Our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has moved here.
CNN’s “Coronavirus: Facts and Fears” global town hall has ended.
Vice President Joe Biden, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, were among the guests to join CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Scroll through our posts below to catch up on what was discussed.
Dr. Priscilla Chan told CNN’s town hall that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative revamped one of its labs in March to serve as a certified coronavirus testing facility.
“Within eight days we got up to a capacity of 1,000 tests a day. So that was really awesome to be able to serve our community that way,” she said. “As of today, we’ve now made testing free to all departments of public health in California.”
Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, founded CZI in 2015 to “find new ways to leverage technology, community-driven solutions, and collaboration to accelerate progress in science, education and within our justice and opportunity work.”
One of Facebook’s most important functions during the pandemic is to connect users with “authoritative health information and experts,” the social media giant’s founder Mark Zuckerberg told CNN’s coronavirus town hall.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s Covid-19 information center has been directed to more than 2 billion people, 350 million of whom have clicked through.
Here’s what he said with regards to the spread of disinformation – something Facebook has been criticized for failing to sufficiently combat in the past.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, joined CNN’s global town hall to discuss what their foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the social media giant are doing to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
Zuckerberg said Facebook employees will return to work in a staggered fashion and shouldn’t expect to be back in their offices until at least the end of May. He also said the company will hold off on hosting “any internal or external physical events that have 50 people or more in them” through June of next year.
Psychiatrist Dr. Christine Moutier joined CNN’s global town hall to discuss tips and advice for people coping with the coronavirus pandemic from a mental health perspective.
She said it was important that people don’t minimize their own grief and sense of loss.
“Right now there is a wave of grief that so many of us are experiencing,” Moutier said.
Moutier also advised people who think they have friends, family or colleagues experiencing a loss and don’t know how to support them to reach out to them “with expressions of love and caring and support.”
“We can do that remotely, and don’t assume that just because you’re not going through the same thing that you can’t do that. We all have a role to play with supporting each other right now,” she said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons has notified Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, that he will be released early from prison due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter and his lawyer.
Cohen is serving a three-year sentence at the federal prison camp in Otisville, New York, where 14 inmates and seven staff members at the complex have tested positive for the virus.
Cohen was scheduled for release in November 2021, but he will be allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence from home confinement, the people said. He will have to undergo a 14-day quarantine at the prison camp before he is released.
Some background on Cohen: He pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. He admitted to helping facilitate hush money payments to two women who alleged past affairs with Trump. When pleading guilty, Cohen implicated Trump, telling a federal judge that he made the payments “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump, who prosecutors identified in court filings as “Individual 1.”
A vocal Trump surrogate: Cohen had been a vocal surrogate for Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, often sparring with reporters and appearing on television to support his long-time client.
Read more here:
At least 667,801 cases of coronavirus have been recorded in the United States, including 32,917 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally of cases.
On Thursday, Johns Hopkins reported 29,690 new cases and 2,073 deaths.
The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as all repatriated cases.
CNN’s map, using JHU data, refreshes every 15 mins:
Wisconsin-based entrepreneur and game developer Scott Owens asked former Vice President Joe Biden if elected president, would he consider responding to the coronavirus with “New Deal-type” proposals that could reshape the United States – like universal health care or guaranteeing a basic income for all Americans.
Here’s how Biden responded with respect to health care:
Here’s what he said about the economy:
Watch:
Former Vice President Joe Biden said during CNN’s coronavirus town hall that it was a “false choice” to have to choose between the economy and peoples’ health.
The question from CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: “I’m hearing once you start opening things back up, people are going to get infected, some may have to go to the hospital and some may sadly die. How would you make those decisions?”
Biden: “I err on the side of caution. Look, I think it’s a false choice to say you have to choose between the economy and our health. If you don’t fix the health side of it, the economy is never going to get right. You’re never going to be in the place where you get to remotely a new normal.”
On small businesses: “We want small business to be able to stay in business,” Biden said of hairdressers, coffee shops, nail salons and hardware stores. “If these little guys go out of business, they’re out of business. They’re not coming back, likely.”
On keeping jobs: “We should think about how we do the economy in a different way,” Biden said.
Small business owner Evans Eads of Fairbanks, Alaska, asked former Vice President Joe Biden if he would reconsider his pledge to choose a woman as his running mate for the 2020 presidential election in favor of someone whose star has risen during the coronavirus pandemic, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Speaking at CNN’s global coronavirus town hall, Biden said:
Former US Vice President Joe Biden said he wouldn’t call the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic a plan.
Speaking at CNN’s global coronavirus town hall, Biden said:
President Donald Trump unveiled new guidelines today meant to help states loosen their social distancing restrictions. In a document provided to all 50 US governors, the White House spelled out a three-phase approach to easing restrictions that depends on meeting specific case count and hospital capacity thresholds.
The benchmarks for the first phase include a sustained decrease in cases over a 14-day period and a return to pre-crisis conditions in hospitals, according to the document.
States should have the “ability to quickly set up safe and efficient screening and testing sites,” the guidelines read, and “quickly and independently supply sufficient Personal Protective Equipment” in hospitals.
Read more on the guidelines here.
Dr. Leana Wen, the former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, told CNN’s coronavirus town hall that three things need to happen before economies and society can reopen safely.
They are:
Here’s what she said:
Dr. Leana Wen, the former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, was asked a question during CNN’s town hall about whether pregnant women or new mothers can give Covid-19 antibodies to their newborns.
Question: I’m 31 weeks pregnant with my fourth child. Is there any evidence to suggest there is antibody protection for a newborn if the mother has been exposed to Covid-19, either across the placenta during gestation or through breast milk?
Dr. Wen: I’ve been thinking a lot about this as a new mother myself. There is a lot that’s not yet known about Covid-19 and pregnancy. We do know that the antibody to coronavirus does cross the placenta and there are studies ongoing now to look at how much of the antibody, if any, is present in breast milk.
“There is a question that remains though, because even if the newborn is able to get those antibodies in some way, we still don’t know if that gives that newborn immunity, meaning that the newborn somehow is less affected by coronavirus or gets a less severe form of it.”
Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said cell phone data anonymized and shared with his research team shows that people by and large are following social distancing policies.
The institute’s coronavirus modeling is being used by the White House to craft its response to the pandemic.
“We’ve made a big push to try to take into account how people move around,” Murray told CNN’s coronavirus town hall.
Murray said it appears that several states in the southern US may have smaller epidemics than previously expected.
He added that the national peak is expected to hit now, but cautioned that different states will see their peaks at different times.
“That’s going to be really important for this idea of rolling opening (of economies),” Murray said. “We’re trying to get a deeper understanding of where states are still on the upswing and where states are on the downswing.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, a HIV researcher and the White House coronavirus response coordinator, characterized the White House guidelines to reopen the country as “fairly strict.”
Testing, contact tracing and surveillance will need to be done as a partnership between the states, local leaders and the federal government, Birx said.
Birx said the federal government is working closely with states and local leaders to identify all the labs and materials they need.
“I know it’s been dynamic, it continues to be a work in progress, but it’s really a partnership between the state and the federal government,” Birx said.
When asked about widespread testing, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said it was unrealistic to expect that every worker in the United States would get tested.
“The virus doesn’t come from nowhere. It has to actually be in the community. So that’s why you have to really have a combination of sentinel surveillance, some early warning systems like the syndromic and influenza-like illness, combined with testing.”
Watch:
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, was asked during CNN’s global town hall about whether a person can get re-infected after getting coronavirus.
Birx: In biology you never want to say that that’s not possible. Coming out of a field where we don’t have an effective model of effective immunity, seeing people develop an immune response and recover and have those two linked, at least in the progress of disease we’ve seen to date, is reassuring to me. But there’s always that small per chance a person who doesn’t make effective antibody or for another reason doesn’t have effective neutrophils, or points out a little defect that wasn’t ever discovered in their genetic response – their immune response to a specific virus. Those outliers always exist, but right now we don’t have an evidence that that’s a common thing that we see.
Cooper: But we don’t know 100% for sure if someone is immune after getting the virus?
Birx: What we have the example of is the biology of someone getting infected, recovering and developing antibody. So in traditional infectious disease, that is the progress you would normally see and that antibody would be effective in controlling subsequent infections. I don’t ever want to say never, but that’s what we’re seeing in most patients is that they recover and they have antibody.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said during CNN’s global coronavirus town hall that it’s important for states to match need with capacity as they ramp up widespread testing – an important lesson learned during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
US President Donald Trump seemed to suggest during today’s press briefing that world leaders were not adequately warned about the severity of the coronavirus, saying he was “angry” because he and fellow G7 leaders were out of the loop.
Speaking about a meeting earlier Thursday with other G7 leaders, Trump said, “all of them and their countries have been devastated by this. Their economies have been devastated by this.”
Without mentioning China by name, where the first cases of the coronavirus were reported, Trump added, “I’m not saying anything. I’m saying people should have told us about this. They should have told the rest of the world, too.”
