WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus (COVID-19) task force held the daily briefing Monday afternoon.
The task force holds a press conference each day to provide an update on the country’s response to COVID-19.
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Watch the briefing below (or click here):
Read a COVID-19 update from the Associated Press below:
The United States is bracing for a painful week, with a wave of coronavirus deaths expected across the nation.
“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said.
New York City, the U.S. epicenter, New Orleans and Detroit face especially worrying days ahead. Yet President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are striking optimistic tones, insisting that hard weeks ahead will ultimately lead to the nation beginning to turn a corner.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY:
— The first alarms sounded in early January that the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China would ignite a global pandemic. But the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment.
— Coronavirus patients around the world are rushing to join studies of an experimental drug that showed promise against some similar viruses in the past. Interest in the drug remdesivir has been so great that the U.S. National Institutes of Health is boosting the size of its study.
— Across the globe, grocery workers are on the front lines during lockdowns. Their stores are deemed essential, and their work puts them close to the public and therefore at risk. They’re also afraid.
— Historic failures in government response to disasters and emergencies, medical abuse, neglect and exploitation have jaded generations of African Americans into a distrust of public institutions.
— Millions of dollars in additional funds are being made available to agencies around the world that provide aid to Holocaust survivors, whose advanced age and health issues make them particularly vulnerable to the new coronavirus, the organization that handles claims on behalf of Jewish victims of the Nazis announced Monday.
— Pushing a shopping cart with two children, César Alegre emerges from the large, deteriorated house near Peru’s presidential palace that is shared by 45 families to search for food. Sometimes he begs in markets; sometimes he sells candies. It is a task that was hard at the best of times, but with a monthlong quarantine that has forced 32 million Peruvians to stay home, it has become much harder.