Trump announces coronavirus testing guidance as more states outline reopening plans; global cases surpass 3 million

President Trump will meet Tuesday with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the president’s second meeting in the past week with the governor of a state hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump and DeSantis are expected to meet at 11 a.m. in the Oval Office, according to the White House.

At a news conference earlier Monday, DeSantis — a staunch Trump ally — defended his handling of the coronavirus crisis in Florida and said that the state’s reopening would be “slow and steady.”

“The fact of the matter is people are getting great care … and a lot of those doomsday scenarios have not come to pass,” he said.

Florida has had a significant backlog in processing unemployment claims amid the pandemic. As of last week, about 1.7 million Floridians had sought unemployment aid since the beginning of the outbreak, but fewer than 120,000 had received money, according to state data.

DeSantis has made several changes in an effort to speed up payments, but critics argue that they have made little difference.

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Treasury officials have distributed nearly half of the payroll support money earmarked for U.S. airlines and cargo carriers under provisions of the $2 trillion economic rescue package approved by Congress last month.

As of this week, $12.4 billion of the $29 billion in grants has been paid out to 93 carriers to keep front-line workers on the job, treasury officials said. In all, airlines and air cargo carriers are eligible for more than $50 billion in grants and loans.

Unlike other financial support programs created by the Cares Act, the program to aid airlines and cargo carriers has been relatively trouble-free — a relief to an industry reeling from the worst financial crisis in its history. According to the most recent data from the International Air Transport Association, airlines stand to lose more than $314 billion in revenue this year, the result of flight restrictions and groundings tied to the pandemic.

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JetBlue on Monday said travelers will have to wear a face covering during flights, while American Airlines announced it will soon begin distributing masks and sanitizer to boarding customers.

Starting Monday, JetBlue said it will also require customers to cover their faces during check-in, boarding and deplaning in an effort to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. American said its policy will go into effect in “early May.”

CNBC reported that Delta this week will start making masks available to fliers at the gate and onboard.

“This is the new flying etiquette,” Joanna Geraghty, JetBlue’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

JetBlue customers will be reminded about the requirement in preflight emails and at the airport, the airline said. Young children are exempt.

American announced that improvements to cleaning procedures for planes will begin this week.

Several airlines, including JetBlue and Delta, had previously announced that flight attendants would wear face coverings.

Last week, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents almost 50,000 employees with 20 airlines, asked the Transportation Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to “suspend all leisure travel until the virus is contained.”

Because of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, U.S. airline travel is 95 percent lower than it was at this time last year.

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Attorney General William P. Barr on Monday directed federal prosecutors across the country to “be on the lookout” for state and local coronavirus-related restrictions that might run afoul of the Constitution and to pursue court action, if necessary.

In two-page memo to U.S. attorneys, Barr wrote that the measures state and local government officials had taken “have been necessary in order to stop the spread of a deadly disease” but that even in times of emergency, the Constitution could not be discounted entirely.

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After signs that he might shelve daily White House coronavirus briefings, President Trump held a news conference Monday evening in the Rose Garden. Here are a few takeaways from the briefing:

• After making several big promises on testing and having the coronavirus task force members admit it’s still not up to snuff, Trump pledged a huge testing increase in the weeks to come.
• At the start of Monday’s briefing, Trump seemed to make a point of reaching out to victims and their families.
• Trump over the weekend retweeted a claim that the coronavirus mortality rate in the United States might be being inflated as part of a political agenda against him. He said Monday that the American death toll is, in fact, accurate.

Read more about Monday’s briefing and watch videos here.

A judge ruled in favor of an Illinois state lawmaker who argued that Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) overextended his power and lacked the legal authority to extend the state’s stay-at-home order.

On Monday afternoon, Clay County Circuit Court Judge Michael McHaney granted Rep. Darren Bailey a temporary restraining order over the extension of Pritzker’s stay-at-home restrictions, therefore allowing the Republican legislator to disregard Pritzker’s order.

On Thursday, Pritzker extended his stay-at-home order to May 30. On Friday, Bailey filed the lawsuit that challenged Pritzker’s authority to extend the order beyond the initial 30 days under the state’s Emergency Management Act.

Pritzker said during his Monday news briefing that the government would be taking swift action to have this ruling overturned and that he planned to issue new public health directives until the suit was resolved.

Since only Bailey filed as the plaintiff, it appears he is the only Illinois citizen released from Pritzker’s order. However, it is unclear what type of legal impact this lawsuit will have on other residents in the state.

“Representative Bailey’s decision to go to the courts is an insult to all Illinoisans who have been lost during this COVID-19 crisis,” Pritzker said Monday. “It’s a danger to millions of people who might get ill because of his recklessness. Disasters don’t evaporate on a 30-day timeframe. Legislators took this into account when they wrote this law. We will fight this lawsuit to the furthest means possible.”

When Bailey initially filed the suit, he asked the court to find that Pritzker “overextended his power by issuing additional ‘stay at home’ orders after his original disaster proclamation, which expired on April 9th, 2020. Enough is enough! I filed this lawsuit on behalf of myself and my constituents who are ready to go back to work and resume a normal life.”

As of Monday, Illinois totaled 45,883 positive covid-19 cases and 1,983 fatalities.

Throughout the nearly five months the world has been fighting covid-19, one of the most comforting — and baffling — aspects of the coronavirus has been its effect on children. Most children who are infected with the coronavirus remain asymptomatic or experience mild illness. But there’s new evidence the disease may be associated with surprising complications in a small number of children.

Britain’s national health authority on Monday issued an alert to physicians, warning of an “apparent rise in the number of children of all ages presenting with a multi-system inflammatory state requiring intensive care across London and also in other regions” that may be related to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The National Health Service said the cases have “common overlapping features” of toxic shock syndrome and another condition that results in dangerous blood vessel inflammation.

British health authorities have declined to provide details, including the number of pediatric cases, other than to say serious complications related to the virus are “very rare” but a growing concern.

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U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

Read more here.