BofA lets 50,000 mortgage borrowers skip payments

Bank of America said it has agreed to allow 50,000 mortgage customers to defer payments for three months because they've lost income as a result of the pandemic.

The borrowers have all kinds of home loans, including some that are not federally backed, said Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America.

To qualify for the government forbearance program, passed last week by Congress as part of the stimulus package, homeowners must contact their lenders and request help. It's only for people who have a hardship because of the coronavirus, though it doesn't require them to present proof.

The new legislation allows borrowers with federally backed mortgages to stop making payments for as many as 180 days, with the possibility of extending that period. But it's not supposed to be a payment holiday. They'll have to make it up, interest and all.

Servicers have reported a surge in calls though some lenders like Bank of America are allowing borrowers to apply for forbearance online.

U.S. officials and researchers have been urging people to follow social distancing guidelines as a total of 189,035 COVID19 cases and 3,900 deaths were reported in the United States as of Tuesday night.

Nearly one third of the deaths occurred in the New York State, the epicenter of the outbreak in the country, according to Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

Health experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force said Tuesday that even with the Trump administration's national social distancing guidelines in place, Americans still should be prepared for the prospect of the coronavirus causing 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the country.

At a White House press briefing, Deborah Birx, the task force's response coordinator, said as many as 1.5 million to 2.2 million people will succumb to COVID-19 if no mitigation measures whatsoever are taken to contain the virus.

"There's no magic bullet, there's no magic vaccine or therapy. It's just behaviors," Birx said, urging people to act according to the administration's social distancing strategy, which has been extended to April 30. Those behaviors, Birx added, could change "the course of the viral pandemic."

During the briefing, U.S. President Donald Trump warned: "we're going to go through a very tough two weeks."

"And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, we're going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel, but this is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks," Trump added.

A research team with Stanford University published a report on Monday saying that there might be a risk of a resurgence or second peak of the COVID-19 if restrictions including social distancing and quarantine are lifted too early.

To avoid this situation, people need to "apply multiple interventions over a long period of time -- 12 to 18 months or more-until effective treatments and/or vaccines are widely available," said team leader Erin Mordecai in the report.

It doesn't mean a total lockdown for a year or more. Adaptive strategies that actively switch on and off interventions can allow for periods of greater mobility while still keeping the epidemic at levels the healthcare system can manage, according to the report.