'Invisible enemy'

THE UNITED STATES OF SOCIAL DISTANCING — We’ve now got a scant 15 days to clamp down on our own social interactions to “flatten the curve” and avoid an Italy-like scenario of death and despair, public health authorities warned Monday.

Even the optimist in chief, Donald Trump, admitted that “it’s bad,” and exhorted us to avoid groups larger than 10 people and avoid restaurants, bars and the like . Acknowledging the outbreak could last for months, Trump gave a much more somber assessment than we’ve heard from him calling the outbreak the “invisible enemy.”


But how do we know if it works? The rub with social distancing: Even if Americans embrace it, it’ll be hard to know quickly how well social distancing is keeping us away from the brink. We’ll know if we fall off it. That makes it hard to determine if we have to do even more, either voluntarily or because the government imposes more drastic steps.

The delays in rolling out testing limit our visibility. The count of confirmed cases is at least 4,287, according to the trackers at Johns Hopkins . The number of actual undetected cases is far higher. Trevor Bedford, the hitherto obscure Seattle scientist turned Covid-19 Twitter phenomenon ( @Trvrb ) a few days ago estimated the caseload at 10,000 to 40,000 — and rising.

Fauci: We’re not overreacting — Just a day earlier the CDC was recommending we avoid gatherings of 50 or more people. Now it’s 10. As the everpresent NIAID chief Anthony Fauci said, the new recommendation is based on trying to anticipate what’s next, not what already happened. “It isn’t an overreaction,” he said. “It’s an action that’s commensurate with what’s going on in reality.” The task now is to slow down that reality.

What we’re watching in the next 24 hours — The new testing crisis: cotton Swabs. Maybe we didn’t all quite understand the reagent problems or the lack of RNA extraction kits. But cotton swabs? A potential shortage of the swabs used to take samples from patients may be among what federal health officials delicately label a “speed bump” in finally rolling out tests, POLITICO’s David Lim reports . California Gov. Gavin Newsom is one of the officials who have publicly fretted over the swab supply.

SCOOP: CORONAVIRUS SWAT TEAM — The White House has deployed a SWAT team of fixers and technocrats to fix the troubled testing program, Dan Diamond reports . About 100 staffers and outside advisers, split between the health department and the White House, are working to rapidly ramp up testing supply and tackle issues like emerging supply shortages, said four people with knowledge of the strategy.

Vaccine trial starts — Trump at Monday’s task force briefing recognized the pretty phenomenal speed of vaccine development. A healthy volunteer was given the first dose of an experimental vaccine Monday in a phase one clinical trial. But experimental is the key word. This is not a vaccine that we will have tomorrow or the next day. There’s reason to hope it will work. But maybe it won’t. In the best success scenario, it will take a year or more to know, and even longer to get it to millions of people around the world.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Reach out to Health Editor Joanne Kenen at [email protected], or @JoanneKenen. And Renu Rayasam [email protected] and @renurayasam.



A doctor handles a sample from a person tested for the coronavirus at a drive-thru station in the hospital's parking garage | Getty Images

On The Economy

STARING OFF A CLIFF — Early signals point to damage unseen in modern U.S. economic history: Potentially millions of jobs lost in a single month, an unprecedented and steep fall in economic activity and market swings not seen since the Great Depression, POLITICO’s Ben White reports .

President Donald Trump and his officials are hoping that the economy will quickly bounce back after the threat subsides. They’re not taking any chances — especially not when the president has staked his re-election on job growth and stock market gains. They’re proposing an aid package worth $800 billion.

First in line for a rescue — Airlines are asking for $60 billion in direct cash payouts and loan guarantees — quadruple what they received in the aftermath of Sept 11, 2001. They’re warning that the country’s lockdown will force many carriers into bankruptcy. Trump also is reviving his push for a payroll tax holiday.

The biggest hurdle for Trump’s proposal will be his own party. With the 2008 bank bailouts fresh on their minds, most Republicans will be loath to pass a package that’s seen as a bailout and one that’s likely to blow a big hole in the budget.

Trump’s transformation — Over the course of a week, President Trump went from telling Americans the coronavirus would disappear to declaring a national emergency. POLITICO's Gabby Orr gives an inside look at Trump's transformation in the latest edition of POLITICO Dispatch , a new podcast from POLITICO’s newsroom.



Exclusive

YOU WERE WARNED THIS COULD HAPPEN — A dangerous virus sweeps through European and Asian capitals, with countries shuttering borders. Cases start to pop up in states like California. This isn’t a summary of today’s events, but a mock pandemic scenario laid out to Trump transition officials in a tabletop exercise days before the inauguration in 2017. Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman and Dan Diamond report first in POLITICO .

POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees who described the atmosphere as “weird” and chilly. At least 30 representatives of Trump’s team — many of them soon-to-be Cabinet members — were present, each sitting next to their closest Obama administration counterpart. Incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared to keep dozing off.



2020 Watch

Scrambling the calculus — Coronavirus continues to upend the regular course of campaigning business. A state judge rejected Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s 11-hour efforts to push back the state’s primary . Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana have already pushed back their primaries.

Turning to Congress

WE HAVE A DEAL — The House approved a sweeping, multi-billion rescue package on Monday night, after intense negotiations between the White House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi .

The deal has already hit multiple speed bumps and more are likely ahead. GOP senators are mixed in their support of the bill. And timing and logistics are still up in the air, amid growing public pressure for federal action on the crisis.



By the Numbers

Patterson Clark’s newest update on reported coronavirus cases has some sobering numbers: Covid-19 has spread to 151 countries. New confirmed cases of the disease globally are growing exponentially, with a weekly average daily growth rate of 1.2 times that of the day before.

POLITICO is charting the number of coronavirus cases reported state-by-state , powered with data from The COVID Tracking Project.



Patterson Clark | POLITICO

Talking to the Experts

Question of the day: What do we need to know about when things will improve? (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

“No one can predict how bad this is going to get and how long it will last. The fact is that we don’t have the information we need that is crucial to make decisions like that. [With right data] if we were to stop seeing unlinked cases, in other words, we knew where the cases were from, that would be very reassuring. But as long as there are cases arising, the sources of which we don’t know, that means it is spreading widely in society.” — Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Barack Obama

What do you think? Have a question? Let me know: [email protected] and @renurayasam.

The Global Fight

GLOBALIZATION IN REVERSE: ‘WE’RE AT WAR’ — That was the message from French President Emmanuel Macron via a televised address tonight from Paris . In practical terms that means a 15-day national lockdown and postponed local elections, making France the latest in a string of countries to shut their borders, their nightlife and most of their shops. British scientists warn that restrictions may need to be in place for a year to avoid 500,000 deaths in the U.K. alone .

WHERE’S THE TRUST? — Divided, distrustful populations find it hard to win wars. With parks and bars full from Paris to Nashville, we’re seeing widespread distrust of official health warnings, part of a slow-building broader disintegration of trust . While China may be bragging about getting the virus under control for now, Beijing is stuck with the same trust problem. POLITICO’s chief Europe correspondent Matthew Karnitschnig explains that whichever capital you look to, leadership has been the first casualty of this pandemic .

See Ryan Heath’s Twitter thread about best in class responses from around the world to different aspects of the coronavirus outbreak. Panic buying is living up to national stereotypes .

For more on the international response to coronavirus, subscribe to his weekly Global Translations newsletter.



Parting Words

A VIRAL HOAX — As the novel coronavirus spreads across the globe, a wildfire of false and unverified information about the pandemic is spreading its own sickness — on private messaging services including WhatsApp. “Elisabeth … you know, Poldi’s mom” had a message about the coronavirus outbreak. It turns out that a friend of hers, who was a doctor at the university hospital of Vienna, had called her with a warning, she said in German. The clinic had noticed that most patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus pandemic, had taken the painkiller ibuprofen before they were hospitalized. Except Poldi’s mom was not a real person and wasn’t sharing real information. That didn’t keep the tidbit from spreading far and wide and temporarily crashing the university’s website, POLITICO’s Janosch Delcker, Zosia Wanat and Mark Scott report.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam