MIAMI — The race to corral the coronavirus pandemic took on even greater urgency Monday as a burgeoning economic crisis collided with political turmoil. While the latest experimental vaccine appeared to show promise, politicians in Washington were far apart in finding a way to bring financial relief to Americans.
With the first federal relief package poised to end, Congress was trying to agree on another deal to ease the financial burden on Americans as businesses have endured repeated closures meant to contain the spread of the virus.
The political turmoil played out amid apparent good news on the medical front, with scientists involved in the development of at least one vaccine reporting promising results in an early trial.
Congressional Republicans at odds with Democrats over how much money is enough for a new rescue package also face pushback from the White House. GOP leaders met with President Donald Trump as the White House panned some $25 billion in the party’s plan that would be devoted to testing and tracing, said one Republican familiar with the discussions.
Democrats have passed a $3 trillion package in the House, while the Republican plan totals about $1 trillion.
“We have to end this virus,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on MSNBC. Any attempt by the White House to block testing money “goes beyond ignorance.”
The political stakes are high before the November election, especially with the nation registering the most coronavirus infections and deaths in the world. With 17 straight weeks of unemployment claims topping 1 million, many households were facing a cash crunch and losing employer-backed health insurance coverage. The number of cases was spiking in spots throughout the U.S., stressing the medical system, Americans’ psyche and the economy.
Malls in San Francisco were ordered closed about a month after reopening. Four months after the San Francisco Bay Area became the first place in the nation to issue broad stay-at-home orders to prevent the virus from spreading, only one Bay Area county is not on the governor’s watch list for areas with rising infection and hospitalization rates.
In Chicago, the mayor imposed new restrictions on bars, gyms and personal services such as facials as health officials reported that the city again topped 200 daily cases on average. Officials attributed the rise primarily to young people going to bars and restaurants.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, flew to Georgia to help deliver masks, test kits, gowns, face shields and hand sanitizer in Savannah. His visit offered tacit support to a mayor who has been a pacesetter in a revolt against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s refusal to allow local governments to order people to wear masks. Georgia’s cases continue to rise, and Kemp has been embroiled in a public tussle with some local officials, including Savannah Mayor Van Johnson, over mandates on face coverings.
Cuomo said that “somehow in this crazy partisan world, we’ve even politicized a virus.”
He pledged to help Savannah set up two new public testing sites aimed at lower-income people and said he would share contact tracing expertise.
In Florida, where nearly 9,500 people were hospitalized as of Monday, just 18% of its ICU units were available. But two other hard-hit states reported hopeful signs.
Arizona said hospitalizations were at the lowest level in more than two weeks, while the number of people on ventilators and in intensive care also decreased.
In Texas, health officials in Houston were cautiously optimistic as the number of people requiring hospitalization “seems to have tapered off a bit.” But deaths in the second-largest state soared above 4,000, and officials in the border state of Starr County, where a team of Navy doctors was sent to help the only hospital, said they were considering creating an ethics committee to discuss rationing hospital resources.
