Coronavirus Live Updates: One After Another, States Are Ordering Residents to Stay Indoors
New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois were preparing to follow the lead set by California and New York on telling people to stay mostly inside. The Federal Reserve moved to backstop municipal money market funds, and the U.S. was set to close borders with Mexico and Canada.
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Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois was expected on Friday to issue a stay-at-home order in his state, which is home to more than 12 million people. With similar instructions underway in California and New York, more than one in five Americans will soon be under orders to stay indoors.
Here’s what you need to know:
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Emergency Medical Services workers in Harlem on Wednesday.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
From New York to California, states are ordering people to stay indoors.
Soon more than one in five Americans will be under orders to stay mostly indoors. One by one, localities and now some of the nation’s biggest states are beginning to limit people’s movements as they struggle to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus before fast-growing caseloads overwhelm their hospitals.
In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo moved Friday to sharply limit outdoor activity across the state, including by ordering nonessential businesses to keep all of their workers home. His wide-ranging executive order, which takes effect on Sunday at 8 p.m., was issued as the number of known cases in the state jumped to over 7,800.
“These provisions will be enforced,” Mr. Cuomo said at a briefing in Albany. “These are not helpful hints.”
Then, within the space of an hour Friday afternoon, several other big states followed suit. Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut issued an order similar to Mr. Cuomo’s, and Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said he planned to order on Saturday that all nonessential businesses in that state shut down as well.
And in Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker was expected to issue a stay-at-home order in his state, which is home to more than 12 million people. With similar orders underway, or soon to be, in California and New York, more than one in five Americans would soon be under orders to stay indoors.
Their moves were announced as California woke up Friday to new rules closing the state’s nonessential retail shops and sharply limiting outdoor movement, after Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered Californians — all 40 million of them — to stay in their houses as much as possible. There was initially confusion there over how the order would be enforced and interpreted, but Californians were told they could still take walks and leave their neighborhoods to hike or go to the beach, as long as they were able to practice social distancing.
States and localities announced the new rules as the death toll in the United States surpassed 200, and as Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., recorded their first cases. There have now been deaths in more than half the states, with the most in Washington State, New York and California.
State and local officials are trying to strike a balance between giving residents the leeway to shop and take the occasional much-needed walk, while doing what they can to slow the spread of infections.
It still remained to be seen how the new orders would be enforced, and how effective they would prove. Even after Italy imposed limitations on movements, it found itself confronting the worst coronavirus outbreak in Europe. When the vice president of the Chinese Red Cross, Sun Shuopeng, recently visited Milan, he suggested that the Italian authorities had not gone far enough.
New York will allow healthy people under age 70 to go out for groceries and medicines, and to exercise and walk outside, as long as they stay six feet away from others. Mass transit will continue to run so that healthcare workers and other people with other essential jobs can get to work, but people will be urged no to use it unless absolutely necessary.
Nonessential gatherings of any size will be banned.
And certain essential businesses will be allowed to remain open, including: grocers, health care providers, pharmacies, gas stations, convenience stores, banks, hardware stores, laundromats, child-care providers, auto repair, utilities, warehouses and distributors, plumbers and other skilled contractors, animal-care providers, transportation providers, construction companies and many kinds of manufacturers.
It’s Not ‘Shelter in Place’: What the New Coronavirus Restrictions Mean
March 20, 2020

Here’s what happened at the White House briefing: Border closures, warnings against immigration and more.
President Trump at the White house on Friday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
At a White House briefing on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that border closures to non-essential travelers from Canada and Mexico would go into effect at midnight on Saturday.
Mr. Pompeo also reiterated that the State Department had implemented a Level 4 travel advisory warning Americans against traveling abroad. He said U.S. citizens “should arrange immediate return” unless they intend to remain abroad for an extended time. “If you choose to travel, it may well be fairly disruptive,” he said.
President Trump suggested that immigration would strain health care systems.
“During a global pandemic they threaten to create a public storm that would spread the infection to our border agents, migrants and the public at large,” Mr. Trump said, referring to people seeking to enter the country.
Speaking on a day when the worldwide death toll stood at more than 10,000, including more than 200 in the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that there was a “fundamental public health reason” for closing the northern and southern borders. “Understand that: There’s a public health reason for doing that.”
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo used the term “Chinese virus,” continuing their efforts to rename a virus that causes a disease public health experts purposely named Covid-19 to avoid the spread of blame and xenophobia.
The term has angered Chinese officials and a wide range of critics, and China experts say labeling the virus that way will only ratchet up tensions between the two countries, while resulting in the kind of xenophobia that American leaders should discourage. Asian-Americans have reported incidents of racial slurs and physical abuse because of the erroneous perception that China is the cause of the virus.
“It’s not racist at all,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, explaining his rationale. “It comes from China, that’s why.”
On Thursday, a Washington Post photographer took an image of Mr. Trump’s speech materials on the White House podium that showed the word “coronavirus” crossed out and “Chinese” replaced in Sharpie.
Deborah L. Birx, who is leading the administration’s coronavirus response, detailed a “concerning trend” from Italy: the mortality rate in males is twice as high as females in every age group affected by the virus.”
A similar disparity was evident in China, where researchers found that the death rate for men, 2.8 percent, was higher than for women, at 1.7 percent. Men in both China and Italy smoke at higher rates than women, although the gender disparity is not nearly as great in Italy. Other factors, such as women’s generally more robust immune systems, may also be at play.
Dr. Birx said that people under age 20 have been sickened by the disease, but that the majority have recovered to date. “This should alert all of us to continue our vigilance to protect our Americans that are in nursing homes,” Dr. Birx said.
Mr. Trump said that the Education Department would suspend standardized testing for schools across the country, and that interest on federally held student loans would be suspended.
Regarding the northern U.S. border, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada would start returning rather than quarantining asylum seekers who cross from the United States outside of formal border points.
During the hourlong briefing, Mr. Trump grew increasingly confrontational with reporters who asked him to detail his message to Americans who were shaken by their lives being upended and scared at the spread of the virus.
“It is a bad signal that you are putting out to the American people,” he admonished a reporter from NBC who asked what the president would say to frightened citizens. “You want to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism. Let’s see if it works. I happen to feel good about it. Who knows. I have been right a lot. Let’s see what happens.