By Elise Hammond, Meg Wagner, Fernando Alfonso III and Rob Picheta, CNN
From CNN's Shawn Nottingham and Hollie Silverman
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order extending the Disaster Emergency Declaration, according to a press release from his office sent out today.
Polis requested a Major Disaster Declaration on March 25 and it was approved by President Trump on March 28, according to the release.
The 30-day extension of this order will provide additional funding for the state's coronavirus response and extend the employment of the Colorado National Guard, the release said.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today that his administration is launching a “test and trace corps" to aid the city’s coronavirus containment efforts.
The corps is tasked with testing New Yorkers for infection, tracing all cases and contacts and then supporting and caring for cases and their contacts.
“We are going to be able to expand testing greatly," de Blasio said in a news conference.
"We want to find everyone who is positive and then trace all their close contacts,” de Blasio added.
That tracing would then help the city “provide help” to those who need it. By May, the unit aims to house and deploy 1,000 public “health foot soldiers” to help with the efforts.
According to de Blasio, nearly 7,000 applications have already been received and are being evaluated for hiring. NYC will utilize the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19/Contact Tracing Training for all applicants who are being considered for contact tracing jobs
Kevin Hassett, senior economic adviser to President Trump, said that the worst is yet to come for unemployment numbers. He expects the unemployment rate to reach a high of 25% in next month’s jobs report.
“If you add the initial claims that have come in after the survey week of the 12th, you're looking at well more than 30 million people that have had their lives really upended by this shutdown,” Hassett told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “And so I think that already, just looking at the claims we had since they did the survey that the data comes from, we’ve probably added about another 4% or 5% to the unemployment rate. And so probably the next number will be a little bit higher than this.”
The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, with the unemployment rate soaring to 14.7%, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today.
“I think we’re going to enter a transition period this summer, before we have sort of another…re-ignition of the economy, and I think we're not quite in the transition period yet,” Hassett said. The unemployment numbers for African Americans and Hispanic Americans, which are at 16.7% and 18.9% respectively, is “something we're watching very, very closely,” Hassett said.
Watch:
From CNN's Amanda Watts
The Infectious Diseases Society of America said as the US begins to open back up, there is still concern over the demand for tests and testing supplies.
“Right now, in some locations in this country they don't have adequate testing to test all symptomatic patients. And so when you open up and you start testing people that are asymptomatic, you're going to put a lot of pressure on the supply chain,” Dr. Angela Caliendo, Secretary for the IDSA Board of Directors and Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, said today.
Testing and the supply chain “remains a substantial challenge for all of us,” Caliendo said.
“We're hoping that as weeks go by, that the manufacturers will be able to increase their production of these tests,” Caliendo said.
As reopening progresses, Caliendo said the role of antibody testing, also known as serology testing, will come into play.
The US needs to “figure out the role of serology and be able to ramp up serology testing over the course of the next couple of weeks to months to have a better idea of who in your population has been infected, who has not.”
At least 102 people were hospitalized for coronavirus in New York City on Wednesday, up from the 79 hospitalizations reported on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday morning.
"Most days lately we've been under 100 new hospital admissions for Covid-19, that's amazing, but we're not out of the woods," he said.
"The big picture is unquestionably good, but still, day to day we're still not where we need to be, we've got more work to do ... still overall much, much, lower numbers — good sign in the bigger scheme of things, not yet what we need to take the next towards loosening restrictions," de Blasio added.
From CNN’s Amanda Watts
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) said there are too many unknowns when it comes to coronavirus antibody tests to know what to do with the results.
“We don't have enough information about the performance of these tests to know ideally how to use them,” Dr. Angela Caliendo, Secretary for the IDSA Board of Directors and Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, said on Friday.
Caliendo said antibody tests are a “hot topic,” with many unanswered questions.
“There's so much interest for this test that there's tremendous pressure to offer it, and then you’re left with not being sure how to interpret it," Caliendo said.
“I think we need to understand the test better. We need to understand what does it mean if you're truly – if the test is accurate and you have antibody – what does that mean? Does that mean you're protected from additional future infection? We don't know that,” Caliendo said.
Caliendo said she is worried what patients would do with the results.
“If they think they've been infected when they're not, they may think they don't have to abide by social distancing, which would be a big problem," she said.
Caliendo said this is the best advice for patients: “If you test positive, do not assume you're immune from the infection. Do not assume that you don't have to abide by social distancing, wearing masks, washing your hands and doing all of that because that would be a misguided decision.”
From CNN’s Matt Egan
US stocks opened sharply higher Friday even after the American jobs market suffered its biggest blow ever, with the unemployment rate spiking to 14.7% and blowing past the worst levels of the Great Recession.
Here's where things opened today:
Reasons for the climb: Although Main Street is reeling from the coronavirus crisis, Wall Street is looking forward to the potential for better days ahead.
As awful as these numbers are, investors had been bracing for the bad news. In fact, economists had expected an even bigger loss of jobs and a 16% unemployment rate.
From CNN Health's Jacqueline Howard
A Covid-19 saliva test that recently received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration is now authorized to allow patients to collect their own samples at home for testing.
Rutgers University announced today that its RUCDR Infinite Biologics lab received an amended emergency use authorization from the FDA late Thursday.
The new authorization for the lab's Covid-19 saliva test now allows people to collect their own saliva at home and send their saliva samples to a lab for results. Testing for Covid-19 so far has usually involved nose or throat swab samples.
Using saliva to diagnose novel coronavirus infections could expand testing capacities across the United States.
"What’s new and next is expanding access to testing for people," Andrew Brooks, chief operating officer and director of technology development at Rutgers University’s RUCDR Infinite Biologics lab, told CNN.
"If people are committed to do self-collection and can facilitate that collection at home, certainly with a prescription under medical care, we can get to those that are quarantined, don’t have the means for transportation or are too scared to go outside," Brooks said. "So they get the test in the mail or from a distribution center."
How it works: Once an at-home collection kit for the testing arrives in the mail, Brooks said that it includes instructions on how to spit into a funnel to collect a saliva sample and seal with a cap to preserve the sample.
Then a preservation agent will appear, blue in color, and once the whole sample is blue, the user puts the sample back in a biohazard bag provided with the kit and send your sample to a lab for testing.
From CNN’s Dianne Gallagher
At least 1,031 of the roughly 2,800 employees at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Waterloo, Iowa, have tested positive for Covid-19, according to Black Hawk County health officials.
The numbers were released during a press conference on Thursday –– the same day the plant reopened.
The number of positive cases is more than twice the 444 cases that Gov. Kim Reynolds had reported on Wednesday.
Black Hawk County health department said the disparity was due to the fact the state’s numbers only included positive cases from the on-site testing at the Waterloo plant. The county numbers included employees who tested positive through local health providers and serology tests that showed Covid-19 antibodies in the workers.
Some context: Black Hawk County has 1,703 total reported cases and 21 deaths through Thursday at 12:30pm.
Tyson officials also spoke at Thursday’s news briefing, going over the safety modifications, new testing procedures and reopening plan.
Slaughter resumed at the plant yesterday, processing comes back today.
The positive tests were first reported in the Des Moines Register.
