In brief

Biden and Sanders cast themselves as best leader amid crisis

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders sought in Sunday’s debate to cast themselves as best-positioned to lead the nation through a global pandemic, with Biden pledging to deploy the military to help with recovery efforts and Sanders using the crisis to pitch his long-sought overhaul of the country’s health care system.

“One of the reasons that we are unprepared, and have been unprepared, is we don’t have a system. We’ve got thousands of private insurance plans,” said Sanders, who backs a sweeping government-run health insurance program. “That is not a system that is prepared to provide health care to all people in a good year, without the epidemic.”

Biden, who is leading Sanders in the race for the Democratic nomination, argued that a pandemic was not a moment to attempt to push through an overhaul of the American health insurance system, a politically arduous endeavor.

“This is a crisis,” Biden said. “We’re at war with a virus. It has nothing to do with copays or anything.”

As the debate opened, Biden and Sanders skipped a handshake, greeting each other instead with an elbow bump. They took their positions at podiums spaced 6 feet apart in keeping with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for limiting the spread of the novel coronavirus. They addressed the nation, and each other, from a television studio in Washington without an in-person audience.

US moves nearer to shutdown amid coronavirus fears

CHICAGO — Officials across the country curtailed many elements of American life to fight the coronavirus outbreak on Sunday, with health officials recommending that groups of 50 or more don’t get together and a government expert saying a 14-day national shutdown may be needed.

Governors were closing restaurants, bars, and schools as the nation sank deeper into chaos over the crisis. Travelers returning home from overseas trips were stuck in line for hours at major airports for screenings, causing them to be crammed into just the kind of crowded spaces that public health officials have been urging people to avoid.

In a sign of the impending economic gloom on the horizon, the Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero. President Donald Trump sought to calm a jittery nation by declaring that the government has “tremendous control” over the situation and urging people to stop the panic buying of grocery staples that has depleted the shelves of stores around the country. Gun stores started seeing a similar run on weapons and ammunition as the panic intensified.

As Americans struggled to come to terms with how to change their daily habits, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a dramatic recommendation: Because large events can fuel the spread of the disease, it said gatherings of 50 people or more should be canceled or postponed throughout the country for the next eight weeks. It added that, at any event, proper precautions should be taken, including making sure people are washing their hands and not getting too close.

But in a sign of the difficulty of striking the right balance, the statement from the CDC also said the recommendation does not apply to “the day to day operation of organizations such as schools, institutes of higher learning, or businesses.”

Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts today

WASHINGTON — A clinical trial evaluating a vaccine designed to protect against the new coronavirus will begin today, according to a government official.

The first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on today, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the trial has not been publicly announced yet. The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, the official said.

Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.

Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.

Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed.

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Fed takes emergency steps to slash rates and ease bank rules

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve took massive emergency action Sunday to try to help the economy withstand the coronavirus by slashing its benchmark interest rate to near zero and saying it would buy $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds.

The Fed’s surprise announcement signaled its rising concern that the viral outbreak will depress economic growth in coming months, likely causing a recession, and that it’s poised to do whatever it can to counter the risks. It cut its key rate by a full percentage point to a range between zero and 0.25%.

The central bank said it will keep its rate there until it is “confident that the economy has weathered recent events.”

The Fed will buy at least $500 billion of Treasury securities and at least $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. This amounts to an effort to ease market disruptions that have made it harder for banks and large investors to sell Treasuries as well as to keep longer-term rates borrowing rates down.

The new purchases will be similar to the several rounds of “quantitative easing,” or QE, that the Fed conducted during and after the Great Recession to bolster the financial system and the economy. Chairman Jerome Powell, in a conference call with reporters, said the Fed’s new purchases are intended to ensure that credit markets function properly.

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Virus brings new travel restrictions, lockdowns and closures

ROME — Daily life came to a grinding halt around much of the world Sunday amid new travel restrictions, border shutdowns and sweeping closures of restaurants and bars aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The numbers of cases and deaths continued to rise, including in hard-hit Italy where 368 more deaths brought its overall toll to 1,809. With the country under a nearly week-old lockdown, Pope Francis ventured out of the Vatican to visit two churches in Rome to pray for the sick, a spokesman said.

Public worship was curtailed in many places as faith leaders gave sermons to empty pews or moved to online services. Muslim authorities announced that the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City would be closed indefinitely, and the Vatican said next month’s Holy Week services would not be open to the public.

Americans returning from abroad found historic closures in cities and faced chaos at airports as overwhelmed border agents tried to screen passengers for illness.

In Spain, long lines for food and police patrols marked the first day of a nationwide quarantine. In the Philippines, soldiers and police sealed off the densely populated capital of Manila from most domestic travelers. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced plans to limit movement nationwide, and Lebanon’s government ordered a lockdown in the country, closing down Beirut’s famed seaside corniche.

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Arc of Trump’s coronavirus comments defies reality on ground

WASHINGTON — In the course of a few weeks, President Donald Trump veered from confidently assuring Americans his administration had the coronavirus outbreak “very well under control” to declaring a national emergency and tweeting ALL CAPS caution about the pandemic that has upended every facet of American life.

Trump meandered from denial to grudging acceptance, and in his words, he seeded conflicting, inaccurate and eyebrow-raising commentary to a country desperate for unvarnished, even shock-to-the-system guidance.

Throughout the global coronavirus crisis, Trump’s statements have been colored by baseless optimism. Sometimes, his commentary has been flatly wrong. Frequently, it’s been amplified by aides and allies with the help of conservative media.

As he confronts the most serious national crisis of his presidency, the lack of precision has cut into Trump’s credibility at a moment when he needs it more than ever, analysts say.

“It started out with really what can only be described as full-blown denial,” said Brian Ott, a communications studies professor at Texas Tech University who has done extensive research on the president’s social media rhetoric. “Then as the crisis spread and as it became a pandemic … it just wasn’t viable rhetoric anymore because it wasn’t at all where the American public was at.”

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New York City schools to close Monday to fight coronavirus

NEW YORK — New York City will close the nation’s largest public school system on Monday, sending over 1.1 million children home in hopes of curbing the spread of coronavirus, the city’s mayor announced Sunday, calling it a “very troubling moment” as he suggested ominously that more restrictions were inevitable.

A somber Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the decision to close schools through at least April 20 and possibly for the school year as school closures occurred in communities and entire states nationwide and pressure mounted in New York from residents, City Council members and others.

“I have no words for how horrible it is, but it has become necessary,” de Blasio said. “As of now, school is canceled for tomorrow.”

The mayor called it a “very troubling moment, a moment when I’m just distraught at having to take this action, but I became convinced over the course of today that there is no other choice.”

He also announced that there were now five deaths in New York City and that he was ordering the end of elective surgeries.

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CDC’s latest guidance could mean no sports for much longer

The already-delayed professional sports seasons in North America could be on hiatus for significantly longer than first planned after federal officials said Sunday that they recommend all in-person events involving 50 people or more be called off for the next eight weeks.

That’s twice as long as the 30-day shutdowns that the NBA, NHL and Major League Soccer decided to put into place last week in response to the global coronavirus pandemic that has already made a deep impact on the U.S. financial markets and has been blamed for at least 64 deaths in this country.

Major League Baseball also was going with what essentially was a 30-day shutdown after canceling the rest of spring training and pushing back the start of regular season play for two weeks; opening day was to have been March 26.

But new recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sunday night seem to suggest that sports in this country could for all intents and purposes be gone until May, if not later.

“CDC, in accordance with its guidance for large events and mass gatherings, recommends that for the next 8 weeks, organizers … cancel or postpone in-person events that consist of 50 people or more throughout the United States,” it said. “Events of any size should only be continued if they can be carried out with adherence to guidelines for protecting vulnerable populations, hand hygiene, and social distancing.”

By wire sources