April 8 coronavirus news

Vice President Mike Pence said he was briefed Wednesday that Philadelphia is “an area of particular concern” for the coronavirus outbreak.

“An area of particular concern we were briefed on this morning is the city of Philadelphia. I spoke today to (Pennsylvania) Gov. Tom Wolf and as we begin to see early trend lines in Philadelphia, I assured him that we were going to continue to flow resources and support to that community,” Pence said at the daily White House briefing on the outbreak. 

Pence emphasized that people in Philadelphia need to practice social distancing “now more than ever.” 

“Our message to the people of the Philadelphia area is now more than ever, practice the social distancing so that Philadelphia, and to some extent even Pittsburgh, do not have to endure what other communities before them have had to endure,” Pence said.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, added that the Philadelphia metropolitan area is seeing 1,400 cases per day and the Baltimore/Washington, DC, area is seeing a 15% positivity rate with 500 cases per day in DC and 200 cases per day in Baltimore. 

Companies will soon be blocked from exporting critical medical supplies needed by the US for the coronavirus response, unless the Federal Emergency Management Agency gives approval for overseas shipments, according to a federal draft regulation.

The combined effort between FEMA and US Customs and Border Protection, which oversees trade and travel, comes as the United States seeks to shore up equipment for hospitals treating coronavirus patients.

Late last week: White House trade adviser Peter Navarro previewed these actions, saying there is “a black market which you have described, where we're having people bid against each other, brokers come in, they're bidding and bidding on all this different (personal protective equipment)."

In a joint statement Wednesday, the two agencies, both of which fall under the Department of Homeland Security, said they're "working together to prevent domestic brokers, distributors, and other intermediaries from diverting these critical medical resources overseas."

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards urged people to keep social-distancing for the Easter holiday. 

"This Easter is not going to look like previous Easters, but it doesn't mean that you can't find some significant way to meaningfully worship and to celebrate," Edwards, a Democrat, said. "There was no Easter exemption from the stay-at-home order. There was no Easter exemption from the 10 person limit. Because that virus isn't going to honor that."

President Donald Trump on Wednesday renewed his attacks on the World Health Organization after the head of the organization asked him not to “politicize the virus.” 

At a press conference earlier Wednesday, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded to attacks from Trump about how his organization handled the coronavirus outbreak. 

“Please don’t politicize this virus... If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it. My short message is: Please quarantine politicizing Covid," Ghebreyesus said.

At Wednesday's White House briefing, Trump declared it was Ghebreyesus who was politicizing the coronavirus and said he believes the organization favors China.

Trump implied that there would have been fewer coronavirus deaths if the WHO gave a “correct analysis.”

“I think when you say more body bags, I think we would have done, and he would have been much better serving the people that he’s supposed to serve if they gave a correct analysis,” Trump said.

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The city of Miami said Wednesday it has mandated all employees and customers in grocery stores, restaurants, pharmacies and convenience stores to wear masks at all times while on premises, effective today at 11:59 pm ET.

In a statement, the city said this “citywide order to wear masks extends to those performing construction work on job sites, as well as food delivery workers.”

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 1.5 million people and killed more than 87,000 worldwide, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University.

There are at least 424,945 cases of coronavirus in the US and at least 14,529 people have died from the disease in the country.

New York City has 5,603 new coronavirus cases and 716 new deaths, according to the city website.

The city now has a total of 80,204 coronavirus cases and 4,260 deaths.

President Donald Trump says it will be safe to reopen the country when "we can say we have to be on that down side of that slope."

"We can do it in phases, go to some areas where — you know, some areas are much less affected than others," he said at a Wednesday coronavirus task force briefing. "But it would be nice to be able to open with a big bang and open up our country, or certainly most of our country."

CNN reported earlier Wednesday that discussions are underway at the task force level about how to reopen the US economy.

Trump said he believes the US is "ahead of schedule" in efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus.

"You hate to say it too loudly because all of a sudden things don't happen. But I think we will be sooner rather than later," Trump said.

"But we'll be sitting down with the professionals. We'll be sitting down with many different people making a determination," he went on. "And those meetings will start taking place fairly soon."

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says a "handful" of State Department officials around the world have tested positive for Covid-19, but the vast majority of US facilities are open. 

Pompeo said that only one US embassy has closed due to coronavirus.

He later added that three local hires, "not US direct hires, but local people who were working for the State Department in embassies around the world," have died of coronavirus.