May 3 coronavirus news

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that 280 people in New York have died over the past day from coronavirus.

The number of Covid-19 deaths in the state totaled 299 on May 1, Cuomo said Saturday.

Cuomo added today that the number of intubations is down as is the number of hospitalizations.

The United Kingdom has seen a decrease in number of coronavirus-related deaths in the past 24 hours.

There have been a total of 28,446 coronavirus-related deaths in the UK, Michael Gove, one of the senior Cabinet ministers leading the response to the pandemic, said during a daily government press briefing. 

The tests require the number of cases to continue falling, death rates to be in decline, that the national health service has all of the equipment and support it needs and that measures are in place to stop a second peak overwhelming the National Health Service.

The country is now “past the peak” of deaths, but a decline “must be sustained," professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director of NHS England, added.

There are at least 1,134,058 cases of coronavirus in the US and roughly 66,430 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

As states begin to include “probable deaths” in their counts, so will the university. In the upcoming days, these changes may show as surges of deaths in the United States. 

The totals includes cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases and those in the US military, veterans hospitals and federal prisons. 

The number of people admitted into hospitals for Covid-19 as of yesterday was 113, which is up slightly from the 92 admitted April 30, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

People that are currently in intensive care units across the city is 645; that number is down from the 677 reported on April 30, de Blasio said.

About 20% of the people tested for Covid-19 across the city tested positive. That number is down from 21% reported April 30.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told CNN that the administration thinks it moved as quickly as other countries in addressing the coronavirus pandemic.

President Trump “moves stuff in Trump time. We are moving mountains in this crisis," Navarro said.

On the issue of testing, Navarro emphasized “we’re doing what we need to do as fast as we can do it,” and said he sees a “bright future ahead.”

On the economy: Navarro said that when he visited the General Motors plant with Vice President Mike Pence in Kokomo, Indiana, he “saw the future."

He said the President will “have a pathway to rebuilding this economy, which now has manufactured unemployment, but which will have a manufacturing renaissance.”

New York City will produce its own Covid-19 test kits, Mayor Bill de Blasio said today.

The city will be working with Print Parks, a local partner, that will help create swabs for the testing kits, the mayor said.

The city is on track to produce 50,000 3D-printed swabs per week, with an initial 30,000 expected by the end of this week, de Blasio said.

The testing kits are broken down into three parts, swabs, transport medium and screw tube tops, the mayor said.

Viral Transport Medium (VTM) will get the tests to hospitals as soon as possible, he said.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said he is concerned about reopening the economy and relaxing social distancing measures, saying it is still very early in the outbreak.

Massachusetts is “between the first and the fifth” inning in its fight against coronavirus, and that “we’re still very much in the beginning days of coronavirus," Walsh said.

Walsh criticized the Trump administration’s response to the outbreak, saying “the mixed messaging is confusing.”

He responded to pictures of crowds on the national mall in Washington, DC, and New York's Central Park, saying, “whether it's Central Park or the Mall is the wrong message. We're still very much in the beginning days of coronavirus.”

Walsh said cities across the US still need mass testing and personal protective equipment for frontline workers.

"As we move down the road here, if there's a second surge, all of the equipment that they have now, they'll need more stuff. I think that's what the federal government should be focused on,” Walsh said.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said on Fox this morning that having a coronavirus vaccine by January is possible “on paper” but will require the proper execution.

Birx was asked whether it was realistic to have a vaccine by the start of next year, given other estimates that it will take at least 12 to 18 months to develop.

“The way that it’s possible is if you bring forward five or six different classes of candidates, which the Operation Warp Speed has done,” Birx said. “And so it’s not relying on a single vaccine platform. It’s relying on several different candidates that are made differently and act differently.”

The vaccine would also require speeding up clinical trials, she said.

CNN previously reported that the goal is to make 100 million doses of a vaccine available by November, 200 million doses by December and 300 million doses by January, according to a senior administration official.

On remdesivir: Birx described the investigational drug remdesivir as a “first step forward."

In early results from a trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the drug was found to shorten the duration of illness in severely affected patients, but it had no statistically significant effect on mortality.

Birx said we’ve only seen “half the data,” but she said an independent monitoring board thought the improvement was significant enough to start giving remdesivir to patients who were previously receiving a placebo.

“So it’s a first step forward. In parallel, we have a whole series of therapeutics including plasma, and also monoclonal antibodies being worked through,” she said, referring to lab-made antibodies targeting the virus. 

Larry Kudlow, the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, told CNN there may be a need for additional stimulus aid because of Covid-19 but said there was a “pause” right now before money is sought.

Kudlow said the government still needs to execute the last package and “see what the results are.”

The President was “very keen” on a payroll tax holiday for workers and would like to see tax deductions for businesses/entertainment, as well as a shield on liabilities, Kudlow said.

Democrats have opposed such a payroll holiday.