US cases rise but talk heats up on economy

COVID-19 cases in the United States rose above 600,000 with over 26,000 deaths as the debate over reopening the economy heats up.

The country saw 609,685 infections with 26,059 deaths as of Wednesday morning, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

The hardest-hit state, New York, has recorded 202,630 infections and 10,834 deaths, followed by New Jersey with 68,824 cases and 2,805 deaths. Other states with over 20,000 infections include Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Louisiana.

A sailor from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, with hundreds of coronavirus infections, died of the disease on Monday.

Four other crew members are in hospital in Guam. The carrier has been docked in the US territory for more than a week as the 4,865-person crew is tested for the virus. The sailor who died was among 585 crew members who tested positive.

"We might well be at a point in time when the number of new cases in the United States will be peaking, and beginning to decline in the country overall," said Robert Schooley, professor of medicine at the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.

Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on the White House to reopen the US economy after a staggering 16.8 million US citizens filed initial jobless claims in a three-week period ending April 4.

During Tuesday's briefing on the epidemic in the White House, US President Donald Trump said that he intended to talk with all 50 governors this week, probably on Thursday, to discuss a national plan for reopening the country.

Trump also said that he might try to authorize reopening some states before May 1, within the federally recommended time horizon for social distancing and other mitigation measures.

Governors' responses

In a response, some US governors told Trump that he did not have authority to end their lockdowns and "reopen" their states. And Trump retreated on Tuesday night from his strong position of the day before when he insisted such decisions were solely up to him. He said he would leave these decisions to the governors.

"We don't have King Trump, we have President Trump," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a CNN interview on Tuesday morning. "I know it's red versus blue. Not anymore. It's red, white and blue. I have 10,000 deaths in my state. This virus did not kill Democrats or Republicans, it killed Americans."

During a Monday White House news briefing on the pandemic, Trump said: "When somebody's president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. It's total. It's total. And the governors know that."

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned that the US is not ready to restart its economy. "We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," Fauci said.

Schooley said: "We will have to continue the distancing policies in places where the epidemic may be peaking as we prepare for new surges in which distancing was late. We are, unfortunately, far from out of danger."

Separately, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the global economy is on track to contract "sharply" by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, the "worst recession" since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

"This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period," IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual news conference on the latest World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday.

Xinhua and agencies contributed to this story.