Coronavirus Live Updates: In 4 Weeks, 22 Million Americans Have Lost Their Jobs

Workers have ‘nowhere to hide’ as unemployment permeates the economy.

More than 5.2 million workers were added to the tally of the unemployed on Thursday, another staggering increase that is sure to add fuel to the debate over how long to impose stay-at-home orders and restrictions on business activity.

In the last four weeks, the economy has lost about 22 million jobs. The latest figure from the Labor Department, reflecting last week’s initial unemployment claims, underscores how the downdraft has spread to every corner of the economy: hotels and restaurants, mass retailers, manufacturers and white-collar strongholds like law firms.

“There’s nowhere to hide,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. “This is the deepest, fastest, most broad-based recession we’ve ever seen.”

Some of the new jobless claims represent freshly laid-off workers; others are from people who had been trying for a week or more to file.

The mounting unemployment numbers seem certain to add to pressure to lift some restrictions on business activity. President Trump has said some measures should be relaxed soon because of the impact on workers. “There has to be a balance,” he said at a press briefing Wednesday evening. “We have to get back to work.”

Many governors and health experts are more cautious. If business conditions return to normal too quickly, they fear, a second wave of coronavirus infections could spread.

“For all practical purposes, the U.S. economy is closed, so why would you expect layoffs to stop?” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities. “The longer the wait to reopen, the more painful it will be in terms of layoffs. Getting a date for reopening and getting more certainty about reopening is critical.”

Mr. Slok expects the unemployment rate to hit 17 percent this month, up from 4.4 percent in March and higher than any mark since the Great Depression.

President Trump is set to issue new federal guidelines on social distancing on Thursday in a bid to move the country closer to reopening for business, even as public health officials warned that it was far too early for any widespread return to public life.

Governors in many states are making their own plans, often in consultation and solidarity with their neighbors. But their actions will depend on the widespread availability of tests to track the coronavirus, an effort that is woefully lagging.

Although capacity has improved in recent weeks, supply shortages remain crippling, and many regions are still restricting tests to people who meet specific criteria. Antibody tests, which reveal whether someone has ever been infected with the coronavirus, are just starting to be rolled out, and most have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said governors and mayors would make the call on lifting restrictions after receiving guidance from the federal government.

But she warned that it was no time for Americans to become complacent about social distancing.

“I will remind the people again: This is a highly contagious virus,” she said.

On Jan. 22, two days after Chinese officials first acknowledged the serious threat posed by the new virus ravaging the city of Wuhan, the chief of the World Health Organization held the first of what would be months of almost daily news briefings, sounding the alarm, telling the world to take the outbreak seriously.

But with its officials divided, the W.H.O., still seeing no evidence of sustained spread of the virus outside of China, declined the next day to declare a global public health emergency. A week later, the organization reversed course and made the declaration.

Those early days of the epidemic illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations that is now under fire by President Trump, who on Tuesday ordered a cutoff of American funding to the organization.

With limited, constantly shifting information to go on, the W.H.O. showed an early, consistent determination to treat the new contagion like the threat it would become, and to persuade others to do the same. At the same time, the organization repeatedly praised China, acting and speaking with a political caution born of being an arm of the United Nations, with few resources of its own, unable to do its work without international cooperation.

Mr. Trump, deflecting criticism that his own handling of the crisis left the United States unprepared, accused the W.H.O. of mismanaging it, called the organization “very China-centric” and said it had “pushed China’s misinformation.”

But a close look at the record shows that the W.H.O. acted with greater foresight and speed than many national governments, and more than it had shown in previous epidemics. And while it made mistakes, there is little evidence that the W.H.O. is responsible for the disasters that have unfolded in Europe and then the United States.

The coronavirus has been sweeping its way through nursing homes across the country and claiming the lives of thousands of residents who are particularly vulnerable — the elderly, many with underlying health issues, who are living in close quarters, as well as the people who care for them.

In a small New Jersey township, police on Monday found 17 dead bodies inside a nursing home morgue designed to hold four people. This brought the death toll at the long-term care facility to 68, including 26 people who tested positive for the coronavirus.

Even as nursing homes have taken measures to limit the spread of the virus, testing kits are a more effective way to separate the sick from the healthy, but they are still not widely available.

After the first positive coronavirus test came back at a Virginia nursing home in mid-March, its administrator said the staff restricted visitors, conducted temperature checks at the end of every worker’s shift and isolated residents who had tested positive into separate areas.

Even so, there suddenly was another case. And within two weeks, dozens of others inside the facility, the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Richmond, Va., were falling ill. Now, at least 46 residents are dead — more than a quarter of the facility’s population and one of the highest known death tolls in the United States.

“You can’t fight what you can’t see,” said Dr. Jim Wright, the director of the center.

Protesters have taken to the streets in several states to urge governors to reopen businesses and relax rules that health officials have said are necessary to save lives.

In Lansing, Mich., on Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators honked from their cars and some waved flags on the state capitol grounds at a protest called “Operation Gridlock.” In Frankfort, Ky., dozens of people shouted through a Capitol building window as Gov. Andy Beshear held a virus briefing. And in Raleigh, N.C., on Tuesday, a woman was arrested for violating the governor’s stay-at-home order at a protest that drew at least 100 people, The News & Observer reported.

More protests are planned in other states, including Texas, Oregon and Washington, as the economic and health effects of the coronavirus continue to worsen. The demonstrations are a sign that despite the rising death toll and pleas of public health experts, some workers are growing agitated about lost wages, emergency orders and the tightening restrictions that governors have placed on their movements.

“You have to disobey,” Wayne Hoffman, the president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that pushes for smaller government, said after the state’s governor announced that he was extending a stay-at-home order until the end of April. He encouraged people to attend a rally on Friday at the State Capitol.

At the Michigan protest, which drew the largest crowd yet, the sound of car horns filled the air and signs proclaimed “Live Free or Die,” “Make Michigan Work Again” and “We Deem Our Governor Non-Essential.”

Tyler Miller, 39, an engineering technician in Bremerton, Wash., who has planned a similar protest for next week at Washington’s statehouse, said in an interview that Americans should take the virus seriously, noting that even as he wrote to the governor to complain about the restrictions, he self-quarantined at home because of coronavirus-like symptoms.

“I want the governor to say that these are strongly encouraged practices but that people have the right to gather,” Mr. Miller said, adding that if the order was revised, he would call off the rally. “My personal view is, I want people to be as safe as possible, but I also want their liberties to be respected in the process.”

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement on face coverings came at a briefing during which he also announced that 752 more people had died of the virus in New York. In New Jersey, officials reported 351 additional deaths, and in Connecticut, the death toll rose by 197. There, Gov. Ned Lamont attributed the sharp increase to a new batch of fatalities being officially tied to the virus.

Mr. Lamont stopped short of saying he would require face coverings in public as Mr. Cuomo had, but said that he planned to issue an order “strongly” advising Connecticut residents to wear masks in crowds and stores.

“This is the way that we are going to get this virus behind us sooner and get everyone back to work as soon as we possibly can,” he said.

A new federal program to help small businesses weather the coronavirus pandemic is running out of money and falling short in the industries and states most battered by the crisis, risking waves of bankruptcies and millions of additional unemployed workers.

Funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, an initiative created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law enacted last month, could be exhausted this week, meaning that the Small Business Administration would have to stop approving applications. As of Wednesday evening, more than 1.4 million loans had been approved at a value of more than $315 billion, according to the Small Business Administration.

But congressional leaders and the Trump administration have failed to reach agreement on adding hundreds of billions of dollars to replenish the program, hamstrung by a dispute over whether to carry out sweeping changes to how it allocates loans to businesses across the country.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Jovita Carranza, the head of the Small Business Administration, urged Congress to approve additional funds, as the demand “underscores the need for hardworking Americans to have access to relief as soon as possible.”

The desperate situation reflects the fitful nature of the government’s efforts to put into effect the hulking stimulus plan, a measure that was hastily negotiated by Congress and the administration as both faced intense pressure to respond to an extraordinary public health and economic catastrophe. Economists warned at the time that the package allocated too little for small businesses and ran the risk of steering too much of that money away from companies that needed it the most.

As critical medical resources are expedited to regions in the country currently hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus, other communities bracing for outbreaks are left with few good options to stock hospitals with masks, respirators, gloves, goggles and surgical gowns. Supplies are backlogged or canceled at the last minute and demand is driving up prices. In some cases, it is not clear whether a vendor is legitimate or a scam.

“I don’t take anything away from hot spots,” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, a Democrat, said in an interview. “But we don’t want to become one of them.”

In Montana, there are 404 coronavirus cases with seven deaths so far, according to a New York Times analysis.

Mr. Bullock said Montana has received 78,000 N95 masks from the federal government, while the state needs 550,000.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is working with 11 different manufacturers to purchase protective gear for medical workers, and it is suggesting workers wash and reuse their gear.

Massachusetts is the first state to invest in an ambitious contact-tracing program, budgeting $44 million to hire 1,000 people to track down people who have been exposed to the coronavirus, as soon as possible, and warning them.

Contact tracing has long been a critical tool in combating infectious disease, including fights against illnesses such as AIDS and SARS. It has helped Asian countries like Singapore and South Korea contain the spread of the new coronavirus, but their systems rely heavily on digital surveillance, using patients’ digital footprints to automatically alert their contacts, an intrusion that many Americans would not accept.

Massachusetts is opting for an old-school, labor-intensive method: people. Lots of them.

Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician-anthropologist and founding partner of the nonprofit Partners in Health, which is helping the state train workers, said there was no substitute for the bond of trust formed by a human contact tracer.

Jerry Falwell Jr.’s angry counteroffensive against critics of his decision to invite Liberty University students back to its Lynchburg, Va., campus after spring break has played out in the media, the courts, even with the campus police.

But his campaign has been undermined by the spread of a virus he cannot control.

Since March 29, when a Liberty student living off-campus was the first to be diagnosed, confirmed coronavirus cases in the Central Virginia health district, which surrounds Lynchburg and Liberty, have grown from seven to 78. One person has died.

It is not known whether any of those cases are linked to returning Liberty students, but the university community is exposed as well. Liberty said on Wednesday night that two employees had tested positive for the virus, two more had results pending, and seven were quarantined at home.

Amid those struggles, a Liberty student on Monday filed a class-action lawsuit, saying that Liberty and Mr. Falwell had “placed students at severe physical risk and refused to refund thousands of dollars in fees owed to them for the Spring 2020 semester,” according to a statement from the law firm filing the suit.

The furor in Lynchburg centers on Mr. Falwell’s decision to open the campus to all students and staff at a time when most American universities were closing for fear of spreading the disease. For weeks before that decision, Mr. Falwell had derided other universities’ coronavirus responses as overreactions driven by a desire to harm President Trump.

Some business leaders had no idea they were included in President Trump’s “Opening Our Country Council” until they heard that their names had been read in the Rose Garden on Tuesday night. Some of those who had agreed to help said they received little information on what, exactly, they were signing up for. And others who were willing to connect with the White House could not participate in hastily organized conference calls on Wednesday because of scheduling conflicts and technical difficulties.

In short, the rollout of the council was as confusing as the process of getting there. Instead of a formal panel, what Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday was a watered-down version that included 17 separate industry groups, including hospitality, banking, energy and “thought leaders.” And on Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers received emails inviting them to join yet another task force.

The president participated in four calls with those groups during the day at the same time that White House officials were playing down their significance. They said the goal was simply to begin a dialogue about the economy after the pandemic recedes, but the confusion was the latest example of the difficulty the administration has encountered in its attempts to enlist support from the private sector to bolster the president’s claim that he has the power to reopen the economy, even as governors have made it clear that they will make those decisions themselves.

Breaking leases, paying rent and other housing questions answered.

Whether you’ve moved back with your parents, or simply to a different space to ride out the pandemic, do you have any options if you want to break your lease? Or are you looking for your next house and considering a life-changing purchase during these strange times? We have the answers you need.

Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s eldest daughter and a senior White House adviser, has positioned herself as one of the leaders of the administration’s economic relief efforts and one of its most vocal advocates of social distancing.

“Those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please do so,” Ms. Trump said in a video she posted online, encouraging Americans to follow federal guidelines about social distancing, which advise people stay at least six feet apart. “Each and every one of us plays a role in slowing the spread,” she noted.

But Ms. Trump herself has not followed the federal guidelines advising against discretionary travel, leaving Washington for another of her family’s homes, even as she has publicly thanked people for quarantining themselves. And effective April 1, the city of Washington issued a stay-at-home order for all residents not performing essential activities.

Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who is also a senior White House adviser, traveled with their three children to the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey to celebrate the first night of Passover this month, according to two people with knowledge of their travel plans, even as Seders across the country were canceled and families gathered remotely over apps like Zoom.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Reporting was contributed by Donald G. McNeil Jr., Richard Pérez-Peña, Ellen Barry, Marc Santora, Jim Tankersley, Emily Cochrane, Emily Flitter, Matt Stevens, Karen Barrow, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Caitlin Dickerson, David Gelles, Abby Goodnough, Neil Irwin, Danielle Ivory, Miriam Jordan, Sheila Kaplan, Annie Karni, Kate Kelly, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Adeel Hassan, Mike Baker, Manny Fernandez, Simon Romero and Katie Thomas.

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