Nation ready for virus, Trump says

Pence picked to lead U.S.’ covid-19 efforts

President Donald Trump holds a news conference Wednesday at the White House with health officials, including Dr. Anne Schuchat (right) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump sought to minimize fears of the virus after earlier criticizing cable news networks, saying they were panicking financial markets. More photos at arkansasonline.com/227virus/.
(AP/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump holds a news conference Wednesday at the White House with health officials, including Dr. Anne Schuchat (right) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump sought to minimize fears of the virus after earlier criticizing cable news networks, saying they were panicking financial markets. More photos at arkansasonline.com/227virus/. (AP/Evan Vucci)

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump declared Wednesday that the U.S. is "very, very ready" for whatever the coronavirus threat brings, and he put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of overseeing the nation's response.

Trump sought to minimize fears of the virus, saying, "I don't think it's inevitable."

Standing next to him at a White House news conference were health authorities who reiterated that Americans need to get ready for what could become a wider outbreak requiring such steps as school closures.

"Our aggressive containment strategy here in the United States has been working and is responsible for the low levels of cases we have so far. However, we do expect more cases," said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Trump said Pence will be working with the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies to coordinate the response.

"We're very, very ready for this, for anything," even if it's "a breakout of larger proportions," Trump said at the news conference.

Trump tweeted earlier on Wednesday to accuse CNN and "MSDNC [Comcast]" -- a reference to MSNBC -- of panicking markets.

U.S. stocks fell for a fifth day, the longest losing streak since August, as investors weathered a barrage of reports on the global widening of the virus.

The S&P 500 closed down 0.4%, after plunging more than 3% each of the previous two days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 123.77 points, for a three-day loss of 2,034 points. A modest rally in technology stocks helped nudge the Nasdaq composite to a 0.2% gain. Smaller company stocks fell the most. The Russell 2000 index lost 1.2%.

Bond yields headed lower for much of the day, but then recovered mostly. The yield on the 10-year Treasury inched up to 1.34% from 1.33% late Tuesday. The yield on the 3-month Treasury bill edged up to 1.51%. The inversion in the yield between the 10-year and the 3-month Treasuries is a red flag for investors because it has preceded the last seven recessions.

"People are taking a step back and reviewing the data and seeing how much this coronavirus is progressing," said Michael Reynolds, investment strategy officer at Glenmede Trust Co.

Energy companies led the selling Wednesday as the price of U.S. crude oil fell 2.3%.

Gold fell $6.90 to $1,640.00 per ounce, silver fell 36 cents to $17.83 per ounce and copper fell 1 cent to $2.58 per pound.

Companies that depend on travelers declined. Expedia lost 7.1%, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings fell 7.9%, Royal Caribbean Cruises dropped 8.1% and Carnival slid 7.5%.

CASES TOP 81,000

More than 81,000 cases of covid-19, an illness characterized by fever and coughing and sometimes shortness of breath or pneumonia, have occurred since the new virus emerged in China.

NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci called it "quite conceivable" that the virus will "come back and recycle next year. In that case, we hope to have a vaccine." He cautioned a vaccine won't be ready for widespread use for a year or more.

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This week, the NIH received a shipment of test doses of a vaccine candidate from Moderna Inc. in preparation for first-step safety testing in a few dozen people aimed to begin by April.

Another person in the U.S. is infected -- someone in California who doesn't appear to have the usual risk factors of having traveled abroad or being exposed to another patient. That brings U.S. cases to 60. Besides the California case, the others infected were people who traveled back from Asia: three who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, and 42 from the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan.

On Capitol Hill, senior lawmakers called for a bipartisan spending package that would give federal, state and local officials more resources. Trump had requested $2.5 billion to fight the virus; Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York countered with an $8.5 billion proposal.

When he announced his coronavirus proposal Wednesday morning, Schumer pointed to the $6 billion Congress appropriated for a 2006 flu pandemic and the $7 billion it carved out for the H1N1 flu in 2009. His plan includes $3 billion for a public health emergency fund, $1.5 billion for the CDC, $1 billion for vaccine development and $2 billion for reimbursing states and cities for efforts they have so far made to monitor and prepare for potential cases of the virus.

The politics of coronavirus shifted Tuesday when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that "it's not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen."

She said that hospitals and schools should begin preparing for an outbreak and that she had even spoken to her own family about a "significant disruption of our lives."

On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told a Senate panel that medical supplies were badly needed for the nation's emergency stockpile, including 300 million masks for health care workers alone, he said.

Trump told reporters he was open to spending "whatever's appropriate."

House Appropriations chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said it's premature to put a price tag on the package. "We're working on it and we'll have a number but I'm not sure it's going to be the number that Schumer's proposing," said Lowey, adding that she's working with lawmakers of both parties.

Aides said the House measure is likely to be unveiled next week. Bipartisan "four corner" meetings -- Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate -- began Wednesday, a House Democratic aide said, with a bipartisan bill the goal.

Arriving back in the U.S. early Wednesday from a trip to India, Trump immediately began to counter critics who say he should have acted sooner to bolster the federal response to covid-19.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham was also pushing back. Grisham retweeted a CDC post that said "there is currently no reported community spread" of coronavirus in the U.S.

Fauci said that while only a few cases have turned up in the U.S. from travelers outside the country, "we need to be able to think about how we will respond to a pandemic outbreak."

"It's very clear. If we have a global pandemic, no country is going to be without impact," Fauci said.

A pandemic involves the continual spread of sustained transmission from person to person in multiple regions and hemispheres throughout the world simultaneously, Fauci noted.

SPREAD CONTINUES

With Brazil confirming the arrival of Latin America's first case, the virus had a toehold on every continent but Antarctica.

In Europe, where Germany, France and Spain were among the places with a growing caseload, an expanding cluster of more than 440 cases in northern Italy was eyed as a source for transmissions. In the Middle East, where cases increased in Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq, blame was directed toward Iran.

"We're going to be trying to slow down the spread so that our hospitals are not overwhelmed in one big gulp, one big hit," said Ian Mackay, who studies viruses at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Military bases are among the other crowded places that had officials worried.

The South Korean military announced additional infections among its troops, with 21 cases on its bases and some 9,570 people in isolation. The U.S. military, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, confirmed the first infection of an American soldier, a 23-year-old man based at Camp Carroll near Daegu, a day after the Americans said a military spouse also had contracted the illness. Bowling alleys, movie theaters and a golf course on four American bases in the country were closed.

"This is a setback, it's true, there's no getting around that. But it's not the end of the war," Col. Edward Ballanco, commander of the U.S. Army Garrison Daegu told troops in a video message. "We are very well equipped to fight this thing off."

The South Korean and U.S. militaries today postponed their annual joint drills. The announcement was jointly made by South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. military in South Korea.

Italy recorded 78 new infections on Wednesday and Greece, North Macedonia and Romania became the newest countries to see a case of the virus.

South Korea reported 334 more cases today bringing its total to 1,595 cases, the second-most behind China. But there are signs the virus is spreading further in South Korea with 55 cases reported so far in the capital, Seoul, and 58 in the second-largest city, Busan.

China, the epicenter of the crisis, reported 433 new cases and 29 more deaths today . The country has a total of 78,497 cases of the virus and nearly 2,744 fatalities.

Indonesia said it evacuated 188 crew members from the World Dream cruise ship and planned to take them to remote Sebaru Island. The workers were released from quarantine in Hong Kong after finding no infections, but authorities mandated an additional observation period.

And on the opposite side of the world, the MSC Meraviglia was denied permission to land in Grand Cayman, where it was due to arrive Wednesday, following a decision by Jamaica to refuse it entry. The move came after the ship reported one crew member from the Philippines was sick with common seasonal flu.

MSC Cruises said the Meraviglia was sailing onward to Mexico.

Information for this article was contributed by Lauran Neergaard, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Kim Tong-Hyung, Matt Sedensky, Jonathan Lemire, Zeke Miller, Andrew Taylor, Alex Veiga, Damian J. Troise Sedensky, Jim Gomez, Joeal Calupitan, Hyung-jin Kim, Stephen Wade, Mari Yamaguchi, Nicole Winfield, Aniruddha Ghosal and Jon Gambrell of The Associated Press; by Claire Ballentine and Vildana Hajric of Bloomberg News; by Noah Weiland, Maggie Haberman and Emily Cochrane of The New York Times; and by Adam Taylor, Rick Noack, James McAuley and Simon Denyer of The Washington Post.

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A passenA traveler covers up Wednesday at the airport in Sao Paulo after Brazil confirmed its first case of the coronavirus, the first in South America. (AP/Andre Penner)

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A woman stands at a window Wednesday at the H10 Costa Adeje Palace hotel in La Caleta on the Canary Island of Tenerife, Spain, where guests are under quarantine. In Europe, Germany, France and Spain have a growing number of coronavirus cases, authorities said. (AP)

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Iraqi officials prepare Wednesday to spray disinfectant at commercial markets and hotels used by Iranians as a precaution against the coronavirus. Iran has been blamed by some authorities for a growing number of cases in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait. (AP/Anmar Khalil)

A Section on 02/27/2020

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