LAYOFFS CONTINUE TO TEAR THROUGH COUNTRY
Pressure mounts to reopen economy despite safety fears
Layoffs continued to soar, enveloping more industries even as states take tentative steps toward reopening the economy, with the government reporting on Thursday that an additional 3.2 million jobless claims were filed last week.
Meanwhile, the head of the National Institutes of Health told lawmakers the nation faces “truly daunting” challenges to develop and deploy millions of coronavirus tests to safely reopen the economy.
With unemployment claims surpassing 33 million since March, the nation’s near-term economic outlook hinges on whether patchwork reopenings can mend the coronavirus pandemic’s damage — and how soon.
Economists expect the monthly jobs report released today to put the April unemployment rate at 15 percent or higher — a Depression-era level.
But even a figure of that magnitude will almost certainly understate the calamity. Officials in some states say more than a quarter of their workforce is unemployed. And experts say it is impossible to calculate how many jobs might come back as states lift shelter-in-place rules.
“We don’t know what normal is going to look like,” said Martha Gimbel, an economist and a labor market expert at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative.
The biggest questions are how many workers will be willing to go back, how many businesses will have full-time jobs for them, and how quickly customers will return to the shopping and spending habits that stoke the consumer-driven economy.
NIH Director Francis Collins told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that it will be a challenge to deploy millions of coronavirus tests to safely reopen the economy.
He said that government and private industry have launched a $2.5 billion effort to quickly develop, manufacture and distribute technology capable of accurately testing millions of people a week by the end of the summer or the fall, before the annual flu season.
Widespread availability of testing is seen as critical to reopening the economy because it would allow public health officials to identify and contain a rebound of the virus. But it remains a high bar to clear.
“I must tell you, senators, that this is a stretch goal that goes well beyond what most experts think will be possible,” Collins said. “I have encountered some stunned expressions when describing these goals and this timetable to knowledgeable individuals. The scientific and logistical challenges are truly daunting.”
Nonetheless, Collins said “the track record of American ingenuity” gives him optimism. Yet more than three months into the epidemic, the lack of testing is widely acknowledged as a central failing in the nation’s response.
The testing issue has dogged the White House for weeks. President Donald Trump takes credit for the fact that testing has ramped up dramatically since the early days of the outbreak, when a test from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran into numerous problems.
But sometimes he also seems uneasy about testing.
“We do, by far, the most testing,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”
The U.S. is currently testing more than a million people a week for COVID-19 and White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx has said that weekly number should rise to 2 million or 2.5 million by the middle of June.
But some experts say a million tests per day are needed, or more.
“To test every nursing home, and every prison, everyone in an operating room, and some entire classes and campuses and factories, teams at sports events, and to give those tests more than once, we will need millions more tests,” agreed committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-tenn. “This demand will only grow as the country goes back to work.”
Sen. Patty Murray of
Washington, the ranking Democrat on the panel, put the blame on Trump for persistent problems with testing.
“The problem isn’t a lack of innovation—it’s a lack of national leadership, and a plan from the White House. And when it comes to testing, this administration has had no map, and no one at the wheel.”
A battle between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention went public Thursday over the agency’s detailed guidelines to help schools, restaurants, churches and other establishments safely reopen.
A copy of the CDC guidance obtained by The New York Times includes sections for child care programs, schools and day camps, churches and other “communities of faith,” employers with vulnerable workers, restaurants and bars, and mass transit administrators. The recommendations include using disposable dishes and utensils at restaurants, closing every other row of seats in buses and subways while restricting transit routes between areas experiencing different coronavirus infection levels, and separating children at school and camps into groups that should not mix throughout the day.
But White House and other administration officials rejected the recommendations over concerns that they were overly prescriptive, infringed on religious rights and risked further damaging an economy that Trump was banking on to recover quickly. One senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services with deep ties to religious conservatives objected to any controls on church services.
“Governments have a duty to instruct the public on how to stay safe during this crisis and can absolutely do so without dictating to people how they should worship God,” said Roger Severino, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, who once oversaw the Devos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation.
Many governors across the U.S. are disregarding or creatively interpreting White House guidelines in easing their states’ lockdowns and letting businesses reopen, an Associated Press analysis found.
The AP determined that 17 states do not appear to meet one of the key benchmarks set by the White House for loosening up — a 14-day downward trajectory in new cases or infection rates. And yet many of those states have begun to reopen or are about to do so, including Alabama, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah.
Because of the broad way in which the nonbinding guidelines are written, other states, including Georgia, have technically managed to meet the criteria and reopen despite not seeing a steady decline in cases and deaths.
Asked at the White House on Thursday about states that are reopening without meeting some of the federal government’s benchmarks, Trump said: “The governors have great power as to that, given by us. We want them to do that. We rely on them. We trust them. And hopefully they are making the right decisions.”
The U.S. has recorded over 75,000 deaths and 1.2 million confirmed infections. But this week, University of Washington researchers nearly doubled their projection of deaths in the U.S. to about 134,000 through early August, largely to reflect the loosening of the state stayat-home restrictions.
Public health experts say the guidance from the top has been anything but clear. In addition to burying the CDC report, the Trump administration has tried to push responsibility for expanding testing capacity onto the states.
“We’re a federalist society, so some of the blame goes to the governors and some of the blame goes to the president. But the responsibility for coordinating and enforcing and implementing a national plan comes from the White House,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health expert at Georgetown University.
He likened it to “an orchestra without a conductor.”