AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT
Volunteers sew masks for health workers facing shortages
CHICAGO (AP) — Bill Purdue waterproofs basements for a living, but he has spent the past few days in his buddy's Washington, Indiana, auto trim and upholstery shop cutting rectangles of cotton fabric that his friend sews into face masks.
Fashion designer Briana Danyele left Italy last month to return to her mother's Greer, South Carolina, home, where she has turned the living room into a mini sewing factory, making masks that she embroiders with the words, "We Got This!"
They're among scores of people answering pleas from hospitals, doctors and nurses so desperate for personal protective equipment amid the viral pandemic that they've turned to the public, saying do-it-yourself face masks are better than nothing.
And for those sitting at home worrying as the virus strains hospitals and the economy teeters, sewing masks makes them feel less helpless.
“Whatever it takes to get the job done, that's what I want to do,” said Purdue, 57, whose daughter works at the women's hospital in Evansville, Indiana. He and his friend Mike Rice responded to a Facebook post last week from Deaconess Health System in Evansville asking the public for help.
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Doctors plead for supplies, while nations seek to slow virus
NEW YORK (AP) — Doctors and nurses pleaded for supplies such as masks and ventilators that are critical in their battle to treat a surging number of coronavirus patients, while governments on Tuesday continued to roll out measures that have put more than one-fifth of the world’s population under some form of lockdown.
High in the Himalayan mountains, Nepal became the latest country to compel its citizens to stay at home, joining large parts of Europe, Southeast Asia and the entire West Coast of the United States. By shuttering businesses, clearing streets and keeping people away from one another, authorities hope they can slow the spread of the pandemic and keep their health care systems from becoming overwhelmed.
In Britain, which on Monday imposed its most draconian peacetime restrictions on businesses and gatherings, health workers begged for more gear, saying they felt like “cannon fodder.” In France, doctors scrounged masks from construction workers and factory floors.
“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 race to find equipment came as the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was accelerating and called on countries to take strong, coordinated action.
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The Latest: Ice rink in Spain turned into makeshift morgue
The Latest on the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 382,000 people and killed over 16,500. The COVID-19 illness causes mild or moderate symptoms in most people, but severe symptoms are more likely in the elderly or those with existing health problems. More than 101,000 people have recovered so far, mostly in China.
TOP OF THE HOUR:
— Ice skating rink in Madrid is being used as a makeshift morgue.
— Laos reports its first confirmed cases of COVID-19.
— The Philippine Congress declares a national emergency.
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Global stocks rise after US Fed promises economic support
BEIJING (AP) — Global stock markets and U.S. futures surged Tuesday after the Federal Reserve promised support to the struggling economy as Congress delayed action on a $2 trillion coronavirus aid package.
Tokyo advanced more than 7% and Frankfurt opened 6% higher. London, Shanghai, Paris and Hong Kong also rose.
On Wall Street, futures for the benchmark S&P 500 index and Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 5%.
Traders were encouraged by the Fed's promise to buy as many Treasurys and other assets as needed to keep financial markets functioning.
On Monday, Wall Street fell 3% after Congress failed to approve an economic support package. It would send checks to U.S. households and offer support for small businesses and the hard-hit travel industry, but Democrats say it favors companies too heavily at the expense of workers and public health.
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China to lift lockdown in most of virus-hit Hubei province
BEIJING (AP) — Chinese authorities said Tuesday they will end a two-month lockdown of most of coronavirus-hit Hubei province at midnight, as domestic cases of the virus continue to subside.
People with a clean bill of health will be allowed to leave, the provincial government said. The city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started in late December, will remain locked down until April 8.
China barred people from leaving or entering Wuhan starting Jan. 23 in a surprise middle-of-the-night announcement and expanded it to most of the province in succeeding days. Train service and flights were canceled and checkpoints set up on roads into the central province.
The drastic steps came as the coronavirus began spreading to the rest of China and overseas during the Lunar New Year holiday, when many Chinese travel.
The virus raged for weeks in Wuhan, the provincial capital, and surrounding cities. Hospitals overflowed, and temporary ones were hastily set up to try to isolate the growing number of infected patients.
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Testing blunders crippled US response as coronavirus spread
WASHINGTON (AP) — A series of missteps at the nation's top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found.
President Donald Trump assured Americans early this month that the COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “perfect” and that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” But more than two months after the first U.S. case of the new disease was confirmed, many people still cannot get tested.
In the critical month of February, as the virus began taking root in the U.S. population, CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests — an average of only a dozen per day.
“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said at a recent briefing. “We cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, has begun an internal review to assess its own mistakes. But outside observers and federal health officials have pointed to four primary issues that together hampered the national response — the early decision not to use the test adopted by the World Health Organization, flaws with the more complex test developed by the CDC, government guidelines restricting who could be tested and delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity.
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Trump says he intends to reopen country in weeks, not months
WASHINGTON (AP) — As cases of coronavirus continue to rise, President Donald Trump said Monday that he wants to reopen the country for business in weeks, not months, as he claimed, without evidence, that continued closures could result in more deaths than the pandemic itself.
"We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem," Trump told reporters at a briefing, echoing a midnight Sunday tweet. “We have to open our country because that causes problems that, in my opinion, could be far bigger problems."
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.
But with the economic impact now snapping into focus and millions out of work, businesses shuttered and the markets in free fall — all undermining Trump's reelection message — the chorus of backlash is growing louder, with Trump appearing to side with them.
“Life is fragile and economies are fragile," Trump said, insisting he could protect both.
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Charities face growing need in pandemic without volunteers
For more than a week, Elaine Peoples, who cooked for a now-shuttered day care center, has been out of work. At 68, she's also at a higher risk for catching the new coronavirus. Nonetheless, she's showing up four days a week for her volunteer shift at an increasingly crowded Brooklyn soup kitchen and food pantry.
“Volunteering is vital," said Peoples, who herself is experiencing financial strain. “Everything I get goes to bills. My budget is stretched to the limit. There is no extra.”
These days low-income families still need food. Homeless people still need beds. And those puppies in the animal shelter still need walks.
For decades, American nonprofits have relied on a cadre of volunteers who — quite suddenly — aren’t able to show up. With millions staying home during the pandemic, charities that help the country’s neediest are finding themselves in need.
“This is a time when we do need everybody pulling together to help us out,” said Leslie Bacho, CEO of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, one of the nation's largest food banks.
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Solidarity: Foreign hospitals help French virus hotspot cope
STRASBOURG, France (AP) — The eastern French border city of Mulhouse was fought over by France and Germany across two centuries, but the horrors of the new coronavirus cluster tearing through this community of 110,000 is inspiring unusual solidarity.
While many countries have shut their borders to stem the march of the pandemic — even some nations within the borderless European Union are instituting ID checks — three German states have opened their hospitals to patients from eastern France. Hospitals in bordering Switzerland have done the same.
The Grand Est region is now the epicenter of the outbreak in France, which has buried the third most virus victims in Europe, after Italy and Spain. The crisis there can be traced largely to a dayslong evangelical church gathering in Mulhouse attended by hundreds of people at the end of February.
In a sign of the devastating toll, the local newspaper in Mulhouse has had to add extra obituary pages as the deaths from the coronavirus increase — as has been done in some areas of Italy. In France, only the area around Paris had confirmed more cases than Grand Est as of Sunday, but the capital region has a population more than twice the size.
“Every day we have eight to 12 people who arrive. We don’t know what to do,” said Dr. Patrick Vogt, a general practitioner at the hospital in Mulhouse who recalled a shift just two weeks ago answering the city’s emergency hotline when call after call came in for respiratory problems.
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Teams, toddlers and cabinets: The joys of working from home
In the early days of working from home to prevent spread of the COVID-19 disease, some Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers talking strategy on a video chat couldn’t help but get distracted by their team leader’s kitchen cabinets.
“There was absolutely nothing special about them except for the fact that they were in the private home of someone senior to us,” said researcher Kate Darling, who started gossiping about the cabinetry in an online back channel.
It was a minor and welcome disruption, an early sign of bigger hiccups that office workers, educators and others around the world are dealing with on the fly as the coronavirus pandemic shuts people out of offices, schools, coffee shops and co-working spaces.
Integrating work life into the home has rarely been easy, but measures to contain the virus have brought those worlds into sudden and sharp collision. Untold numbers of Americans are shifting their day jobs from offices to living rooms, spare bedrooms, kitchens and basements. This massive, unplanned social experiment can strain productivity and domestic tranquility as toddlers scurry around untended and business meetings and classes shift to noisy group video chats that resemble a checkerboard of talking heads.
It is also forcing many parents into unexpected new roles. Carmen Williams, a therapist in Macomb, Michigan, finds herself not only seeing clients sporadically, but shelling out for a babysitter, paying tuition for her seven- and 14-year-old kids — and still teaching them school assignments.