he may have already been exposed to individuals infected by the coronavirus and the White House said the president does not plan to be tested or go into self-quarantine.

“Let’s put it this way,” Trump said. “I am not concerned.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement Thursday that “exposures from the case are being assessed, which will dictate next steps.”

“As stated before, the White House Medical Unit and the United States Secret Service has been working closely with various agencies to ensure every precaution is taken to keep the First & Second Families, and all White House staff healthy,” Grisham said.

Grisham said that under U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, “there is currently no indication to test patients without symptoms, and only people with prolonged close exposure to confirmed positive cases should self-quarantine.”

Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who met Bolsonaro in Miami, said he will self-quarantine despite believing his personal risk is low.

Public health officials said Trump was sending the wrong message with his behavior and potentially putting the public at risk by sowing confusion and undermining efforts to keep people safe, especially if the situation grows worse.

“I think it’s beholden upon our leaders to follow the public health recommendations that the CDC, the government, public health are recommending and to emulate those practices,” said Dr. Jason Farley, a nurse epidemiologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. He said that it sends “mixed messaging to the public” when recommendations aren’t heeded.

When it comes to Trump, he added, “There’s nothing special about being the president of the United States that protects you from a virus like this unless you’re following the practices recommended for every 70-year-old.”

Trump, at 73, is considered at higher risk, although his press secretary said Monday he “remains in excellent health.”

Trump has repeatedly played down the risk, both to the public and himself, even as he claims that his administration is “taking this unbelievably seriously.”

“It will go away. Just stay calm,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “Everybody has to be vigilant and has to be careful. But be calm. It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen.”

After a week of mixed messages and false starts, and as government officials warned in increasingly urgent terms that the outbreak in the U.S. will only get worse, the administration suddenly seemed poised to act.

On Wednesday evening, Trump, in a rare Oval Office address to the nation, announced he is sharply restricting passenger travel from 26 European nations to the U.S. He blamed Europe for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus” and claimed that U.S. clusters were “seeded” by European travelers.

After Trump spoke, the White House cancelled a planned trip by the president to Nevada and Colorado this week “out of an abundance of caution.” Trump’s reelection campaign also postponed a planned March 19 event in Milwaukee that was set to feature the president.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illnesses, including pneumonia.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges those at higher risk of getting the virus to take “everyday precautions to keep space between yourself and others,” avoid crowds, handshaking and nonessential air travel.

“During a COVID-19 outbreak in your community, stay home as much as possible to further reduce your risk of being exposed,” the CDC writes.

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Overall, the CDC has suggested that workplaces encourage employees to stop shaking hands, use videoconferences for meetings when possible and hold meetings in well-ventilated spaces if meetings are necessary.

That hasn’t happened at the White House, where Trump, a self-professed “germophobe,” sat shoulder-to-shoulder Wednesday with aides and banking executives, traveled to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a Senate lunch and later in the day awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a well-attended ceremony, where he also shook hands with those in the front row.

The White House has suspended tours and some visitors to the building have been asked to report where they’ve traveled recently — though many who interact with the president regularly have received no kind of heightened screening.

Elsewhere across government, the response has been more robust. At the Pentagon, Defense Department officials have been sitting at least six feet apart, in line with health guidance. On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers were barred from helping themselves to a breakfast buffet or touching serving utensils, and told to avoid kissing, hugging and shaking hands.

But not Trump — a pattern that Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said appeared motivated by Trump’s desire to protect the economy in an election year.

“Right or wrong, the president’s decided he wants to minimize the economic impact of this pandemic. … He’s trying to do everything he can to protect the economy by saying, ‘It will be over,’ ‘It’s not that bad,’ ‘Feel free to go places,'” Blendon said. While much uncertainly remains, “if it turns out to be more serious, the president’s contributing to people not protecting themselves.”

“The president should be keeping us safe. He shouldn’t be amplifying the risk,” added Gostin of Georgetown University.

“The message should be: Let’s have social distancing, let’s avoid the usual cultural symbols of shaking hands, let’s separate from one another and avoid either contracting or transmitting a very dangerous infection,” Gostin said. “And it’s baffling to me that the president, who should be the model of good behavior, is modeling exactly the opposite.”

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The nation snapped to attention on Wednesday as the new coronavirus was declared a pandemic, stocks slid into bear market territory and the American public finally began to come to grips with the outbreak. President Donald Trump held a rare prime-time address from the Oval Office to calm the public.

Health and government officials have been sounding the alarm about the virus for nearly two months as it infected and killed thousands of people, pinballing from China to Iran to Italy and beyond before striking Seattle in the first deadly outbreak in the U.S.

But Wednesday was the moment that the larger American public came to the dawning realization that the toll of the virus would be unavoidable for months to come, perhaps longer.

In the matter of hours Wednesday afternoon, the signs were everywhere. The NCAA announced that the rite of spring for so many Americans — its college basketball tournament — would be played before largely empty arenas. Around the same time, the White House scheduled a nationally televised address. News feeds lit up with cancellations of St. Patrick’s Day parades, major university systems in California, New York and elsewhere ending classes for the term and late night comedians making plans to film without live studio audiences.

CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell solemnly declared during Wednesday evening’s broadcast that two employees of the network had tested positive and those who worked closely with them had been asked to self-quarantine.

Later in the day, Hollywood icon Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife have tested positive for the virus. Just as the Hanks news was bouncing around the internet and on people’s phones, the NBA said it was suspending its season until further notice.

In his prime-time address, Trump declared that he is sharply restricting passenger travel from 26 European nations to the U.S. beginning late Friday, at midnight. Trump said the month-long restrictions won’t apply to the United Kingdom, and there would be exemptions for “Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings.” He said the U.S. would monitor the situation to determine if travel could be reopened earlier.

“We are all in this together,” Trump said.

The Oval Office address was an abrupt shift in tone from a president who has repeatedly sought to downplay the severity of the threat, telling people: “It will go away, just stay calm.”

Many Americans shared a similar mindset in recent weeks, but the events of Wednesday changed the mood.

Koloud ‘Kay’ Tarapolsi of the Seattle suburb of Redmond learned that two of her children will have to be kept home from school because their district closed for two weeks starting Thursday. Their Girl Scout activities including cookie-selling have already been curtailed.

“We’re adjusting,” she said. “If we avoid each other and listen to the scientists, maybe in a few weeks it will be better.”

Officials in some American cities, including the hot spots of Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, banned large gatherings of people, while celebrations including Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade were canceled.

The World Health Organization called the crisis a pandemic, a step it had previously resisted. Stocks plunged, with the S&P 500 on the cusp of falling into bear territory at nearly 20% lower than the record set just last month.

In Washington state, after Gov. Jay Inslee announced a ban on events of more than 250 people in the greater Seattle area, the Seattle Public School system said it would close for at least two weeks for its 53,000 students. COVID-19 has killed more than two dozen in the Seattle area.

Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Denise Juneau called it “an unprecedented situation.”

As of Wednesday evening, 38 people had died in the U.S., while more than 1,300 people had tested positive for the new coronavirus.

That’s far less than the toll in other parts of the globe: In Italy, where more than 12,000 people had tested positive and 800 people have died, the situation was so dire that all stores except pharmacies and food markets were ordered closed.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. In mainland China, where the virus first exploded, more than 80,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 60,000 have so far recovered.

Meanwhile, from UCLA to the University of Vermont, the number of colleges and universities canceling in-person classes and moving the rest of the semester online mounted.

In New York City, there have only been a few dozen people diagnosed with COVID-19, but the virus is still all that anyone was talking about.

Subway trains, usually jam-packed at rush hour, were unusually uncrowded Wednesday. City transportation officials reported that the number of people cycling to work in Manhattan over the East River bridges has soared 55% over the past few days as people have heeded the mayor’s suggestion to avoid public transportation during peak hours.

Some grocery stores across the city, which ran out of hand sanitizer days ago, have seen shelves empty of other items, like bottled water. Public places have seemed a little less teeming, though tourist hubs like Times Square are still attracting plenty of people.

Late night comedians made plans to start filming without live audiences. NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Myers” tweeted it was following guidance by New York City officials.

“We hope to do our part to help to decrease the rate of transmission in our communities,” it wrote.

Even email boxes were papered with references to the new virus, as employers wrote to workers outlining new work-from-home procedures, and businesses sent emails to customers with subject lines like “Coronavirus update.”

Holly Wagner, 20, a sophomore at New York University, said she had been planning on visiting Washington, D.C., over spring break, but now is worried the campus will shut entirely while she’s gone, leaving her unable to retrieve belongings.

“I’m worried the situation is going to escalate and they’re going to say, ‘don’t come back to the dorms,'” she said.

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo asked residents not to organize or attend gatherings of more than 250 people, but stopped short of an outright ban. Still, at an afternoon news conference, she pleaded for people sick even with just aches and pains to stay home.

“We understand that people have to live their lives and and business has to continue,” she said. “However, we only have one chance to contain this.”

La Corte reported from Olympia, Washington, Smith from Providence. Associated Press writers Adam Geller, David B. Caruso and Theo Wayt in New York; Chris Grygiel in Seattle; Janie Har, Jocelyn Gecker, Olga Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco; Robert Jablon in Los Angeles; Lisa Baumann in Seattle; Ken Ritter in Las Vegas; and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Marilynn Marchione in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

A rare crisis battering the White House that is not of the president’s own making, the spreading coronavirus has panicked global financial markets and alarmed Americans, many of whom have turned to the Oval Office for guidance and reassurances. But what they have found is a president struggling for a solution, unable to settle Wall Street and proving particularly vulnerable to a threat that is out of his control.

In an address to the nation Wednesday night, Trump announced a sweeping travel ban for much of Europe as well as a package of proposals to help steady the teetering economy. But he continued to play down the severity of the situation, painting it as a foreign threat that soon will be banished rather than focusing on managing the growing number of cases at home.

“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” Trump declared.

Addressing the economic costs, he added, “This is not a financial crisis, this is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

But the virus has appeared impervious to the Republican president’s bluster.

The virus does not have a Twitter account and, unlike so many previous Trump foes, is resistant to political bullying or Republican Party solidarity. It has preyed on his lack of curiosity and fears of germs while exposing divides and inadequacies within senior levels of his administration. It has taken away Trump’s favorite political tool, his rallies, from which he draws energy and coveted voter information.

And eight months from Election Day, it has endangered his best reelection argument — a strong economy — just as Joe Biden, the candidate emerging from the Democratic field, seems poised to take advantage of a political landscape upended by the virus.

“Crises of varying degrees produce fascinating and often consequential elections: Think 1860, 1932, 1968, 2008. Such races turn on questions of chaos versus order and favor the candidate who seems to offer the best chance of bringing order to the country in times of uncertainty,” presidential historian Jon Meacham said. “What’s interesting about those examples is that incumbents, or candidates of the incumbent party, lost all of them.”

One of Trump’s most potent political assets is his ability to read a room, or a moment, often eschewing long-term planning for instantaneous reaction.

But he was slow to come to grips with the threat posed by the coronavirus as it exploded in China, distracted by impeachment and unwilling to scare the markets by stirring panic or upsetting his trading partner in Beijing, Xi Jinping.

The virus first spooked Trump while he was in India two weeks ago, as a 1,000-point drop on Wall Street caused him to pepper aides with questions about the markets even as he was feted in New Delhi. But after he returned to the states, Trump continued to play down the virus, lashing into officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, for talking up the possible severity of the threat. He urged other aides, including Kellyanne Conway and senior economic adviser Larry Kudlow, to go on television and preach confidence, according to five White House officials and Republicans close to the White House. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

And as he has so often done before, Trump believed that through his force of will and ability to dominate a news cycle, he could alleviate the crisis, taking to Twitter and the White House briefing room podium to dismiss the threat.

“The markets are going to be just fine,” Trump claimed Thursday, as he welcomed Ireland’s prime minister to the White House the morning after his Oval Office address.

But Wall Street, unlike traditional political foes, has not listened. The markets opened down again Thursday morning, plummeting so quickly that automatic safeguards were triggered to temporarily halt trading.

And while Trump deemed the media coverage of the virus “a hoax” meant to create hysteria and tank his poll numbers, it is a harder sell to ask his supporters to dismiss media reports when they see people in their own communities getting sick, schools closing and local drugstores unable to keep hand sanitizer on the shelves.

Infighting erupted within the administration, as Trump blamed and then sidelined Azar, relegating the health secretary to a secondary role behind Vice President Mike Pence on the coronavirus task force. But while Trump empowered Pence and respected medical professionals to take the lead on briefings, he ignored his advisers’ advice to let the vice president be the public face of the administration’s response, according to the officials.

Unable to cede the spotlight, Trump spoke extemporaneously to reporters at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Friday, requiring the vice president, who addressed the media in Washington moments later, to correct the president’s misstatements about the availability of testing kits and the fate of a cruise ship filled with coronavirus patients.

It was only on Monday, as he was flying from Florida back to Washington, that the economic severity of the crisis hit home for Trump, according to three of the officials and advisers.

In one cabin on Air Force One, Matt Gaetz, a Florida GOP congressman who had accompanied Trump to a series of Orlando fundraisers, had isolated himself after learning he’d come into contact with someone infected by the virus. And on the TV in Trump’s aircraft office, Fox News was broadcasting dire graphics illustrating the single worst day for stock markets since the 2008 financial crisis.

By the time the plane touched down at Joint Base Andrews, Trump told aides he would change tactics and propose a broad economic stimulus to reassure investors. But the fate of his plan, which included a suspension of the payroll tax, remained unclear as the week went on and the markets’ roller coaster ride continued.

“I think that in many ways this has made Trump a wartime president,” said former campaign communications director Jason Miller. “This virus has no borders, doesn’t discern between allies and foes and attacked the nation’s health security and economic security. It is going to take continued bold action from the president.”

After surviving impeachment, Trump has in earnest remade his White House staff to focus on reelection, prioritizing loyalty over experience. Increasingly focused on his campaign, Trump pushed aides to continue scheduling massive rallies, even as his Democratic foes had begun canceling theirs.

But late Wednesday, the White House announced that a trip to Colorado and Nevada had been cancelled. At least for now, no rallies were scheduled as a means to blunt the momentum of his likely general election foe, Biden, who offers himself as someone uniquely positioned to respond to the coronavirus.

As vice president, Biden helped manage the Ebola outbreak and has long shown an ability to comfort rattled voters. Moreover, the Trump campaign believes that scuttling normal political activity benefits Biden, who tends to draw small rally crowds and has had some eyebrow-raising moments when interacting with voters.

“This is something that doesn’t hurt and probably actually helps Joe Biden,” said Eric Trump, the president’s son and frequent campaign surrogate. “This works for him on all fronts.”

Biden, now in command of the Democratic race after a series of primary wins Tuesday, has drawn a clear comparison between how he would handle the crisis and the president’s scattershot approach from the Oval Office.

“At this moment, when there’s so much fear in the country and so much fear across the world, we need American leadership,” Biden said. “We need presidential leadership that’s honest, trusted, truthful and steady, reassuring leadership.”

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EDITOR”S NOTE — Lemire has covered politics and the White House for The Associated Press since 2013.

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Follow Lemire on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@JonLemire.

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Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”

Sanders, the early front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential race, suffered another in a series of recent blows to his campaign on Tuesday, or “Super Tuesday 2.0,” as rival Joe Biden won four of the six states at stake, including the big prize of the night, Michigan. Sanders came out victorious in just one state: North Dakota. NBC News has not yet projected a winner for Washington state.

Sanders told Fallon the Democratic National Committee has been pressuring him to suspend his campaign, just as it did with former candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Although he currently trails Biden in delegates, Sanders still believes he can win the democratic nomination. He announced Wednesday before appearing on “Tonight” that he will continue his campaign after Tuesday’s setbacks.

“We have introduced an agenda that I think the American people now support,” he told Fallon.

That agenda includes raising the minimum wage, introducing “Medicare for All” and affordable college tuition and expanding paid sick leave. He said he finds a lot of young voters support these ideas in particular.

“The young people of this country are on our side,” Sanders said.

Sanders candidly acknowledged his campaign’s weaknesses thus far, most notably that people still think Biden is the more electable candidate — due in part to the fact that he was Barack Obama’s vice president.

Sanders added that if Biden were the nominee, he could beat Trump, who many people see as “racist,” “sexist,” and someone who “has never read the Constitution.” However, Sanders cautioned that Trump will be a tough opponent to whomever is the Democratic nominee.

“Trump is not going to be easy to beat,” he said. “I think you need a campaign of energy and excitement.”

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Next up, Sanders will face Biden in a debate Sunday night — the first since the race narrowed to just two candidates. Sanders said he is looking forward to the opportunity to speak more in-depth about issues that matter to voters.

“We are actually going to be able to discuss the issues impacting the families of America,” he said.

Among those issues will most likely be the current administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

When Fallon asked about Trump’s handling of the outbreak, Sanders said Trump has been worried about the Democratic primary and not focusing enough on properly addressing the spread of the virus and stabilizing the stock market.

“We have a president who doesn’t believe in science,” he added.

To restore confidence to the American people, Sanders said the U.S. government needs to make sure everyone, regardless of income, can see a doctor if they’re feeling sick, take paid family and medical leave and get the coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available.

Fallon closed out the interview by asking Sanders whether his seven grandkids are the motivation behind his running for president. The senator responded that he’s running for them and for all of the other kids who live in the United States — a nation which, he believes, is the wealthiest in the world but also has great wealth disparity between the upper and lower classes.

“If we honestly believe that we are a democracy, we gotta end billionaire rule and create an economy and a government that works for all of us,” he concluded.

The ban, announced Wednesday and set to begin at midnight Friday, won’t apply to Americans trying to return home — though they will be subject to “enhanced” health screening — or to citizens of the United Kingdom.

But coming on top of similar restrictions imposed by many other governments, Trump’s move is bound to drastically escalate the upheaval facing global airlines and travelers on some of the most heavily traveled routes.

The disruptions to air travel are rippling through economies in a blow to hotels, car rental companies, museums and restaurants.

Lucrative business travel was already down sharply because conferences have been canceled and companies have instructed employees to skip all but essential trips. And travel from and within Asia has been restricted for weeks as authorities try to stop the spread of the virus there.

Airlines scrambled Thursday to adjust to the new restrictions, with many telling customers they were still assessing options and asking for patience from those trying to contact them.

French retirees Jean-Michel and Christiane Deaux were among those weighing their options. They had spent months planning a 3,500-kilometer (2,200-mile) road trip across America and planned to fly to New Orleans later this month. Now they’re trying to reschedule for later in the year.

“When I heard this morning, I was very disappointed but not surprised,” Jean-Michel Deaux said. “All the preparations, ruined.”

There are usually about 400 flights a day from Europe to the United States, according to flight tracker FlightAware. Airlines have already been slashing their flight schedules, especially on international routes, to cope with a sharp decline in travel demand among fearful customers.

About 72.4 million passengers flew from the U.S. to Europe in the year ended last June, making it the most popular international destination, according to Transportation Department figures. About one-third of those passengers fly on U.S. airlines, the rest on foreign carriers. Trump didn’t mention restrictions on Americans traveling to Europe.

Even before Trump’s announcement, the International Airline Travelers Association was forecasting a 24% fall in Europe’s passenger traffic this year and $37 billion in lost potential ticket sales. Italy, which is all but closed off as authorities try to control the spread of the virus there, has been particularly hard hit.

In his address from the Oval Office, Trump said U.S. restrictions on people coming from China and other countries with early outbreaks of COVID-19 had held down the number of cases in the United States compared with Europe. He blamed the European Union for failing to immediately stop travel from China “and other hot spots,” which he said had led to clusters of outbreaks in the U.S being “seeded by travelers from Europe.”

Trump has called the disease a “foreign virus” and claimed that U.S. clusters were “seeded” by European travelers. He announced that all European travel would be cut off, but U.S. officials later said that restrictions would apply only to most foreign citizens who have been in Europe’s passport-free travel zone at any point for 14 days prior to their arrival to the United States.

“The European Union disapproves of the fact that the U.S. decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation,” European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a joint statement.

The new U.S. restrictions apply to most foreign nationals who have been in the 26-nation Schengen area of Europe in the 14 days before their scheduled arrival in the United States. The Schengen countries, which do not restrict travel among each other, include Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday labeled COVID-19 a pandemic, citing its alarming spread and severity. Some experts have raised doubts over the effectiveness of tight border controls now that it has spread to so many countries.

In Asia, where the virus was first reported, governments have been imposing various restrictions on arrivals, requirements for health certificates and other precautions for more than a month.

An industry trade group warned that airlines worldwide could lose up to $113 billion in revenue from the virus — several times the damage caused by the 2001 terror attacks in the U.S. Since mid-February, shares of American Airlines have dropped by nearly half, United Airlines by more than one-third, and Delta Air Lines more than one-fourth.

It isn’t just U.S. airlines feeling the pain. Germany’s Lufthansa plans to cut up to half its flights because of a “drastic” drop in bookings. Cathay Pacific Airways warned Wednesday that it faces a “substantial loss” in the first half of this year. The Hong Kong-based airline canceled 90% of its flight capacity to the mainland at the start of February after Beijing told the public to avoid travel as part of efforts to contain the outbreak centered on the city of Wuhan.

Airlines, hotels and other travel businesses in East Asia already suffered a painful blow in January when demand plunged after China canceled group tours, told businesspeople to avoid foreign trips and imposed restrictions on foreign visitors.

China is the No. 1 source of foreign tourists for Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries and a growing source of business travel. Airlines canceled thousands of flights. Hotels and other businesses closed.

With air travel and airline revenue plummeting, airlines are losing their appetite for new planes. On Wednesday, Boeing’s stock fell 18% — its biggest one-day percentage drop since 1974 — and the iconic airplane manufacturer announced a hiring freeze.

In China, more than three-fourths of virus patients have recovered and most suffered only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. The illness can be severe and lead to pneumonia, especially in older adults and people with existing health problems.

More than 126,000 people in more than 110 countries have been infected. But the World Health Organization has emphasized the vast majority are in just four countries: China and South Korea, where new cases are declining, and Iran and Italy, where they are not.

Trump’s Homeland Security secretary acknowledged that the ban will further upend the airline industry.

“While these new travel restrictions will be disruptive to some travelers, this decisive action is needed to protect the American public from further exposure to the potentially deadly coronavirus,” DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said in a statement issued shortly after the president’s address.

Nicholas Calio, president of Airlines for America, a trade group for many large U.S. carriers, said the ban “will hit U.S. airlines, their employees, travelers and the shipping public extremely hard. However, we respect the need to take this unprecedented action.”

Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst in San Francisco, said the ban will push airlines including American, Delta and United to reduce flights between the U.S. and Europe, and will cast a long shadow over the peak summer travel season.

“This is going to cause a lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic to reconsider where they are going to spend their summer vacation,” he said. “Leisure travelers will stay close to home,” while people traveling on business will be grounded by corporate restrictions, he said.

In January, the U.S. issued a similar ban on people coming into the country from China. That policy was later extended to people who had been in Iran.

___

Associated Press writers Joe McDonald in Beijing and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

Trump made the announcement that he is partly suspending travel from Europe, except the United Kingdom, to the U.S. for 30 days beginning at midnight on Friday during a rare Oval Office address to the nation. After days of playing down the threat, he blamed the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the novel coronavirus and claimed that U.S. clusters were “seeded” by European travelers.

“We made a lifesaving move with early action on China,” Trump said. “Now we must take the same action with Europe.”

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After Trump’s address, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the restrictions only apply to foreign nationals and not U.S. citizens, green card holders or the family of U.S. citizens, NBC News reports.

“The actions President Trump is taking to deny entry to foreign nationals who have been in affected areas will keep Americans safe and save American lives,” DHS Acting Secretary Chad F. Wolf said in a statement. “While these new travel restrictions will be disruptive to some travelers, this decisive action is needed to protect the American public from further exposure to the potentially deadly coronavirus.”

In his address, Trump initially said his administration would be “suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” except for “Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings,” “trade and cargo” and the United Kingdom.

The White House joined the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in tweeting clarification about who the travel restrictions will apply to.

After he spoke, the White House canceled a planned trip by the president to Nevada and Colorado this week, “out of an abundance of caution.”

The Defense Department announced two-month travel restrictions would begin Friday for service members, DoD civilians and families traveling to or from “Level 3” locations designated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mounting effort to contain the virus and financial fallout intensified on a grueling day: Communities canceled public events nationwide, universities moved to cancel in-person classes, and families grappled with the impact of disruptions to public schools. The number of confirmed cases of the infection topped 1,000 in the U.S. and the World Health Organization declared the global crisis is now a pandemic.

In a week of mixed messages and false starts, as government officials warned in increasingly urgent terms that the outbreak in the U.S. will only get worse, Washington suddenly seemed poised to act.

Congress, for its part, unveiled a multibillion-dollar aid package Wednesday that was expected to be voted on by the House as soon as Thursday.

“I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said in testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He said the virus is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

Trump spoke after days of confusion in Washington amid mounting calls on the president to demonstrate greater leadership. In the hours leading up to his remarks, White House aides struggled to determine what action the president could take unilaterally and what required congressional action, as Trump personally weighed the public and political reactions to the options before him.

Trump said he was also directing agencies to provide unspecified financial relief for “for workers who are ill, quarantined or caring for others due to coronavirus,” and asked Congress to take action to extend it.

Trump said the U.S. will defer tax payments for some individual and business filers for three months to lessen the impacts of the virus outbreak. He said the Small Business Administration will also make low-interest loans available to businesses to help them weather the storm.

“This is not a financial crisis,” he said. “This just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

Trump also reiterated his call on Congress to pass a cut to the federal payroll tax in order to stimulate the economy, though that proposal was dismissed by many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He remained silent on his previous calls to provide assistance to industries hard-hit by the pandemic like airlines and cruise ships.

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled an economic assistance plan that was gaining bipartisan backing. Central to the package is free coronavirus testing nationwide and emergency funding to reimburse lost paychecks for those self-quarantining, missing work or losing jobs amid the outbreak.

The draft legislation would create a new federal emergency sick leave benefit for people with the virus or caring for a coronavirus victim. It would provide two-thirds of an employee’s monthly income for up to three months.

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Facing a likely surge in unemployment claims, the package would also give states money for the newly jobless. It would provide additional funding for food and nutrition benefits for pregnant women, mothers and young children. It also would up money for “meals on wheels” and food for low-income elderly people.

“Right now we’re trying to deal with the direct impact of the virus on individual citizens,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, whom Trump tapped to negotiate with Pelosi, urged Congress “to pass legislation quickly.”

“This is a little bit like a hurricane, and we need to cover these outside of normal expenses,” Mnuchin said.

The administration had floated several other strategies, including the rare idea of declaring a national disaster that could potentially unlock funding streams, according to a person unauthorized to discuss the planning and granted anonymity. But Trump ultimately opted against taking that step Wednesday.

A major disaster declaration provides additional authorities for federal agencies, including the military, to assist in responding to an emergency, including medical care, sheltering and distributing goods.

The administration also rolled out new recommendations for the communities most impacted by the virus in Washington state, New York and California, while authorizing Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to take whatever steps necessary to increase the supply of face masks available to doctors and nurses by providing them with masks intended for industrial use.

Mnuchin noted that Trump’s executive authorities are “quite significant” and said the administration would be rolling out “various proposals.”

As pressure mounted for Washington to respond, the GOP leader in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, signaled potential Republican support for the funding package in Congress.

“We need to do something,” McCarthy said. “I think they could become very bipartisan.”

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

Congress’ attending physician told staff there could be 70 million to 100 million coronavirus cases in the U.S. That’s on par with other estimates. A Harvard official has estimated that 20% to 60% of adults will get the virus, noting it’s “a pretty wide range.”

Pelosi’s goal is to pass an aid package before lawmakers leave town for a previously scheduled weeklong recess, and revisit potential stimulus measures later.

In Washington, tourists still arrived at the U.S. Capitol, but an official unauthorized to discuss the situation and speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that tours would soon be shut down.

Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard, Marty Crutsinger, Laurie Kellman and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.

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This is campaigning in the age of the coronavirus, when fears of the new pandemic’s rapid spread are upending Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. The urgency of the issue comes at a pivotal time in the Democratic presidential primary, as Biden is beginning to pull ahead as a front-runner for the nomination and as Sanders is scrambling to catch up.

“If coronavirus has the lasting impact that we all fear it will, it will also dramatically reshape the way a presidential campaign unfolds,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist and former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“Politics is fundamentally about leaders interacting with the people who they represent, and if a pandemic forecloses that ability, it changes everything — how you campaign, how you knock doors, how you do events and how you do the retail part of politics.”

While coronavirus concerns have been building as new cases crop up daily and as Democrats criticize President Donald Trump for what they consider a lackluster response, Tuesday marked the first moment the issue affected the campaigns in a substantive way. Both Biden and Sanders decided to cancel planned election-night rallies in Ohio at the advice of local health officials.

And so Biden — who won at least four of the six states voting Tuesday — delivered a victory speech to a crowd almost entirely composed of media and dozens of staffers who had wandered over from headquarters. It was hardly the big celebration Biden had hoped for on one of the biggest nights of his 2020 campaign.

It’s not the first time a major national crisis has upended the contours of a presidential race. During the 2008 campaign, as the economy was in free fall, Republican nominee John McCain returned to Washington to work on the congressional response to the crisis in an effort to revive his flagging campaign.

Steve Schmidt, McCain’s top adviser, has said the coronavirus crisis could be particularly problematic for Sanders — and for Trump.

“The raw politics of this is that it freezes the Democratic race in place for Bernie Sanders, who is on his last legs. You can’t have a revolution without rallies,” he said.

Trump, meanwhile, delights in turning out tens of thousands of supporters to his events and has kept up a steady calendar of rallies in recent months.

“The Trump show is sustained by rallies,” he said.

While they have not said they are holding off on rallies, Trump’s campaign doesn’t have any on the schedule — a rare break to his persistent counter programming.

The campaign postponed a “Women for Trump” bus tour through Michigan, citing “scheduling conflicts,” after the husband of a participant came into contact with someone who tested positive for the virus at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

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Late Wednesday, the White House announced Trump would cancel his trips to Colorado and Nevada “out of an abundance of caution” amid the coronavirus outbreak. He was set to leave Thursday for a Western swing that would include a pair of fundraisers and an appearance at the annual gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas — just the kind of event that public health officials had been urging people to avoid.

The 73-year-old president has also continued to shake hands and speak at large gatherings, despite public health warnings directed at people his age.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. In mainland China, where the virus first exploded, more than 80,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 58,000 have so far recovered.

While Trump continues his handshaking, those warnings from officials could affect the way Biden campaigns. While the former vice president typically holds smaller events and has only consistently turned out crowds in the thousands since winning South Carolina on Feb. 29, he’s known for his personal, often physical interactions with voters. He often doles out hugs or goes forehead-to-forehead with a voter to share an emotional moment.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California’s Irvine School of Law, joked that Biden may have “some things to learn about social distancing.”

Indeed, even Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn was trading elbow bumps instead of handshakes with a reporter on the trail this week.

It’s not just rallies that face restrictions with the spread of the new coronavirus. The Democrats’ next debate, being held Sunday in Arizona, will not have a live audience at the request of both campaigns.

One major concern for the candidates is turnout — particularly among older voters, who make up a key portion of Biden’s base.

“I certainly think that it has the potential to cause both voters and poll workers to want to stay away from places where people gather,” Hasen said.

Election officials in Ohio and Chicago announced they’re moving polling centers out of senior centers and nursing homes, which could make it tougher for seniors to vote and create confusion for voters.

Some Democratic operatives have expressed concerns that some states could see a shortage in volunteers on Election Day. Election officials in Florida, where early voting is underway, are sanitizing voting machines hourly with disinfectant wipes.

Kelly Dietrich, CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee, a group that trains Democrats who want to run for office or work on a campaign, said they’re already seeing a decline in people who have registered to participate in their training over fear of showing up to large gatherings.

“That fear is a prime motivator. It’s going to affect your campaign. It needs to be taken into account,” Dietrich added.

The Sanders campaign held a call with staff and advisers to go over new organizing protocols on Wednesday. Signs of heightened concern could be seen on the Biden campaign trail earlier this week. His press aides offered liberal doses of hand sanitizer as his traveling press boarded their plane. And at a high-dollar fundraiser this week in Detroit, boxes of disinfectant wet wipes were placed on the cocktail tables.

But even as the outbreak scrambles the campaigns’ operational plans, it offers Democrats an opportunity to draw a contrast with Trump on presidential leadership.

“In a situation like this, coronavirus or a financial crisis, you see in real time how the candidates would react if they were president,” Schmidt said.

Seeking to calm financial markets during an election year, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the threat posed by the virus, insisting that it will simply sort itself out. But his administration on Wednesday appeared to be coming to terms with the widespread impact as it considered more drastic measures.

To that effect, Biden is giving an address Thursday outlining how he would address the outbreak as president. On Wednesday, he announced the formation of a “Public Health Advisory Committee,” comprised of five doctors and a former Obama counterterrorism adviser, that will “provide science-based, expert advice” to the campaign on ways it can minimize health risks.

Sanders has argued that the outbreak underscores the need for “Medicare for All” to avoid steep hospital bills for people who contract — or think they may have contracted — the new coronavirus.

“This crisis, this absurd health care system, is becoming more and more obvious to the American people as we face the challenge of a coronavirus pandemic,” he said Wednesday. “Imagine facing a pandemic and having 87 million people who are having a difficult time going to a doctor when they need.”

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.

Bloomberg made the donation to Voto Latino, a group founded by the actress Rosario Dawson and María Teresa Kumar, the group’s president.

“President Trump has spent four years attacking and slandering Latino communities, but in November, Latinos will have a chance to make their voices heard,” Bloomberg said in a statement first provided to NBC News.

Kumar said Bloomberg’s donation will help pay the costs of registering 500,000 new voters this election cycle. That’s part of a larger effort to register and get to the polls 1 million Latino voters in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and other key states ahead of November.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

The House gave final legislative approval to the measure Wednesday, 227-186, sending it to Trump. The president has promised to veto the war powers resolution, warning that if his “hands were tied, Iran would have a field day.”

The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., declares that Trump must win approval from Congress before engaging in further military action against Iran. Kaine and other supporters say the measure is not about Trump or even the presidency, but instead is an important reassertion of congressional power to declare war.

Six Republicans joined 220 Democrats and independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan to support the measure. Six Democrats and 180 Republicans opposed it. In the Senate last month, eight Republicans backed the resolution.

The resolution “sends a clear message that the American people don’t want war with Iran and that Congress has not authorized war with Iran,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

While tensions with Iran have abated since a U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top general in early January, the resolution clarifying Congress’ power to declare war is still important, Engel said.

“Congress doesn’t have to wait until the president alone decides to use military force again,” Engel told House members during floor debate Wednesday. “It’s our responsibility to do something, because we know the tensions could flare up again at a moment’s notice. Iran has not been deterred as the administration promised.”

Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, called the war powers measure “divisive and irresponsible” and based on a false premise.

“It orders the president to terminate hostilities against Iran. The problem is, for the other side, we are not engaged in hostilities in Iran,” McCaul said.

If the U.S. military launches strikes in Iran, “I believe that the president would need to come before this body to ask for a new authorization” for the use of force, McCaul said. “But that is not what we are facing.”

The House vote marked a rare exertion of authority from Congress, which also moved to impose restrictions on U.S. involvement with the Saudi-led war in Yemen last year after U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in a gruesome murder at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Turkey. Trump promptly vetoed that measure.

The Democratic-controlled House passed a separate, nonbinding resolution on Iran in January, a few weeks before the Senate approved Kaine’s resolution. Two-thirds votes in the House and the GOP-run Senate would be needed to override an expected Trump veto.

Kaine hailed the House vote.

“For years, Congress has abdicated its responsibility on matters of war, but now a bipartisan majority in both the Senate and House has made clear that we shouldn’t be engaged in hostilities with Iran without a vote of Congress,” he said in a statement.

The legislation “doesn’t prevent the president from defending the United States against imminent attack,” but instead “demands that the decision of whether or not we go on offense and send our troops into harm’s way should only be made after serious deliberation and a vote of Congress,” Kaine added. “If President Trump is serious about his promise to stop endless wars, he will sign this resolution into law.”

In a statement of administration policy, the White House said the resolution should be rejected “because it attempts to hinder the president’s ability to protect” U.S. diplomats, forces, allies and partners, including Israel, from the continued threat posed by Iran and its proxies, including militia groups and foreign fighters in Syria.

“Iran has a long history of attacking United States and coalition forces both directly and through its proxies,” the White House said, adding the congressional resolution could hinder Trump’s ability to protect U.S. forces and interests in the region.

“This joint resolution is untimely and misguided. Its adoption by Congress could undermine the ability of the United States to protect American citizens whom Iran continues to seek to harm,” the White House said.

Tehran responded to the U.S. attack on its top general, Qassem Soleimani, by launching missiles at two military bases in Iraq that house American troops. The attack caused traumatic brain injuries in more than 100 U.S. soldiers, the Pentagon said.

Democrats and Republicans alike criticized a briefing by the Trump administration shortly after the drone strike, saying U.S. officials offered vague information about a possible attack being planned by Iran but no substantial details.

Kaine has long pushed for action reasserting congressional power over military conflict. At the request of Republican senators, he removed initial language that targeted Trump in favor of a generalized statement declaring Congress has sole power to declare war. The resolution also directs Trump to terminate use of military force against Iran or any part of its government without approval from Congress and commends Trump for killing Soleimani, who was long designated a terrorist by the U.S.

“No one lamented the loss of Mr. Soleimani. No one,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. “That’s not what this bill is about.”

The resolution “is about our Constitution, the authority of this body to declare or not declare war,” Hoyer added. “It ought to be the representatives of the people that take them to war, not a president — any president, Democrat or Republican. This is about our responsibility.”

The legislation is a compromise that reflects angst in both parties about the way the surveillance powers have been used, but also a reluctance to strip those powers from the government’s arsenal. The bipartisan bill, negotiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, would renew several provisions the FBI sees as vital to fighting terrorism even as it aims to ensure stricter oversight of how the bureau conducts surveillance.

The compromise, which passed 278-136, came after Republicans and Democrats in the House broadly agreed that they did not want civil liberties sacrificed in efforts to thwart terrorism and other crimes. Republicans had been aggressively seeking changes to the law since the Russia investigation, while many Democrats already had concerns about government surveillance.

The Senate is poised to pass the bill, as well, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement with several other Republicans saying they “strongly support this legislation and urge all of our Senate colleagues to join us.”

The statement said the legislation “balances the need to reauthorize these critical authorities with the need for tailored reforms to increase accountability.” Signing on with McConnell were Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, Texas Sen. John Cornyn and South Dakota Sen. John Thune.

It was not immediately clear whether Trump would sign it. And a handful of Republican and Democratic senators have strongly criticized the House measure, possibly threatening procedural delays.

Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, all longtime skeptics of surveillance laws, are opposed to the legislation. But Wyden indicated he would not filibuster, or delay, the bill, saying he was focused on a response to the spread of the coronavirus.

It wasn’t certain what tactics Paul or Lee might use to slow down the legislation. Lee said Wednesday that “there are a lot of procedural tools at our disposal,” indicating he might try to delay passage. Paul has been working closely with Trump, who told Republican lawmakers at a meeting last week that he would not sign an extension of the current surveillance authorities without reforms.

Lawmakers leave town at week’s end. The existing powers expire Sunday.

At the behest of Republicans, the House compromise takes aim at some of the missteps the Justice Department has acknowledged making during the Russia investigation. Applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide were riddled with omissions and missteps, according to an inspector general report.

The measure would require that officers responsible for FISA applications certify that the department has been advised of any information that could undercut or contradict the premise of the surveillance. In the Russia investigation, some of the information the FBI omitted from its applications cut against the idea that former Trump adviser Carter Page was a Russian agent, the watchdog found.

Page has denied that and was never charged with wrongdoing.

The bill also would institute criminal penalties and other sanctions for making false statements to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues warrants to the FBI to eavesdrop on people it has probable cause to believe are agents of a foreign power. It would require the attorney general to approve in writing of an investigation if the target of the surveillance is a federal candidate or official.

The legislation updates the three expiring surveillance provisions, including one that permits the FBI to obtain court orders to collect business records on subjects in national security investigations. Another, known as the “roving wiretap” provision, permits surveillance on subjects even after they’ve changed phones. The third allows agents to monitor subjects who don’t have ties to international terrorism organizations.

Attorney General William Barr was involved in the negotiations with the White House and Congress, and he said Wednesday that he supports the bill.

“It is of the utmost important that the Department’s attorneys and investigators always work in a manner consistent with the highest professional standards, and this overall package will help ensure the integrity of the FISA process and protect against future abuses going forward,” Barr said.

Some conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats said the compromise did not go far enough.

Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, the heads of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that “Congress can and must do more to protect civil liberties” and announced they would oppose the bill. Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said he would also oppose it, asserting that it would allow the government to spy on Americans.

But other Republicans who have advocated for change said they would support it. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a close ally of Trump’s, said the bill is “a start” that would improve civil liberties. McCarthy called the compromise “a turning point.”

House Democrats who control the chamber said they would continue to work on revising the authorities. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, one of the bill’s sponsors, said Congress still has “a long way to go” on reforms.

_____

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

The measure, which passed with a 53-42 vote, stands as a rare rebuke of DeVos by the Republican-led Senate. The House approved the measure in January, and it now goes to President Donald Trump. The White House has threatened a presidential veto but it remains to be seen whether Trump will overturn a resolution that drew support from 10 Republican senators.

The Education Department quickly condemned the move and defended her policy.

“It’s disappointing to see so many in Congress fooled by misinformation from the Left and the fake news narrative about our efforts to protect students from fraud,” Education Department spokeswoman Angela Morabito said in a statement. “Our rule is consistent with Congress’s intent, it protects students and it treats taxpayers fairly.”

Lawmakers moved to reverse DeVos’ policy through the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn federal rules with a simple majority of both chambers and approval of the president. The Senate measure was led by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who told lawmakers that DeVos has made it nearly impossible for students to get their loans canceled after attending fraudulent for-profit colleges.

“She made it extremely difficult for these students to get any relief,” Durbin said before the vote. “These schools take the money and run, and the students end up holding the bag with massive debts.”

The measure aims to strike down DeVos’ changes to a policy known as borrower defense to repayment, which promises to cancel federal student loans for borrowers whose colleges commit fraud. It dates to the 1990s but was expanded under the Obama administration to forgive loans for students whose colleges used false claims to get them to enroll.

The Obama-era update was directed at thousands of students who attended Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute and other for-profit college chains that shut down after authorities found that they made exaggerated claims about the success of their graduates.

But when DeVos took office, she suspended the rules before they took effect and began writing new ones even as thousands of applications awaited review. Her 2019 update made it harder for students to get their loans canceled by requiring them to prove that their colleges knowingly misled them and also caused personal financial harm.

DeVos’ rules required students to apply for relief within three years of leaving the school, and they ended a policy allowing the Education Department to cancel loans for large groups of students that attended schools known to have committed fraud.

The measure would undo DeVos’ changes and restore the rules created under President Barack Obama. The move drew quick praise from borrower advocates and consumer protection groups, along with Democrats and some Republicans.

“We applaud the Senate for its bipartisan vote to overturn the borrower defense rule that attacks the rights of borrowers,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University. “We call on the president to put the voices of students above the interests of for-profit colleges by signing this bipartisan legislation.”

Among the Republicans who backed the measure was Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado who said he was “proud to stand with students who were defrauded by educational institutions.”

“I voted in favor of the Congressional Review Act and against the 2019 rule due to concerns that the new procedures would make it too difficult for defrauded students to receive the relief they are due,” Gardner said in a statement.

DeVos previously said the 2016 rules were too generous and allowed too many students to get their loans erased at the expense of taxpayers. Her rules were estimated to save nearly $13 billion over a decade, primarily by reducing the amount of loan relief awarded to students.

Her changes were opposed by borrower advocates but embraced by for-profit colleges, who said their industry had unfairly been targeted by the Obama administration.

The policy has been a frequent source of tension between DeVos and Democrats, who say the Trump administration stopped processing claims while DeVos changed the rules. As of January, the Education Department said it had nearly 170,000 pending applications.

In total, about 52,000 have been approved, the agency said, while 28,000 have been rejected.