The New York Times reports:

A week after a deadly coronavirus outbreak was reported inside a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs, officials from the long term care center said on Saturday that 70 staff members were out sick with symptoms resembling coronavirus and six residents were also ill.

A federal strike team of nurses and doctors arrived Saturday to support the staff at the long-term nursing home, Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., where officials have announced the deaths of 13 residents and a visitor who were infected with the virus. Tim Killian, a spokesman for the care center, praised the workers who continued to show up even as 70 of the nursing home’s 180 employees have developed symptoms.

“The amount of work and stress that these staff and employees and caregivers are under is tremendous,” Mr. Killian said. “They truly are heroes.”

Earlier on Saturday, Mr. Killian said that the center was still unable to get all of its staff members tested for coronavirus. The home had received 45 virus testing kits, Mr. Killian said, which was not enough for the 63 remaining residents and dozens of staff members.

Later in the day, Life Care managers said the state had provided additional test kits, enough for all of the residents. It was not clear whether there were also enough kits to test staff members.

Mr. Killian said that six of the residents who were still living at the center, where visitors have been restricted from entering, had developed symptoms. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

On Friday, as coronavirus infections rapidly multiplied aboard a cruise ship marooned off the coast of California, health department officials and Vice President Mike Pence came up with a plan to evacuate thousands of passengers, avoiding the fate of a similar cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, which became a petri dish of coronavirus infections. Quickly removing passengers was the safest outcome, health officials and Pence reasoned.

But President Donald Trump had a different idea: Leave the infected passengers on board — which would help keep the number of U.S. coronavirus cases as low as possible.

“Do I want to bring all those people off? People would like me to do it,” Trump admitted at a press conference at the CDC later on Friday. “I would rather have them stay on, personally.”

“I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” Trump added, saying that he ultimately empowered Pence to decide whether to evacuate the passengers.

For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. [Continue reading…]