By Mike Hayes, Meg Wagner and Ivana Kottasová, CNN
From CNN’s Anneken Tappe
Another 3.2 million Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits in the week ended May 2.
In total, more than 33.5 million people have filed first-time claims since mid-March as the coronavirus pandemic is forcing businesses to close and lay off workers.
That represents 21% of the March labor force.
From CNN Health’s Jamie Gumbrecht and Devon Sayers
Moderna’s investigational vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to proceed to second phase of a study, the company said today in a press release.
The next phase of the trial is expected to begin shortly, it said.
The vaccine, mRNA-1273, was the first US vaccine to start clinical trials in the United States. Moderna said it is finalizing protocol for a phase 3 study, which is expected to begin in early summer.
CNN has reached out to the FDA.
If you're just joining our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, here are the key headlines today:
From CNN's Faith Karimi
A growing number of children are showing up at New York hospitals with troubling new symptoms that state health officials believe could be linked to coronavirus.
In an advisory to health care providers, state officials said 64 children in New York have been hospitalized with a condition doctors described as "pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome."
Some of the children had persistent fever, toxic shock syndrome and features similar to Kawasaki disease, the state health advisory said.
Kawasaki disease causes inflammation in the walls of the arteries and can limit blood flow to the heart. While it's usually treatable and most children recover without serious problems, it can also be deadly. It mainly affects children under the age of five.
From CNN's Christina Maxouris
As coronavirus restrictions in the US are loosened, public health officials and state leaders have urged residents to continue practicing social distancing in order to prevent another spike in cases.
But Americans in prisons and nursing homes often don't have that option. In some states, those facilities make up a startling number of coronavirus cases.
Across federal and state prisons, thousands of inmates have tested positive for the virus -- many of whom showed no symptoms when they were infected. In Ohio, more than 20% of the people infected with coronavirus are prisoners. And in Colorado, the state's largest outbreak is in a correctional facility.
Read the whole story here.
According to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases in the United States, there are at least 1,228,609 cases of coronavirus in the U.S.
At least 73,431 people have died in the U.S. from coronavirus.
The totals includes cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other U.S. territories, as well as repatriated cases.
From CNN's Maggie Fox
Blood-thinning drugs could help save some patients who are the most severely affected by the new coronavirus, doctors reported Wednesday.
The findings from a team at Mount Sinai Hospital could help with a troubling problem that has shocked and horrified doctors treating coronavirus patients around the world -- blood clots throughout the body that complicate an already hard-to-treat disease.
The team now says it is running experiments to see which anticoagulants may work best, and at what doses.
"The patients who received anticoagulants did better than those who didn't," Dr. Valentin Fuster, director of Mount Sinai Heart and physician-in-chief of The Mount Sinai Hospital, told CNN.
"This has implications already. People, I believe, should treat these patients with antithrombotics," he added.
The findings are not clear enough yet to make solid recommendations. The team noted that patients who were already severely ill were more likely to be given the blood thinners.
From CNN's Kevin Liptak
PresidentTrump declared Wednesday his coronavirus task force would continue "indefinitely" a day after he and Vice President Mike Pence said they were phasing out the health-focused panel in favor of a group focused on reopening the economy.
Trump, who said the panel would adopt a new focus on vaccines, is also considering naming an administration point person on treatment and vaccine efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.
And Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and senior adviser, continues to play a central role in the White House's response effort, including on vaccines, despite questions about the efficacy of his attempts to source badly needed supplies.
According to Pence's public schedule, the task force was slated to meet at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday. A few hours earlier, Trump explained his retreat on phasing out the panel.
"I thought we could wind it down sooner. But I had no idea how popular the task force is until, actually, yesterday when I started talking about winding it down," Trump said in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with nurses. "I get calls from very respected people saying, 'I think it would be better to keep it going, it's done such a good job.'"
"It's a respected task force. I know it myself," he added. "I didn't know whether or not it was appreciated by the public but it is appreciated by the public."
From CNN's Sara Murray and Scott Glover
As complaints about dire shortages of protective gear for medical workers on the frontlines of the Covid-19 crisis began to stream in, President Donald Trump was quick to point the finger of blame at his predecessor, Barack Obama.
It was Obama and other administrations, he said, who left the shelves of the nation's Strategic National Stockpile bare of the items needed to combat the coronavirus.
To an extent, the President was right. The Obama administration did use and then failed to replace items from the stockpile to fight the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic.
But Trump hadn't replaced those items either, despite repeated warnings that the country was ill prepared for a pandemic, stockpile experts said.
The President's criticism also ignored a key point: The stockpile was never intended — or funded — to be a panacea for a pandemic. Rather, it serves as one piece of the overall supply chain puzzle during a disaster.
The stockpile's inadequacies quickly came to light in the coronavirus pandemic — a devastating health crisis that experts have long predicted. Trump delayed striking deals with the private sector and invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to produce more medical supplies, making a bad situation worse. And states — bidding against one another and other countries for supplies at sharp markups — turned to the stockpile, only to find it understocked and the federal stewards overseeing it in disarray.
The picture was complicated even further when a whistleblower alleged this week that the system of deciding what to put in the stockpile had been corrupted by outside lobbyists and politically driven decision-making, rather than science.
"People who somehow believed it was a bottomless pit filled with everything they can imagine were not paying attention," said Tara O'Toole, a physician and former Department of Homeland Security official who once chaired an advisory committee on the stockpile.
