Coronavirus Live Updates: Senate Hearing Begins, Fauci to Warn of ‘Needless Suffering and Death’ if States Open Too Soon

Dr. Fauci, who has emerged as perhaps the nation’s most respected voice during the worst public health crisis in a century, is one of four top government doctors testifying remotely at a high-profile — and highly unusual — hearing on Tuesday before the health committee . Dr. Fauci made his comments in an email to the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg late Monday night.

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee,” he said in his prepared opening statement, “is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely.” “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Dr. Fauci’s message is starkly at odds with the “things are looking up” argument that President Trump has been trying to put out: that states are ready to reopen and the pandemic is under control.

Mr. Trump declared that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed,” though he later walked back the comments and said he only meant to say that the country had prevailed on increasing access to coronavirus testing — an assertion public health experts say is not true.

Dr. Fauci, who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents for more than three decades and who has worked to master the art of contradicting Mr. Trump without correcting him, echoed the language of Mr. Trump’s own plan, Opening Up America Again, which lays out guidelines for state officials to consider in reopening their economies.

But signs of opposition from parts of Mr. Trump’s party appeared almost immediately. Shortly after Dr. Fauci’s comments were published Monday night, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, pushed back on Twitter, and invoked another top scientist: Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Mr. Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator.

“Dr. Fauci has continually used his bully pulpit to bring public criticism on governors who are seeking to open up their states,” Mr. Biggs wrote. “The Fauci-Birx team have replaced faith w/ fear & hope w/ despair. The remedy is to open up our society & our economy. Trust & respect our freedom.”

In moments of great national crisis and controversy since the first Senate investigation in 1792, the congressional hearing has been an American tradition filled with familiar rituals. The witnesses sit face-to-face with lawmakers. The audience, sometimes populated with protesters, crowd into the gallery in anticipation. Photographers, journalists and lawyers all cram in shoulder-to-shoulder.

But when the nation’s top public health officials appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday, there will be none of those familiar sights.

Mr. Trump sought on Monday to rewrite the narrative of his administration’s handling of the crisis and offered a series of misleading claims.

Even as the president spoke, the scene around him spoke eloquently of the challenges lying ahead as White House employees covered their faces with masks, many for the first time, in an effort to halt the spread of the virus in the West Wing.

In an internal email obtained by The New York Times, people who work in the cramped quarters around the Oval Office were told that “as an additional layer of protection, we are requiring everyone who enters the West Wing to wear a mask or face covering.”

Asked at a Rose Garden news conference whether he had ordered the change, Mr. Trump — who did not wear a mask and has repeatedly said he sees no reason to — said, “Yeah, I did.”

But officials said the new requirement was not expected to apply to Mr. Trump or to Vice President Mike Pence.

The United States did not shut down all at once. And it is not opening up all at once. The political, economic and social pressures, as well as the public health dangers, are varied and nuanced.

In a case study, Nicholas Casey reports from Farmington, N.M., about why Mayor Nate Duckett wants to reopen, while the governor wants the state to stay closed. To understand the conflicting viewpoints, Mr. Casey writes, it helps to know something about what the mayor calls his city’s “death spiral.”

Perched in a rural corner of northwestern New Mexico, Farmington watched its wealth vanish as its oil and gas industries went elsewhere. Its population is one of the fastest-shrinking in the United States. What keeps the lights on in Farmington is a coal-fired power plant whose fate remains uncertain.

The mayor’s appeal reflects anxieties shared in small cities and towns across the West, which have far fewer cases of Covid-19 per capita than the eastern United States. In Farmington, few people say they know anyone who is ill from the virus, but almost everyone knows someone unemployed by it.

Riley Breakell, who works in a Starbucks in Connecticut, was reassured in mid-March when the company sent a letter announcing expanded catastrophe pay for those absent because of the pandemic. Even though she couldn’t live on the roughly $250 per week she received from Starbucks while her store was closed for a month and a half, she appreciated the company’s effort to do right by its employees.

But after the company said that those provisions would cease for those who were able but “unwilling to work” as stores reopened last week, Ms. Breakell became increasingly frustrated, questioning her managers about the risks that workers would encounter.

“The first letter they sent said you should not have to choose between your health and a job, and now they’re like, ‘Well, if you don’t want to go back, you have to quit,’” she said last week, shortly before her first day back. “I’m very anxious.”

Global markets fell in early Tuesday trading, as reports from China, South Korea and the United States offered sobering reminders to investors of how long and difficult the recovery is likely to be.

European markets opened mostly lower after a broad drop in the Asia-Pacific region, and U.S. Treasury prices rose, signaling more investor unease. Futures markets were predicting that Wall Street would open less than 1 percent lower.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 fell 0.1 percent, while the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong was down nearly 1.5 percent. The Shanghai Composite index in mainland China lost 0.1 percent.

In London, the FTSE 100 was up 0.3 percent in early trading. But the DAX in Germany was down 0.1 percent, and the CAC 40 in France was flat.

Albany, a city of 75,000 in the southwest part of Georgia, emerged as a virus hot spot after a pair of funerals led to hundreds of cases. In response to a push by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to reopen the state, pastors across Albany have united to keep their doors closed.

“We cannot go back to business as usual,” said Orson Burton, a pastor who lost members of his congregation, including his father-in-law. “These are not numbers, these are souls.”

Mr. Burton is on a mission to keep people at home, through door-to-door visits and online sermons, and he has joined a coalition of about 30 pastors who have decided to keep their churches closed until the crisis eases. Otherwise, they fear, they will be hit with a second wave of the virus.

Their effort is backed by the city’s elected leaders — who passed a resolution encouraging people to continue staying at home — and by doctors at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, the only hospital in the Albany region.

“It could happen again in a heartbeat,” said Dr. James Black, the head of the emergency department at the hospital.

In the early days of the outbreak, the United States, like many countries, had a very brief chance to limit the spread of the disease at its borders. Identifying travelers from high-risk countries and tracing their contacts with others would have been critical measures, if put in place early enough.

In California, the largest state and a point of entry for thousands of travelers from Asia, a program was established to do just that. But the system was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of passengers, many with inaccurate contact information, and was understaffed in some cases, rendering the program ineffective, according to a study released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which looked exclusively at California.

“Despite intensive effort, the traveler screening system did not effectively prevent introduction of Covid-19 into California,” the report said.

In early February, over 11,000 travelers from China — and later Iran — who landed in California were identified for contact tracing. The hope was to keep track of people traveling from high-risk countries, enabling public health officials to identify possible cases of the coronavirus, quarantine them and contact people who were exposed to them.

But when the program was begun on Feb. 5, several weeks had already passed since the disease was first identified in Wuhan, China. On March 17, the program was abandoned so that health care officials could shift their focus to mitigating the spread of the disease within the state. By mid-March, the virus had already established a foothold in California; preventing further introduction from overseas was seen as less important than fighting it on the ground.

“This report is a good example of the challenge of trying to use travel screening to contain and prevent pandemic transmission,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the most concrete step yet toward bringing New York back to life, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that three upstate regions might partially reopen this weekend.

State officials have previously laid out a plan under which each of 10 regions must meet thresholds in seven health-related areas before any reopening could begin. The areas that had met the benchmarks, he said, were the Finger Lakes, which includes Rochester; the Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania; and the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany.

To start, each area’s reopening would allow limited construction, manufacturing, curbside retail and some low-risk businesses like landscaping to resume. The effort, which will be gradual, is tied to infection rates remaining low, Mr. Cuomo emphasized.

In a sign that the toll may be even greater in New York City than it appears, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an analysis showing that nearly 5,300 residents had died during the pandemic for reasons that have not been directly linked to the virus.

They came in waves throughout the day, large groups in car pools and married couples taking advantage of their newfound health for a road trip through the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

The coronavirus has hit New York State with devastating force, infecting over 340,657 people and killing more than 26,000. And public health data suggests that the Orthodox and Hasidic community may have been affected at a rate that exceeds other ethnic and religious groups, with community estimates placing the number of dead in the hundreds.

That heavy toll has caused grief and anguish in the tight-knit community. But as people have begun to recover, thousands have donated blood plasma, which public health officials believe may be used to help treat people suffering from Covid-19.

Organizers have recruited so many donors from the Hasidic community that appointments at blood banks across New York and New Jersey have filled up, forcing donors to travel to Delaware and Pennsylvania to donate plasma.

“I think the Jewish people are a little bit like a rubber band,” said Mordy Serle, an Orthodox Jew who made the trip from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania to donate blood. “You know, the more you pull them down, the more they’re going to snap back up.”

Reporting was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Noah Weiland, Marc Santora, Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Linda Qiu, David Waldstein, Nicholas Casey, Noam Scheiber, Liam Stack and Matt Stevens.