TO ECONOMIC EDGE PUSHES AMERICANS BROAD SHUTDOWN · and-a-half-year stretch that ended with the...
1
U(D54G1D)y+=!]!,!$!" An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well- dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment cap- tured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up grocer- ies from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; rent- ers and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospi- tals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing. In an economy that has been hailed for its record-shattering successes, the most basic necessi- ties — food, shelter and medical care — are all suddenly at risk. The latest crisis has played out in sobering economic data and bleak headlines — most recently on Thursday, when the Labor De- partment said 5.2 million workers filed last week for unemployment benefits. That brought the four-week to- tal to 22 million, roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine- and-a-half-year stretch that ended with the pandemic’s arriv- al. Certainly, the outbreak and at- tempts to curb it have created new hardships. But perhaps more sig- nificantly, the crisis has revealed profound, longstanding vulnera- bilities in the economic system. “We built an economy with no shock absorbers,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning econo- mist. “We made a system that looked like it was maximizing profits but had higher risks and lower resiliency.” Well before the coronavirus es- tablished a foothold, the American economy had been playing out on a split screen. On one were impressive achievements: the lowest jobless rate in half a century, a soaring stock market and the longest ex- pansion on record. On the other, a very different story of stinging economic weak- nesses unfolded. Years of limp wage growth left workers strug- gling to afford essentials. Irregu- lar work schedules caused weekly BROAD SHUTDOWN PUSHES AMERICANS TO ECONOMIC EDGE In a System ‘With No Shock Absorbers,’ Basic Needs Are Suddenly at Risk By PATRICIA COHEN The line outside an unemployment office in Fayetteville, Ark., last week, when another 5.2 million workers applied for benefits. SEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS Source: Dept. of Labor THE NEW YORK TIMES WEEKLY, SEASONALLY ADJUSTED 6 million 0 4 2 ’20 ’04 ’16 ’12 ’08 RECESSION 22,034,000 Claims were filed in the last four weeks Continued on Page A10 Berna Lee got the call from the nursing home in Queens on April 3: Her mother had a fever, nothing serious. She was assured that there were no cases of coro- navirus in the home. Then she started calling workers there. “One said, ‘Girl, let me tell you, it’s crazy here,’” Ms. Lee said. “‘Six people died today.’” In a panic, Ms. Lee drove from her home in Rhode Island to the nursing home, beginning a two- week scramble for information, as workers at the facility, Sapphire Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing of Central Queens, told her privately that many residents had died, and that most of the home’s leadership was out sick or in quarantine. Finally, she banged on her mother’s first-floor window to see if she was OK. It was unclear whether her mother understood what was happening, Ms. Lee said. “I didn’t know how bad it was,” she said. “People told me bodies were dropping.” The crisis at Sapphire high- lights not only the desperate state of nursing homes in the New York How Many Are Dead? Nursing Home Won’t Say This article is by John Leland, Amy Julia Harris and Tracey Tully. Continued on Page A17 Families Left in Dark About Conditions BOSTON — Alexandra Cross, a newly minted state public health worker, dialed a stranger’s tele- phone number on Monday, her heart racing. It was Ms. Cross’s first day as part of Massachusetts’s fleet of contact tracers, responsible for tracking down people who have been exposed to the coronavirus, as soon as possible, and warning them. On her screen was the name of a woman from Lowell. “One person who has recently been diagnosed has been in con- tact with you,” the script told her to say. “Do you have a few minutes to discuss what that exposure might mean for you?” Forty-five minutes later, Ms. Cross hung up the phone. They had giggled and commiserated. Her file was crammed with information. She was taking her first steps up a Mount Everest of cases. Massachusetts is the first state to invest in an ambitious contact- tracing program, budgeting $44 million to hire 1,000 people like Ms. Cross. The program repre- sents a bet on the part of Gov. Charlie Baker that the state will be able to identify pockets of infec- tion as they emerge, and prevent infected people from spreading the virus further. This could help Massachusetts in the coming weeks and months, as it seeks to relax strict social- distancing measures and reopen its economy. Contact tracing has helped Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore contain the spread of the virus, but their systems rely on digital surveillance, using pa- tients’ digital footprints to alert potential contacts, an intrusion that many Americans would not accept. Massachusetts is building its response around an old-school, la- bor-intensive method: people. Lots of them. “It’s not cheap,” Governor To Trace Virus, One State Uses An Old-Fashioned Tool: People By ELLEN BARRY HONG KONG — After 16 years in China, a Congolese business- man thought he knew what being black there entailed. He had been subjected to racial slurs and de- nied apartments, but he had also learned Chinese and made local friends. He loved the country; he called it his second home. But the businessman, Felly Mwamba, had not anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, during which he would find himself sealed in his home, prohibited from leaving and eyed as a carrier of the disease, simply because he was African. “The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept,” Mr. Mwamba said by telephone. “We are not animals.” As China tames the coronavirus epidemic now ravaging other countries, its success is giving rise to an increasingly strident blend of patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, at a pitch many say has not been seen in decades. A restaurant in northern China put up a banner celebrating the vi- rus’s spread in the United States. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted Crisis Tamed, China Sees Outsiders as New Peril By VIVIAN WANG and AMY QIN Displays of Hostility as Nationalism Swells Continued on Page A7 HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Minnoli Aya, 18, used text messages to try to encourage her mother, Madhvi Aya, who succumbed to the coronavirus at age 61 after working in a Brooklyn hospital trying to save others. Page A16. ‘I Need My Mommy’ Continued on Page A11 A delicate ecosystem was broken in the Comoros, off East Africa, when trees were cleared for farming. INTERNATIONAL A19 ‘There’s No More Water’ Leagues face large, but not insurmount- able, obstacles even to get games back on television. PAGE B8 SPORTSFRIDAY B8-10 When Sports Might Be Back Just as isolation became the new nor- mal, a “loneliness story” by the author- provocateur Ottessa Moshfegh is sched- uled to be released. PAGE C1 WEEKEND ARTS C1-16 A Solitary Point of View The Trump administration’s latest roll- back, which focuses on releases from power plants, may lead to loosened controls on other pollutants. PAGE A22 NATIONAL A20-23 E.P.A. Weakens Mercury Rules The Democrats’ presumptive nominee is gaining little traction online. Kevin Roose weighs the risks. PAGE A21 Will the Internet Sink Biden? Golf officials are preparing to restart the season by hosting a tournament in Fort Worth, without spectators. PAGE B9 PGA Tour Plans June Return Paul Krugman PAGE A27 EDITORIAL, OP-ED A26-27 WASHINGTON — President Trump told the nation’s governors on Thursday that they could begin reopening businesses, restau- rants and other elements of daily life by May 1 or earlier if they wanted to, but abandoned his threat to use what he had claimed was his absolute authority to im- pose his will on them. On a day when the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus in- creased by more than 2,000 for a total over 30,000, the president re- leased a set of nonbinding guide- lines that envisioned a slow return to work and school over weeks or months. Based on each state’s conditions, the guidelines in effect guarantee that any restoration of American society will take place on a patchwork basis rather than on a one-size-fits-all prescription from Washington that some gov- ernors had feared in recent days. “We are not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a briefing at the White House. Mr. Trump essentially gave cover to mainly Republican gover- nors of states in the South and West that have not been as hard hit by the pandemic to begin re- opening sooner. The president, who has previously said that as many as 29 states could reopen soon, told governors on a confer- ence call before his announce- ment that some of them were “in very, very good shape” and could move further and faster to resum- ing economic and social activities. If they follow the guidelines, New York and other states in the Northeast, as well as states in the Midwest and West, that have seen large outbreaks would remain shuttered until new cases of the vi- rus and death tolls fall and hospi- tal capacity is restored. The guidelines envision pro- Trump Says Governors Can Make Call to Reopen By PETER BAKER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR A Reversal After He Insisted He Had Total Authority to Decide Continued on Page A12 LONDON — The two Chinese companies were offering a risky proposition: two million home test kits said to detect antibodies for the coronavirus for at least $20 million, take it or leave it. The asking price was high, the technology was unproven and the money had to be paid upfront. And the buyer would be required to pick up the crate loads of test kits from a facility in China. Yet British officials took the deal, according to a senior civil servant involved, then confidently promised tests would be available at pharmacies in as little as two weeks. “As simple as a pregnancy test,” gushed Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “It has the poten- tial to be a total game changer.” There was one problem, howev- er. The tests did not work. Found to be insufficiently accu- rate by a laboratory at Oxford Uni- versity, half a million of the tests are now gathering dust in storage. Another 1.5 million bought at a similar price from other sources have also gone unused. The fiasco has left embarrassed British offi- cials scrambling to get back at least some of the money. “They might perhaps have slightly jumped the gun,” said Prof. Peter Openshaw of Imperial College London, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advi- sory Group. “There is a huge pres- sure on politicians to come out and say things that are positive.” A spokesperson from the De- partment of Health and Social Care said that the government had ordered the smallest number Britain Bets On Test Kits, And It Loses By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JANE BRADLEY Continued on Page A8 Brian Dennehy, whose career spanned more than 50 years in theater, movies and television, was 81. PAGE A24 OBITUARIES A24-25, 28 Tony Award-Winning Actor Lawmakers have just 21 days to form a majority government, or the country may have to hold elections again. Unity Talks in Israel Falter The coronavirus crisis could hurt the American economy so badly that as many as 10 million people could soon join the ranks of the poor, Columbia University researchers say. PAGE B4 BUSINESS B1-7 A Pandemic of Poverty The world’s second-largest economy shrank 6.8 percent in the first three months of 2020 as the country coped with the effects of the novel coronavirus that was first reported there. PAGE B6 China’s Economic Run Ends Late Edition VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,666 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, FRIDAY, APRIL 17, 2020 Today, sunshine then clouds, rain and drizzle, high 50. Tonight, rain and drizzle, low 44. Tomorrow, chilly, rain early then clearing, high 50. Weather map appears on Page B11. $3.00
Transcript of TO ECONOMIC EDGE PUSHES AMERICANS BROAD SHUTDOWN · and-a-half-year stretch that ended with the...
C M Y K Nxxx,2020-04-17,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
U(D54G1D)y+=!]!,!$!"
An indelible image from theGreat Depression features a well-dressed family seated with theirdog in a comfy car, smiling downfrom an oversize billboard onweary souls standing in line at arelief agency. “World’s higheststandard of living,” the billboardboasts, followed by a tagline:“There’s no way like the AmericanWay.”
The economic shutdown causedby the coronavirus pandemic hassuddenly hurled the country backto that dislocating moment cap-tured in 1937 by the photographerMargaret Bourke-White. In theupdated 2020 version, lines of carsstretch for miles to pick up grocer-ies from a food pantry; joblessworkers spend days trying to filefor unemployment benefits; rent-ers and homeowners plead withlandlords and mortgage bankersfor extensions; and outside hospi-tals, ill patients line up overnightto wait for virus testing.
In an economy that has beenhailed for its record-shatteringsuccesses, the most basic necessi-ties — food, shelter and medicalcare — are all suddenly at risk.
The latest crisis has played outin sobering economic data andbleak headlines — most recentlyon Thursday, when the Labor De-partment said 5.2 million workersfiled last week for unemploymentbenefits.
That brought the four-week to-tal to 22 million, roughly the netnumber of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch thatended with the pandemic’s arriv-al.
Certainly, the outbreak and at-tempts to curb it have created newhardships. But perhaps more sig-nificantly, the crisis has revealedprofound, longstanding vulnera-bilities in the economic system.
“We built an economy with noshock absorbers,” said JosephStiglitz, a Nobel-winning econo-mist. “We made a system thatlooked like it was maximizingprofits but had higher risks andlower resiliency.”
Well before the coronavirus es-tablished a foothold, the Americaneconomy had been playing out ona split screen.
On one were impressiveachievements: the lowest joblessrate in half a century, a soaringstock market and the longest ex-pansion on record.
On the other, a very differentstory of stinging economic weak-nesses unfolded. Years of limpwage growth left workers strug-gling to afford essentials. Irregu-lar work schedules caused weekly
BROAD SHUTDOWNPUSHES AMERICANSTO ECONOMIC EDGE
In a System ‘With No Shock Absorbers,’Basic Needs Are Suddenly at Risk
By PATRICIA COHEN
The line outside an unemployment office in Fayetteville, Ark., last week, when another 5.2 million workers applied for benefits.SEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS
Source: Dept. of Labor THE NEW YORK TIMES
WEEKLY, SEASONALLY ADJUSTED
6 million
0
4
2
’20’04 ’16’12’08
RECESSION
22,034,000Claims were
filed in the lastfour weeks
Continued on Page A10
Berna Lee got the call from thenursing home in Queens on April3: Her mother had a fever, nothingserious. She was assured thatthere were no cases of coro-navirus in the home. Then shestarted calling workers there.
“One said, ‘Girl, let me tell you,it’s crazy here,’” Ms. Lee said.“‘Six people died today.’”
In a panic, Ms. Lee drove from
her home in Rhode Island to thenursing home, beginning a two-week scramble for information, asworkers at the facility, SapphireCenter for Rehabilitation andNursing of Central Queens, toldher privately that many residentshad died, and that most of the
home’s leadership was out sick orin quarantine.
Finally, she banged on hermother’s first-floor window to seeif she was OK. It was unclearwhether her mother understoodwhat was happening, Ms. Leesaid.
“I didn’t know how bad it was,”she said. “People told me bodieswere dropping.”
The crisis at Sapphire high-lights not only the desperate stateof nursing homes in the New York
How Many Are Dead? Nursing Home Won’t SayThis article is by John Leland,
Amy Julia Harris and Tracey Tully.
Continued on Page A17
Families Left in DarkAbout Conditions
BOSTON — Alexandra Cross, anewly minted state public healthworker, dialed a stranger’s tele-phone number on Monday, herheart racing.
It was Ms. Cross’s first day aspart of Massachusetts’s fleet ofcontact tracers, responsible fortracking down people who havebeen exposed to the coronavirus,as soon as possible, and warningthem. On her screen was the nameof a woman from Lowell.
“One person who has recentlybeen diagnosed has been in con-tact with you,” the script told herto say. “Do you have a few minutesto discuss what that exposuremight mean for you?” Forty-fiveminutes later, Ms. Cross hung upthe phone. They had giggled andcommiserated. Her file wascrammed with information.
She was taking her first stepsup a Mount Everest of cases.
Massachusetts is the first stateto invest in an ambitious contact-tracing program, budgeting $44
million to hire 1,000 people likeMs. Cross. The program repre-sents a bet on the part of Gov.Charlie Baker that the state willbe able to identify pockets of infec-tion as they emerge, and preventinfected people from spreadingthe virus further.
This could help Massachusettsin the coming weeks and months,as it seeks to relax strict social-distancing measures and reopenits economy.
Contact tracing has helpedAsian countries like South Koreaand Singapore contain the spreadof the virus, but their systems relyon digital surveillance, using pa-tients’ digital footprints to alertpotential contacts, an intrusionthat many Americans would notaccept.
Massachusetts is building itsresponse around an old-school, la-bor-intensive method: people.Lots of them.
“It’s not cheap,” Governor
To Trace Virus, One State Uses An Old-Fashioned Tool: People
By ELLEN BARRY
HONG KONG — After 16 yearsin China, a Congolese business-man thought he knew what beingblack there entailed. He had beensubjected to racial slurs and de-nied apartments, but he had alsolearned Chinese and made localfriends. He loved the country; hecalled it his second home.
But the businessman, FellyMwamba, had not anticipated the
coronavirus pandemic, duringwhich he would find himselfsealed in his home, prohibitedfrom leaving and eyed as a carrierof the disease, simply because hewas African.
“The way they are treatingblack people, you cannot accept,”
Mr. Mwamba said by telephone.“We are not animals.”
As China tames the coronavirusepidemic now ravaging othercountries, its success is giving riseto an increasingly strident blendof patriotism, nationalism andxenophobia, at a pitch many sayhas not been seen in decades.
A restaurant in northern Chinaput up a banner celebrating the vi-rus’s spread in the United States.A widely circulated cartoonshowed foreigners being sorted
Crisis Tamed, China Sees Outsiders as New PerilBy VIVIAN WANG
and AMY QINDisplays of Hostility as
Nationalism Swells
Continued on Page A7
HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Minnoli Aya, 18, used text messages to try to encourage her mother, Madhvi Aya, who succumbedto the coronavirus at age 61 after working in a Brooklyn hospital trying to save others. Page A16.
‘I Need My Mommy’
Continued on Page A11
A delicate ecosystem was broken in theComoros, off East Africa, when treeswere cleared for farming.
INTERNATIONAL A19
‘There’s No More Water’Leagues face large, but not insurmount-able, obstacles even to get games backon television. PAGE B8
SPORTSFRIDAY B8-10
When Sports Might Be BackJust as isolation became the new nor-mal, a “loneliness story” by the author-provocateur Ottessa Moshfegh is sched-uled to be released. PAGE C1
WEEKEND ARTS C1-16
A Solitary Point of View
The Trump administration’s latest roll-back, which focuses on releases frompower plants, may lead to loosenedcontrols on other pollutants. PAGE A22
NATIONAL A20-23
E.P.A. Weakens Mercury Rules
The Democrats’ presumptive nomineeis gaining little traction online. KevinRoose weighs the risks. PAGE A21
Will the Internet Sink Biden?
Golf officials are preparing to restartthe season by hosting a tournament inFort Worth, without spectators. PAGE B9
PGA Tour Plans June Return
Paul Krugman PAGE A27
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A26-27
WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump told the nation’s governorson Thursday that they could beginreopening businesses, restau-rants and other elements of dailylife by May 1 or earlier if theywanted to, but abandoned histhreat to use what he had claimedwas his absolute authority to im-pose his will on them.
On a day when the nation’sdeath toll from the coronavirus in-creased by more than 2,000 for atotal over 30,000, the president re-leased a set of nonbinding guide-lines that envisioned a slow returnto work and school over weeks ormonths. Based on each state’s
conditions, the guidelines in effectguarantee that any restoration ofAmerican society will take placeon a patchwork basis rather thanon a one-size-fits-all prescriptionfrom Washington that some gov-ernors had feared in recent days.
“We are not opening all at once,but one careful step at a time,” Mr.Trump told reporters during abriefing at the White House.
Mr. Trump essentially gavecover to mainly Republican gover-
nors of states in the South andWest that have not been as hardhit by the pandemic to begin re-opening sooner. The president,who has previously said that asmany as 29 states could reopensoon, told governors on a confer-ence call before his announce-ment that some of them were “invery, very good shape” and couldmove further and faster to resum-ing economic and social activities.
If they follow the guidelines,New York and other states in theNortheast, as well as states in theMidwest and West, that have seenlarge outbreaks would remainshuttered until new cases of the vi-rus and death tolls fall and hospi-tal capacity is restored.
The guidelines envision pro-
Trump Says Governors Can Make Call to ReopenBy PETER BAKER
and MICHAEL D. SHEARA Reversal After He
Insisted He Had TotalAuthority to Decide
Continued on Page A12
LONDON — The two Chinesecompanies were offering a riskyproposition: two million home testkits said to detect antibodies forthe coronavirus for at least $20million, take it or leave it.
The asking price was high, thetechnology was unproven and themoney had to be paid upfront. Andthe buyer would be required topick up the crate loads of test kitsfrom a facility in China.
Yet British officials took thedeal, according to a senior civilservant involved, then confidentlypromised tests would be availableat pharmacies in as little as twoweeks. “As simple as a pregnancytest,” gushed Prime MinisterBoris Johnson. “It has the poten-tial to be a total game changer.”
There was one problem, howev-er. The tests did not work.
Found to be insufficiently accu-rate by a laboratory at Oxford Uni-versity, half a million of the testsare now gathering dust in storage.Another 1.5 million bought at asimilar price from other sourceshave also gone unused. The fiascohas left embarrassed British offi-cials scrambling to get back atleast some of the money.
“They might perhaps haveslightly jumped the gun,” saidProf. Peter Openshaw of ImperialCollege London, a member of thegovernment’s New and EmergingRespiratory Virus Threats Advi-sory Group. “There is a huge pres-sure on politicians to come out andsay things that are positive.”
A spokesperson from the De-partment of Health and SocialCare said that the governmenthad ordered the smallest number
Britain BetsOn Test Kits,
And It LosesBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and JANE BRADLEY
Continued on Page A8
Brian Dennehy, whose career spannedmore than 50 years in theater, moviesand television, was 81. PAGE A24
OBITUARIES A24-25, 28
Tony Award-Winning ActorLawmakers have just 21 days to form amajority government, or the countrymay have to hold elections again.
Unity Talks in Israel Falter
The coronavirus crisis could hurt theAmerican economy so badly that asmany as 10 million people could soonjoin the ranks of the poor, ColumbiaUniversity researchers say. PAGE B4
BUSINESS B1-7
A Pandemic of Poverty
The world’s second-largest economyshrank 6.8 percent in the first threemonths of 2020 as the country copedwith the effects of the novel coronavirusthat was first reported there. PAGE B6
China’s Economic Run Ends
Late Edition
VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,666 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, FRIDAY, APRIL 17, 2020
Today, sunshine then clouds, rainand drizzle, high 50. Tonight, rainand drizzle, low 44. Tomorrow, chilly,rain early then clearing, high 50.Weather map appears on Page B11.
$3.00
