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Coronavirus Updates: U.S. Will Drop Limits on Testing, Pence Says.
President Trump was weighing more restrictions on travelers arriving from abroad. The U.S. death toll rose to nine, including two who died last week and were later confirmed to have been infected.
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The federal government is lifting all restrictions on who can be tested for coronavirus, Vice President Mike Pence said.
Here’s what you need to know:
- All federal limits on testing will be lifted, Pence says.
- More limits on foreign travel are being weighed, but not domestic restrictions, Trump says.
- Two earlier deaths in Washington State are tied to the virus.
- The New York subway will be disinfected every 72 hours, officials say.
- Iran frees 54,000 inmates to avoid spread in prisons.
- The death toll in Italy surges while the pope has a common cold.
- The second case in New York raises the prospect of the virus spreading locally.
Read updates in Chinese: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息
All federal limits on testing will be lifted, Pence says.
Vice President Mike Pence said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was lifting all restrictions on testing for coronavirus, and would be releasing new guidelines to fast-track testing for people who fear they have the virus, even if they are displaying mild symptoms.
“Today we will issue new guidance from the C.D.C. that will make it clear that any American can be tested, no restrictions, subject to doctor’s orders,” Mr. Pence told reporters at the White House.
The federal government has promised to significantly ramp up testing, after drawing criticism for strictly limiting testing in the first weeks of the outbreak. But health care supply companies and public health officials have cast doubt on the government’s assurances, as complaints continue that the need for testing remains far greater than the capacity.
“The estimates we’re getting from industry right now — by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed,” the head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Stephen Hahn, said at a White House briefing on Monday.
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But some companies developing tests say their products are still weeks away from approval.
And even if a million test kits were available, public health laboratories say they would not be able to process nearly that many within a week. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday that public health labs currently can test 15,000 people daily, though that figure is expected to grow.
The F.D.A. said that Dr. Hahn was taking into account the anticipated increased production of test kits by an outside manufacturer, Integrated DNA Technologies, which is now selling kits to the federal government and other buyers.
The C.D.C. botched the first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic kit, a discovery made only after hundreds of kits had been shipped to state laboratories. A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses.
“Right now, I’d say we’d need more capacity,” Dr. Hahn said at the White House briefing.
TESTING DELAYS
Public and private labs say they’re not even close to reaching the federal government’s promises that close to a million tests for the virus could be performed soon.
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More limits on foreign travel are being weighed, but not domestic restrictions, Trump says.
President Trump said on Tuesday that he may further tighten limits on international travel in hopes of blocking the arrival of more visitors infected by coronavirus, but he ruled out for now any restrictions on domestic travel within the United States.
“We’re not looking at that at all. There’s only one hot spot,” he told reporters. “But we’re looking at other countries and we’re being very stringent.”
The Trump administration has already imposed limits on travel from China, barred all travel to Iran and issued warnings to Americans not to travel to parts of Italy and South Korea.
Later, at the National Institutes of Health, Mr. Trump added that he was not actively considering restrictions on travel to Mexico but expressed concern about Japan, which is hosting the Summer Olympics in Tokyo and has just constructed a new stadium for the competition.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” he said. “They have this fabulous facility.”
As for Mexico, he played down the prospect of travel limits. “We’re not looking at it very strongly,” he said. “We’re not seeing a lot of evidence in that area.”
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Two earlier deaths in Washington State are tied to the virus.
Two people who died last week in the Seattle area were infected with coronavirus, officials said on Tuesday, suggesting that the virus had spread in that region days earlier than health officials had previously known.
That brought the death toll in Washington State, and in the United States, to nine. So far, those deaths have all been in the Seattle area.
The confirmation of additional deaths adds to an escalating emergency in a region that has rapidly emerged as a focal point for the virus in the United States, where there have now been at least 120 cases of coronavirus in more than a dozen states, as local health authorities from coast to coast raced to assess the risk to schools, medical centers and businesses.
The other deaths, all announced over the last few days, included residents of a nursing care facility in Kirkland, a Seattle suburb.
Health officials in North Carolina announced that state’s first case of coronavirus on Tuesday afternoon. They said the patient there had traveled to Washington and been “exposed at a long-term care facility” where there was an outbreak, an apparent reference to the Life Care nursing center in Kirkland, Wash.
The North Carolina patient was said to be doing well and isolated at home in Wake County.
Officials in Washington State were rushing to take steps to contain the spread. Health officials were asking the State Legislature for an additional $100 million in funding to help respond to the virus. Some leaders were weighing more widespread closings of events, and around Seattle, immediate steps were being taken.
In King County, officials were in the process of purchasing a motel in the region that could house people needing isolation. They were also working to repurpose modular homes that had been originally meant to be used by homeless people.
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The New York subway will be disinfected every 72 hours, officials say.
If there’s one place where being packed in close quarters with crowds of strangers is unavoidable, it is the New York City subway system — well known not just to the locals, but to millions of tourists and anyone who has ever watched a television show or movie set in the city. And that makes it a focus of public worry about contagion.
Officials said on Monday that industrial-grade disinfectants would be used to clean everything from train cars to MetroCard machines every 72 hours. “The safety of our customers and employees is our first priority as we continue to monitor the coronavirus,” said Patrick T. Warren, chief safety officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
From Monday evening to midday Tuesday, transit workers disinfected nearly all of the system’s 472 subway stations, more than 1,900 subway cars and nearly 2,000 buses, officials said. Transit officials in neighboring New Jersey, which has its own vast commuter rail and bus network, have also ramped up its cleaning regimen.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends keeping essential services like public transit in operation, in part so that health care workers and other emergency responders can get to work.
Other major cities experiencing outbreaks have announced similar precautions. In Tehran, public health officials have said they are disinfecting buses at least four times a day and cleaning trains after each trip. In Italy, buses, trains and ferries are also being disinfected regularly.
Although research on the coronavirus is still in the early stages, a 2011 study on a possible influenza outbreak in New York City found that only 4 percent of infections would occur on the subwa
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