Good afternoon,
Please see highlights from yesterday’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing, as well as additional guidance and resources addressing COVID-19.
Today, President Trump meets with the Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State at 4:00pm ET. Members of the Coronavirus Task Force hold a press briefing at 5:00pm ET.
Additional Guidance (as of 4.20, 5pm):
- WH - President Donald J. Trump Approves American Samoa Disaster Declaration (Click here)
- WH - Executive Order on National Emergency Authority to Temporarily Extend Deadlines for Certain Estimated Payments (Click here)
- CDC - What Food and Grocery Pick-up and Delivery Drivers Need to Know about COVID-19 (Click here)
- CDC - What Rideshare, Taxi, Limo, and other Passenger Drivers-for-Hire Need to Know about COVID-19 (Click here)
- CDC - Contact Tracing (Click here)
- CDC - Resources for State, Local, Territorial and Tribal Health Departments (Click here)
- CDC - CDC Response Corps to Support State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Health Departments (Click here)
- CDC - COVID-19 Forecasts for the United States (Click here)
- CDC - Support for States, Tribes, Localities and Territories (Click here)
- CMS - CMS Issues Recommendations to Re-Open Health Care Systems in Areas with Low Incidence of COVID-19 (Click here)
- FDA - April 17 Daily Roundup (Click here)
- FDA - Serological Test Validation and Education Efforts (Click here)
- NIH - Investigational chimp adenovirus MERS-CoV vaccine protects monkeys (Click here)
- NIH - Antiviral remdesivir prevents disease progression in monkeys with COVID-19 (Click here)
- USDA - USDA Announces Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (Click here)
- USDA - West Virginia Added to Innovative SNAP Online Pilot Program (Click here)
- USDA - USDA Approves Program to Feed Kids in Arizona and Illinois (Click here)
- DHS - Acting Secretary Chad Wolf Statement on the President’s Executive Order on Duties and Fees Deferment for Certain Importers (Click here)
- DHS - Acting Secretary Chad Wolf Statement on Non-Essential Travel (Click here)
- DHS-FEMA/HHS - FEMA and HHS Share Best Practices for Coronavirus Pandemic Response (Click here)
- DOJ - Justice Department Issues Business Review Letter to AmerisourceBergen Supporting Distribution of Critical Medicines Under Expedited Procedure for COVID-19 Pandemic Response (Click here)
- VA - VA acquires Texas community hospital to fight COVID-19 and care for Veterans in the future (Click here)
HIGHLIGHTS | President Trump and the Coronavirus Task Force Provide an Update to Americans
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RE-OPENING THE COUNTRY SAFELY
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Following the release of our reopening guidelines, governors across the country are looking forward to phase one and announcing plans for an economic resurgence.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “During this time, Americans must maintain strict vigilance and continue to practice careful hygiene, social distancing, and the other protective measures that we have outlined, and that everyone’s become very familiar with. We continue to be encouraged that many of the areas hardest hit by the virus appear to have turned the corner.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Recent deaths are down very, very substantially. You can compare that with their peak not so long ago, and you have numbers of 30%, 25%. And Detroit, as an example, it’s down over by over 50% - congratulations. And in New Orleans, where they’ve done a terrific job, they’re down 65%.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “30 states have just one case or less per 1,000 people. Far fewer cases per capita, as an example, than Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden.”
WORKING WITH GOVERNORS ON TESTING
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Earlier today, Vice President Pence spoke with governors from all 50 states about our unified effort to defeat the virus … Prior to the call, we provided each governor with a list of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the labs where they can find additional testing capacity within their state.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Similar to the situation with ventilators, states need to assess their complete inventory of available capacity. Some states have far more capacity than they actually understand.”
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: “Governors are continuing to expand testing and we assured them that we’re going to continue to work in every way to support their efforts to do just that.”
TESTING UPDATE
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “To date, the United States has conducted millions more tests than any other country. You can add them all up and they don’t catch us. And our numbers are doubling almost on a -- certainly on a monthly basis, but almost on a weekly basis, we’re moving very rapidly.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’ll be doubling our number of daily tests if the governors bring their states fully online through the capability that they have.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “As the experts have explained, this capacity is sufficient to allow states to conduct diagnostic testing to treat patients, as well as contact tracing to contain outbreaks and monitoring to pinpoint potential hot spots during phase one.”
DR. DEBORAH BIRX: “[Adm. Giroir and CMS Deputy Administrator Smith] have prepared to have everything ready for phase two. And preparing it now for what we will need in the future.”
ASSISTANT SECRETARY ADM. GIROIR: “There’s been over 40 million ‘[tests] in the marketplace.’ But we have an end to end issue that we needed to deal with and that’s what we’ve been dealing with: the swabs, the transport media. If we don’t have people utilizing the machines the way Dr. Birx is talking about -- we have some of our main platforms that are only 10% being utilized. You could have a lot of tests in the market and those are correct numbers, but if the machines aren’t utilizing them and they’re not organized at that level, then they’re not being utilized to its fullest.”
SUPPLIES OF MEDICAL EQUIPMENT
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We have almost 10,000 [ventilators] in our federal reserve, our stockpile as they call it and we did a great job with the ventilators. Unfortunately, the press doesn’t cover it other than the fair press.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “My Administration also continues to support states with our massive operation to deliver masks, gowns, gloves and other vital supplies. Admiral Polowczyk and his team at [FEMA] are really — what a job they’ve done. … They’re using detailed data about supply chains to track the deployment of one billion pieces of protective equipment through private distributors every two weeks.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’ve also conducted major military operations providing cities and states with additional medical capacity and the incredible 1,800 men and women from the Army Corps of Engineers.”
LT. GEN. SEMONITE: “We’re actually executing 32 different facilities, that’s on the order of merit of about 16,000 beds. Eight of those are all done, we’ve still got a lot more to complete, and in the next week and a half, we’re going to complete about 15 more facilities.”
TREATMENTS AND THERAPEUTICS
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “There are now 72 active trials underway across the United States, researching dozens of therapies and treatments, and another 211 are in the planning stages … This includes their therapies designed to attack the virus, as well as others that would hinder its replication, reduce the rate of infection, control the immunity response, or transfer lifesaving antibodies from the blood of recovered patients.”
NEW FUNDING PACKAGE
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “My administration continues to press Congress to replenish the enormously successful Paycheck Protection Program, which has impacted 30 million American jobs. We hope to have an agreement very soon.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’re also pushing for the deal to include an additional $75 billion -- our deal that we’re talking about. $75 billion for hospitals and other health care providers.”
SUPPORT FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “HHS has also distributed the first 30 billion dollars in direct payments to a million health care providers across the country.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’ve also invested 1.4 billion dollars in community health centers to ensure our most vulnerable communities, including many African-American and Hispanic American communities have access to the services and testing that they need.”
OIL PRICES
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Based on the record low price of oil that you’ve been seeing – it’s at a level that’s very interesting to a lot of people – we’re filling up our national petroleum reserves, strategic, and all the strategic reserves. And we’re looking to put as much as 75 million barrels into the reserves themselves.”
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