First details of Trump’s economic package includes $500B for taxpayers.

The Trump administration on Wednesday broadened the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and spelled out the primary details of a $1 trillion economic package, asking Congress for an infusion of $500 billion for direct payments to taxpayers and $500 billion in loans for businesses.

President Trump invoked a seldom-used wartime law that permits the govt to press American industry into service to build up production of medical supplies. He said he would send two hospital ships to ny and California.

He also directed federal agencies to suspend all foreclosures and evictions until the top of April because the full economic toll of the crisis began to line in round the world. And he agreed with Canada to prevent all nonessential traffic across the northern border.

After weeks of playing down the outbreak, Mr. Trump appeared on Wednesday to completely embrace the scope of the calamity, saying he saw himself as a wartime president and invoking memories of the efforts made by Americans during war II.

“Now it’s our time,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference at the White House. “We must sacrifice together because we are beat this together, and that we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy.”

Entire sectors of the American economy are shutting down, threatening to crush businesses, put many people out of labor and forcing lawmakers to think about a huge financial bailout that might dwarf the federal government’s response to the 2008 crisis.

The scale of the matter is unlike anything Washington has faced before: The financial crisis, which sent unemployment skyrocketing to 10 percent, centered on foreclosures and therefore the banking sector while this crisis is springing from dozens of place directly , as restaurants and movie theaters pack up , factories close and airplanes, public trains and buses run nearly barren of passengers.

Economists fear that by the time the coronavirus pandemic subsides and economic activity resumes, entire industries might be exhausted , proprietors across the country could lose their businesses and many workers could find themselves jobless.

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(COVID-19) Live Updates: As Virus Spreads Swiftly Worldwide, China Reports Zero New Infections

The White home is seeking $500 billion in direct payments to taxpayers and President Trump invoked a wartime law to press companies to form medical supplies. Britain, bracing for a surge, puts 20,000 troops on standby.

RIGHT NOWThe European Union’s chief Brexit trade negotiator, Michel Barnier, said he had tested positive for the virus.
Here’s what you would like to know:
As the virus spreads, the human toll grows.
China reports zero local infections, a serious turning point.
Many hospitalized within the U.S. are younger adults.
First details of Trump’s economic package includes $500 billion for taxpayers.
Testing in ny gathers speed as health officials rush to stem the spread in Hasidic communities.
Queen Elizabeth heads to country home as Britain’s restrictions expand.
What does ‘social distancing’ actually mean?
As the virus spreads, the human toll grows.
China reported its first day with no new locally transmitted coronavirus infections, three months after the primary case was detected. But the march of the affliction gathered pace while nations throughout the planet braced for a surge of infections and, ultimately, deaths.

For the Fusco family in Freehold, N.J., the risks of the virus and its pernicious exploitation of human connection were laid bare when Grace Fusco, 73, died Wednesday night, hours after her son and five days after her daughter. Four other relations are hospitalized, three of them in critical condition, from an infection traced to a routine family gathering.

No one is safe.

Two members of Congress tested positive and were in isolation on Thursday. While older people remain at gravest risk worldwide, a C.D.C. report found that 38 percent of these who required hospitalization within the U.S. were aged 20 to 54.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, warned that as testing becomes more widespread, people would see the numbers soar.

President Trump signed a relief package to supply leave , unemployment benefits and free coronavirus testing, and lawmakers were drafting a good more sweeping $1 trillion economic stabilization package.

But whilst the federal invoked wartime powers to hurry the assembly of essential medical equipment, like surgical masks, protective body suits, testing kits and, especially, ventilators remained briefly supply.

World leaders escalated pleas to the sole ones who can ultimately help buy time: everyone.

“It’s right down to each and each one among us,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said during a televised address. “We aren't doomed to helplessly watch the spread of the virus. we've a way to fight it: we must practice social distancing.”

Failure to try to to so could end in even more stringent lockdowns that Germany has thus far avoided, she said. “We are a democracy. We don’t live by force, but by shared knowledge and cooperation.”

In California, quite nine million people are told to not leave their homes. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of latest York resisted taking such a drastic step, whilst he ordered businesses to compel employees to figure from home.

In Spain, violations of isolation orders are enforced with fines. Russia is using facial-recognition technology to trace down and fine people that violate mandatory quarantines. Beaches in Barcelona are closed, but many Americans were heading to sandy shores for respite .

Even as nations wrestled with a public health emergency, the depression grew darker, deepening the anxiety felt by people increasingly stop from their support networks.

But, as Ms. Merkel said, whilst a society in isolation, “we will show that we are there for each other .”

For the primary time since the coronavirus crisis began, China on Thursday reported no new local infections for the previous day, a milestone in its costly battle with the outbreak that has since spread round the world.

Officials said 34 new coronavirus cases had been confirmed, all of them involving people that had come to China from elsewhere.

In signaling that an end to China’s epidemic could be in view , the announcement could pave the way for officials to specialise in reviving the country’s economy, which nearly ground to a halt after the govt imposed travel restrictions and quarantine measures. In recent days, economic life has been resuming in fits and starts.

But China isn't out of danger yet. Experts have said that it'll got to see a minimum of 14 consecutive days without new infections for the outbreak to be considered truly over. It remains to be seen whether the virus will re-emerge once lifestyle restarts and travel restrictions are lifted round the country.

“It’s very clear that the actions taken in China have almost delivered to an end their first wave of infections,” said Ben Cowling, a professor and head of the division of epidemiology and biostatistics at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health. “The question is what is going to happen if there’s a second wave, because the type of measures that China has implemented aren't necessarily sustainable within the future .”

To contain the outbreak, the authorities shut schools and workplaces and imposed travel and quarantine restrictions on broad swaths of the population and lots of visitors from abroad. Since January, quite 50 million people within the central province of Hubei, including its capital, Wuhan, where the outbreak began, are subjected to a strict lockdown.

American adults of all ages — not just those in their 70s, 80s and 90s — are being seriously sickened by the coronavirus, consistent with a report on nearly 2,500 cases within the us .

The report, issued Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that — as in other countries — the oldest patients were at greatest risk of becoming seriously ill or dying. But of the 508 coronavirus patients known to possess been hospitalized within the us , 38 percent were between 20 and 54. And nearly half the 121 sickest patients studied — those admitted to medical care units — were adults under 65.

“I think everyone should be listening to the present ,” said Stephen S. Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University . “It’s not just getting to be the elderly.”

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, appealed on Wednesday for younger people to prevent socializing in groups and to require care to guard themselves et al. .

“You have the potential then to spread it to someone who does have a condition that none folks knew about, and cause them to possess a disastrous outcome,” Dr. Birx said.

In the C.D.C. report, 20 percent of the hospitalized patients and 12 percent of the medical care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44, basically spanning the millennial generation.

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Trump and Beijing agree on the COVID-19 crisis: It's someone else's fault

Hong Kong (CNN)As the coronavirus pandemic spreads round the world and lots of governments prove themselves but prepared to cope, the blame game is heating up.

But while there's many opprobrium to travel around in areas where the virus is now rapidly spreading -- particularly over why precautions weren't put in situ earlier, when health experts were warning the outbreak wouldn't remain contained in Asia -- some top officials are pointing the finger further afield.

In a tweet late Monday, US President Donald Trump said his administration would be supporting industries "that are particularly suffering from the Chinese virus," echoing previous comments by Republican lawmakers tying the outbreak to China, where cases of the novel coronavirus were first identified. Trump has previously mentioned a "foreign virus" in his speeches to the state .

That has been widely viewed -- particularly in Beijing -- as an effort responsible China for the pandemic itself, obfuscating any responsibility US and other officials have for his or her own handling of it. And while China's handling of the outbreak within the early weeks has come under intense scrutiny and deserved criticism, once the virus arrived overseas, so too did the responsibility to contain it.

On Monday, the amount of cases of the virus outside China overtook those inside the country where the virus was first reported. Indeed, there are fears in parts of Asia that the outbreak could rebound thanks to cases coming from Europe and North America -- most of China's new cases in the week are imported, and Hong Kong on Tuesday announced an entire quarantine on anyone entering the territory from overseas.

'Turn inward'

By repeatedly emphasizing the supposed Chinese-ness of the virus, Trump may very well be playing into Beijing's hands. Only a couple of weeks ago, domestic anger over the government's handling of the outbreak and an alleged initial coverup was reaching boiling point, but nothing rallies people round the flag like blanket criticism from overseas, particularly from people known to be hostile to China like Trump and lots of other Republican officials pushing this line.

Millions of people across China shouldered immense sacrifices to contain the virus once the outbreak began, efforts that are praised by the planet Health Organization (WHO) et al. , and there's increasing bitterness that the country remains bearing the brunt of the blame from some quarters.

Chinese officials have capitalized on this growing resentment by boosting their own unfounded conspiracy theories about the virus' origin.

Last week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao seized upon a press release by Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that some influenza deaths within the US were later identified as cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

On Twitter, Zhao claimed -- without evidence -- that "it could be United States Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan" and demanded the US "Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!" Zhao also retweeted another Twitter user claiming baselessly that Redfield's statement "supports the claims made by Japanese scientists that the virus originated from the US but was covered up."

Zhao and his Foreign Ministry colleagues have refused to supply evidence for his or her claims, but they do not got to so as to realize their goal. Creating confusion or disagreement over the origin of the virus could help push the blame faraway from China for its initial handling of the outbreak, even as Trump and other US officials' blaming of China helps move the conversation faraway from their own, highly criticized, response.

Ironically, even as he was boosting conspiracy theories about the virus' origin, Zhao also tweeted perhaps the simplest advice for all officialdom altogether countries, quoting a Chinese saying: "Turn inward (and) examine yourself once you encounter difficulties."

The cost of the coronavirus, both in terms of lives and economic losses, is already great, and is probably going to urge much worse. it is easier for officials in any country to point the finger of blame elsewhere -- be it at China, or its neighbors, or easily scapegoated communities like migrants -- than shoulder it themselves.

But even as China should be responding to the very real complaints of its own citizens about how the outbreak was handled, and whether it could are contained at an earlier stage had officials acted differently, so too should the US and other countries be facing head on their own alleged failings to stop the virus reaching pandemic levels.

Dangerous consequences

Trump has long taken an aggressive stance on China on the economic front, pushing the country on trade and property , and emphasizing where the coronavirus outbreak first began plays into a longtime us vs. them narrative. it's going to also help alleviate a number of the backlash Trump will inevitably suffer should there be an economic downturn as a results of the pandemic.

But while Trump's base may yet respond positively to blaming China, there's another subsection of usa citizens who could face very real risks due to it.

Asian Americans, and particularly Chinese Americans, have already been handling a rise in racism and discrimination thanks to the coronavirus, including attacks and public confrontations. Similar incidents have also occurred in parts of Europe.

Viruses, of course, don't have nationalities, and therefore the WHO has moved faraway from giving new pathogens regional or country-specific names for this very reason, on the grounds that previous naming choices -- like the center East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) -- had resulted within the "stigmatizing (of) certain communities."

And while it's going to have made sense to debate a "Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus" early within the outbreak, when it had been still centralized therein country -- and lacked a politician WHO moniker -- the epicenter of the pandemic has now moved to Europe, while China itself appears to be moving past the outbreak.

Replying to Trump Monday, Congressman Ted Lieu, who is Taiwanese-American, warned that "Asian Americans will likely encounter more discrimination due to your tweet."

"COVID19 is now an American virus, an Italian virus, a Spanish virus," Lieu added. "We all are impacted & we all got to work together."

The Asian American Journalists Association has repeatedly urged media outlets to take care in how they cover the virus, "to avoid fueling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak" -- but this has had little effect over how the country's President and other officials discuss it on Twitter.

source cnn : here

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