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Georgia governor Brian Kemp (R) said he will allow some shuttered businesses, including gyms, bowling alleys and salons, to reopen by the end of the week, despite the state not meeting the Trump administration’s criteria for a “downward move” has “in COVID-19 cases. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Officials in Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas have also announced plans to simplify their home-stay arrangements for the next two weeks. (BuzzFeed)
In his news conference on Monday, President Trump suggested that governors calling for more extensive COVID-19 testing ignore the resources available in their own states, but also criticized Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R) for buying 500,000 Tests from South Korea. Other federal officials insisted that states have adequate testing to help reopen their economies, The Hill reported.
Unofficial U.S. case count at 8:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday: 787,960 cases, with 42,364 deaths – 28,174 cases and 1,681 deaths from yesterday.
Three-quarters of Americans consider opening states to be risky despite recent protests in some states against business closings. (Axios)
A cycle of opening and closing the economy over the next 12 months could cost trillions of dollars, and the US is nowhere near enough to get the number of tests necessary to reopen safely, according to a Harvard white paper Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
The largest group of cases in the United States was discovered at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio, where 1,950 of approximately 2,500 prisoners tested positive. (Columbus shipping)
The hidden victims of the coronavirus include people with cancer or those waiting for organ transplants whose deaths may have been hastened by the pandemic. At least 26,000 people died in the last month who were not included in national surveys. (New York Times)
Across the world, India and Singapore saw the largest surge in a day in new cases yesterday, while New Zealand aimed to eradicate the virus completely. (AP News)
The World Health Organization confirmed that the novel coronavirus was found in animals and not in a research laboratory. (Reuters)
President Trump said via Twitter that he would sign an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration to the United States as cases emerge in clusters of recently deported migrants. (Politico, Reuters)
The FDA will temporarily allow small compounding pharmacies to fill out prescriptions for patients on ventilators to make up for the shortage after last week so that outsourcing facilities can also be sold to hospitals. (STAT)
The New York State Nurses Association filed a lawsuit against the state and two hospitals alleging they were not given adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) or issued guidelines to prevent the virus from spreading. (Wall Street Journal)
Also in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) called on the federal government to make a risk payment for key public employees and canceled all non-material events for the month of June.
An industrial warehouse, two semi-trailers marked as food service trucks, and a close encounter with the FBI – a senior physician in Massachusetts – document his experience in securing PPE. (New England Journal of Medicine)
The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law again called on the federal government to release COVID-19 racial data after preliminary data showed that African Americans were disproportionately affected. (Politico)
