Whether the president would be tested had been a matter of speculation since it first emerged that a member of a Brazilian delegation that visited Mar-a-Lago had tested positive. Two other people who were with the president at Mar-a-Lago have tested positive, and various members of Congress have been self-isolating after interacting with some of the same people.
Mr. Trump, wearing a “USA” baseball cap, said he decided to be tested for the coronavirus after his news conference on Friday to declare a national emergency.
“People were asking, did I take the test,” he said.
Asked when he expected to have the result, Mr. Trump said, “A day, two days.”
“They send it to a lab,” he said.
It was unclear if Mr. Pence, who interacted with some of the infected Mar-a-Lago visitors, had known that the president was tested. Answering a reporter’s question about his own status, Mr. Pence said, “I’m going to speak immediately after this press conference with the White House physician’s office,” which he said had previously advised him that neither he nor his wife needed to be tested.
The White House has begun checking the temperatures of anyone in close contact with Mr. Trump or Mr. Pence. White House staff checked the temperatures of everyone arriving at the news conference.
Reporters pressed Mr. Trump about “mixed messages,” asking about why he shook hands with a row of chief executives who attended his news conference on Friday where he announced a national emergency.
“It almost becomes a habit and you get out of that habit,” he said, noting that “getting away from shaking hands is a good thing.”
Mr. Pence said that, effective at midnight Monday night, the federal government’s European travel ban would apply to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. health official, said that Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on Friday had cleared the way for a concerted, effective response to the virus. “Now it’s all systems go,” he said, adding that “as we get knowledge about new testing, we’ll alleviate the anxiety that we have in the world about, we don’t know what’s going on, but also it will give the individual physician and individual citizen the opportunity to know where they stand.”
Later in the news conference, the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, called for unity in responding to the virus’s spread in the United States, urging “no more finger-pointing or criticism” and suggesting “less stories looking at what happened in the past.”
Tracking Every Coronavirus Case in the U.S.: Full Map
Maps show the extent of the coronavirus outbreak and the number of cases and deaths by state.
The coronavirus spreads to 49 states, and a sweeping relief package awaits the Senate’s return.
As the coronavirus continues to spread in the United States, people are increasingly worried that a pandemic that has upended lives and wreaked havoc on financial markets could have a disproportionate effect on the nation’s poor and disadvantaged. The virus has been reported in more than 2,100 people in 49 states, as well as Washington and Puerto Rico, and has killed at least 48.
New York reported its first coronavirus death on Saturday, when a 82-year-old woman died in Brooklyn, according to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The woman, who was not identified, had emphysema, an underlying medical condition that the governor said had contributed to her death.
The House passed a sweeping relief package to assist people affected by the outbreak, after a roller-coaster day of negotiations on Friday, and it now goes to the Senate.
Talks threatened to veer off track as President Trump criticized the plan during a White House Rose Garden news conference in which he declared a national emergency. Instead, by dusk, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote to House Democrats saying they had reached an agreement with the administration, and Mr. Trump later tweeted that he would sign the bill “ASAP!”
How Every House Member Voted on the Coronavirus Relief Bill
The sweeping legislation passed the House, 363-40, and will allow for free testing, paid sick leave, stronger unemployment benefits and food security assistance.
When officials in Washington State chose two locations to house people exposed to the virus, they picked areas in mostly low-income neighborhoods, drawing ire from local officials who noted that the communities had not yet experienced any cases. Dana Ralph, the mayor of Kent, south of Seattle, said residents wondered if their neighborhoods were being sacrificed to protect wealthier ones.
Their fears came true when a person who was housed in a converted motel wandered away and hopped on a bus. The bus was taken out of service, but the community was angered.
And the closing of schools in more than a dozen states continues to create concerns that children may miss meals and parents may not be able to stay home from work. Mayor Bill de Blasio, under increasing pressure to close New York City schools, has maintained that the schools are a lifeline for the city’s most vulnerable and refused to cancel classes.
After Los Angeles Unified School District announced it was closing, school officials said that they would open 40 family resource centers to provide child care and meals to students whose parents cannot get out of work.
Warnings that prisons could be overtaken with the virus — as they have in some other countries — began to seem increasingly plausible. On Friday, Washington State announced that a prison employee tested positive for the virus. A jail employee in Hancock County, Ind., also tested positive.
The Bureau of Prisons, which runs federal prisons that hold more than 175,000 people, suspended all visits to prisoners for 30 days, including most by lawyers.
The virus continued to prompt closures and cancellations around the world. Universal Studios Hollywood said that it would be closed from Saturday through at least the end of March.
Mr. Pence did not immediately share new details on a testing website from Google.
Despite being pressed repeatedly at the White House news conference on Saturday, Mr. Pence did not share substantive new details about Mr. Trump’s earlier claim that Google was developing a website to help people decide whether a test for the coronavirus was warranted and where they could get one.
The confusion started when Mr. Trump thanked Google on Friday for developing the website, which he said would be “very quickly done.”
But later Friday, Carolyn Wang, a spokeswoman for Verily, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, said that the website was meant to help health care workers triage people for virus screening, that it would be available by Monday and that it would be limited to testing sites in the Bay Area. If the pilot goes well, Verily said, it plans to deploy the project nationwide but there is no timetable for a national rollout.
Ms. Wang said that Mr. Trump’s statement prompted the company to plan to make the site available to the public.
On Saturday, Mr. Pence said the government was working “24/7” on the website and more details would be released at 5 p.m. on Sunday.
“What Google said was that they’re planning to launch a website this coming Monday, March 16, that will enable individuals to do a risk assessment and be scheduled for testing at pilot test, sites in the Bay Area with the goal of expanding to other locations” Mr. Pence said.
“And we’re very grateful for that. The objective here is to have a website up very quickly that first people in the areas that have been deeply impacted.”
Apple says it will close most stores worldwide for two weeks.
Apple said on Friday that it would temporarily close most of its stores worldwide, becoming one of the first major retailers to take such drastic measures.
The company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said that Apple would shutter all stores until March 27, excluding those in mainland China — where infections have significantly declined recently — and in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“The most effective way to minimize risk of the virus’s transmission is to reduce density and maximize social distance,” Mr. Cook said in a statement posted to the company’s website.
Many firms around the world are contemplating similar measures. Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing retailer, said on Friday that it would shut its stores until late March. Starbucks has said it would consider closing stores temporarily as a “last resort.”
The virus has already taken a toll on many businesses, disrupting supply chains and hurting demand in critical markets.
Apple recently reopened all of its 42 stores in China, after closing them for more than a month. But the company has struggled to ramp up production of smartphones amid delays at its factories in China.
Italians cope with quarantine by singing on their balconies.
Italy is locked down, in the face of what is so far Europe’s most severe coronavirus outbreak. Italians, however, are still getting their voices heard.
At precisely noon on Saturday, millions of Italians, from Piedmont to Sicily, leaned out of windows or stood on their balconies to applaud the health care workers in hospitals and other front-line medical staff who have been working round the clock to care for coronavirus patients.
As church bells normally drowned out by traffic pealed in the surreal silence that defines Italy since Wednesday’s lockdown, applause filled streets, piazzas and even country roads, after messages went viral on social media calling Italians to put their hands together.
There was a similar response to another online appeal Friday evening, asking Italians to sing the national anthem — or play it on a musical instrument — at exactly 6 p.m. The socially distant flash mob swept social media.
Naturally, not everyone is blessed with a voice like Pavarotti. Some Italians preferred banging on pots and calling out, “We will make it.”
It’s unclear who began the musical interlude, but in the land that gave the world opera, it’s clearly not meant to be a cacophonous mess, and a program for more songs is spreading online. At 6 p.m. on Saturday, Italians will sing “Azzurro,” a 1968 hit by the singer Adriano Celentano, and on Sunday, “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu,” by Nino Gaetano, which topped the charts in 1975.
At American airports, lax screening raises concern.
As thousands of Americans flee from Europe and other centers of the coronavirus outbreak, many travelers are reporting no health screenings upon departure and few impediments at U.S. airports.
Since January, officers from Customs and Border Protection have been on heightened alert for travelers who might spread the virus. The Department of Homeland Security has told employees to look for physical symptoms, search through travel documents and review a federal tracking database.
But travelers, including some who say they showed visible signs of illness, say screening has been lax. Members of Congress this week grilled senior Homeland Security officials over what some described as a porous screening process.
Even top officials at the department acknowledge that fully sealing the United States from the virus is impossible.
“We are trying to reduce and delay the biggest peak in the virus wave hitting on the United States of America,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security. “And all of these steps reduce and delay. They do not stop the virus.”
Your home dynamics have changed. Here’s how to manage the shift.
More schools are closing, more companies are asking employees to work remotely. Here are some tips to help you work from home more efficiently, and balance home schooling for your children.
And here is more coverage on how the coronavirus affects your day-to-day life here.
The Pentagon is closing to visitors.
The Pentagon will shut its doors to visitors at midnight Sunday, the Defense Department said, as part of the military’s efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus.
The Defense Department said in a statement late Friday that facilities associated with the Pentagon in the Washington area — the department owns or leases a slew of properties in Washington, Virginia and Maryland — will also bar visitors.
People who work in the various Defense Department buildings will still be allowed in. But the department, for the past week, has been instituting “social distancing” protocols, spreading across multiple meeting rooms and keeping chairs three to four feet apart.
The Defense Department directive also bars any individual with a history of international travel in the past 14 days from entering Pentagon facilities. Access may be restored on the 15th day, the directive said, “if the individual remains asymptomatic.”
The department also said on Friday that it was halting all official travel for military service members in the United States beginning on Monday for nearly three months.
Those restrictions will apply to service members, civilians employed by the Department of Defense, and families who are assigned to the department’s U.S. facilities. They only apply to official travel. In an unsigned statement, the department said there may be exemptions for “compelling cases.”
South Korea’s aggressive testing may be paying off.
For a second day in a row, the number of coronavirus patients released from South Korean hospitals has exceeded the number of newly confirmed infections, a potential sign that the country’s aggressive test-and-treatment approach is paying off.
Unlike China and Italy, which have locked down entire cities, South Korea has not blocked the movement of people in and out of regions heavily affected by the outbreak. Instead, it has launched an aggressive campaign of tracking, testing and treating patients, conducting more than 10,000 diagnostic tests a day.
Heath officials said it was still too early to say that the country’s outbreak was under control, but they were encouraged by the recent figures. The number of recovered patients surpassed that of new infections by 177 to 110 on Friday, and by 204 to 107 on Saturday.
The improvement was due largely to a sharp decline in the number of new patients in the city of Daegu, the epicenter of the country’s outbreak and the focus of the testing campaign. So far, the country has tested more than 260,000 people. Of these, 8,086 have tested positive for the virus.
Reporting was contributed by Adam Nossiter, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mujib Mashal, Najim Rahim, Andrew Kramer, Maria Varenikova, Helene Cooper, Hannah Beech, Elisabetta Povoledo, Marc Santora, Johanna Berendt, Choe Sang-Hun, Stephen Castle, Richard C. Paddock, Muktita Suhartono, Elian Peltier, Peter Robins, Keith Bradsher, Damien Cave, Emily Cochrane, Javier Hernandez, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, John Schwartz, Liz Alderman, Mihir Zaveri, Patricia Mazzei, Frances Robles and Annie Karni.
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