Our chief reporter writes: We are now wrapping up our coverage of the day’s coronavirus news in the US and Donald Trump’s Rose Garden performance. You can keep reading the latest on coronavirus in the US and around the world in our global news blog. David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, will file a full report on the Trump extravaganza shortly. Trump’s latest press briefing bore all the hallmarks we have become used to – misleading comments, exaggerations and ugly remarks directed at journalists trying to do their jobs including, again, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS and a representative of CNN. The main news line to emerge was that the president has bowed to the inevitable and accepted that his ambition of 12 April, Easter, as a date on which social distancing restrictions on Americans could start to be lifted was always a pipe dream. The new date he gave was the end of April. Whether that sticks remains to be seen. The president’s address was peppered with boasts – he compared “ratings” for his briefings to “Monday Night Football and the Batchelor finale” – and bizarre flights of fancy. Perhaps the strangest was his suggestion that hospitals in a coronavirus crisis city like New York were somehow stealing hundreds of thousands of surgical masks. He asked how the numbers of masks requested could shoot up from 10,000 to 300,000 overnight and said: “Are they going out the back door?” According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, New York has recorded 965 of 2,433 coronavirus deaths in the US so far, and nearly 60,000 of close to 140,000 confirmed cases. Trump also started invoking the figure of 2.2m possible deaths in America if nothing were done to mitigate the disaster – a figure drawn from modeling by scientists at Imperial College London earlier this month. Trump pulled that statistic out of his bag of tricks to try to minimize the political fallout of an earlier statement from Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said that up to 200,000 Americans could die even when the benefits of social distancing are taken into account. In Trump’s world, 2.2m is such a scary number it might put people off thinking that 200,000 is also pretty shocking. It might in turn give the impression that he is doing a great job, and not presiding over a historic failure of federal leadership. Time will tell on that as well. Here’s a summary of the latest events: Trump declares he will be extending the virus guidelines to 30 April. The president said the “peak and death rate is likely to hit in two weeks” during the daily coronavirus task force briefing. “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won,” Trump said. “That would be the greatest loss of all.” Fauci warns coronavirus could kill as many as 200,000 Americans. Dr Anthony Fauci, the leading US government infectious disease expert, offered a grim prediction on the Covid-19 death toll on Sunday morning, but cautioned the figure is a ‘moving target’ that could easily be wrong. Pelosi accuses Trump of costing US lives with coronavirus denials and delays. The top Democrat in Congress delivered a devastating critique of Donald Trump, accusing the president directly of costing American lives through his constant denials and delays in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Andrew Cuomo says he expects ‘rolling apex’ of cases in New York. “The number of cases are still going up, so you’re still going up towards an apex,” the New York governor said. “But the rate of the doubling is slow, which is good news.” Donald Trump in ‘near tie’ with Joe Biden, new poll finds. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll puts former vice-president ahead by 49% to 47% among registered voters. In these extraordinary times, the Guardian’s editorial independence has never been more important. Because no one sets our agenda, or edits our editor, we can keep delivering quality, trustworthy, fact-checked journalism each and every day. Free from commercial or political bias, we can report fearlessly on world events and challenge those in power. Your support protects the Guardian’s independence. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to accurate news and calm explanation. No matter how unpredictable the future feels, we will remain with you, delivering high quality news so we can all make critical decisions about our lives, health and security – based on fact, not fiction. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you. Make a contribution - The Guardian Trump concludes the daily briefing by saying “the enemy is death” and “it’s very unpleasant”, but “the level of competence, the level of caring, the level of love ... is brilliant”. Vice-president Mike Pence finally takes the dais and says every American should have a “grateful heart” for all of the front-line healthcare workers. He says he understands the extension of the guidelines to 15 April may be received with disappointment, but there is hope on the horizon. “What the president laid out today, while I’m sure for many Americans that were hoping we would be with this sooner, there may be a modest sense of frustration and disappointment,” Pence says. “But what I hear speaking to these healthcare experts is that there is light at the end of the tunnel as the American people continue to put into practice the president’s coronavirus guidelines for Americans.” Donald Trump accused a reporter of fake news when he asked the president about his hostility towards Democratic governors based on a verbatim quote from Trump himself. In his rambling answer, Trump repeated his assertion that he has decided not to call governors like Jay Inslee in Washington state who he described as a “failed presidential candidate” who he doesn’t like. But he insisted he never told senior White House staff including Mike Pence, the vice-president, not to call. “Mike Pence and the head of [Federal Emergency Management Agency] call, I don’t stop them,” Trump said. “Did I ever ask you to do anything negative, Mike, to the state of Washington?” He did in fact tell Pence not to call Democratic governors like Inslee. We know that as a fact because Trump told us so himself in his briefing on Friday. Then, Trump said: “I say, ’Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him.’” Here’s Washington bureau chief David Smith’s report about that briefing: Trump is asked to respond to the decisions of some network affiliates to cease airing the daily coronavirus task force briefings due to the inability to fact-check his statements in real time. In a surreal twist, the president likens the ratings of the briefings to Monday Night Football or the finale of the The Bachelor, two of the the highest rated TV programs in America. He goes on to note that Fauci and Birx have become “big stars” through the pandemic. Trump is asked about potential deaths from the economic consequences of the pandemic and whether he believes those deaths will outpace the death toll of the virus. “You’re going to have massive depression, meaning mental depression,” the president says. “You’re going to have depresison in the economy, also. You’re going to have large numbers of suicides. Take a look of what happens in a really horrible recession or worse. So you’re going to have tremendous suicides, but you know what you’re going to have more than anything else? Drug addiction. You will see drugs being used like nobody’s ever used them before and people are going to be dying all over the place from drug addiction. Because you would have had a wonderful job at a restaurant or even owned a restaurant ... and in one day they have nothing. They’ve gotten wiped out. One day. From our enemy, this invisible, horrible scourge.” He adds: “Hopefully, we’re not going to have that.” Trump flatly denied that he had suggested a quarantine of New York was likely to happen, saying he only floated it as a possibility. On a pedantic level, he is quite correct. What he said on Saturday was that “there’s a possibility that some time today we’ll do a quarantine, short-term, two weeks on New York. Probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut.” But when you are president of the United States, and you are standing in front of TV cameras broadcasting to millions of Americans, and you then say that “some time today” it is possible the federal government will put a ring of steel round the entire New York area, you are bound to induce a reaction. That word “possibility” gets lost amid the noise. In the end, Trump backed down. Federal health officials issued an advisory urging New York, New Jersey and Connecticut residents to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for two weeks. But his original proposal certainly had an impact. On Sunday, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state, said Trump’s words had an instant impact on large numbers of New Yorkers. He said he was inundated with worried calls. “People are so on edge, it really panicked people,” he said. Trump says General Motors is “doing a fantastic job” and we don’t need to worry about them anymore. When asked why Florida has received 100% of the supplies it’s requested from the national strategic stockpile as opposed to states like Massachusetts, Trump says: “I was on the call yesterday with the governors and they were happy with the job we are doing. Florida has been taken care of and Michigan has been taken care of.” When further pressed on Florida’s success rate, Trump responds: “They’re very aggressive in trying to get things.” Trump lashes out at PBS NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor when asked about his statement on Sean Hannity’s show that some governors don’t need the equipment they’re requesting. “Why don’t you people ask ... why don’t you act a little more positive? It’s always trying to getcha’. Getcha’, getcha’. That’s why you used to work for the Times and now you work for somebody else. Look, let me tell you something: Be nice. Don’t be threatening. Be nice.” He adds: “Just so you know: you, me, everybody, we’re all on the same team.” Fact check Richard Luscombe To illustrate his allegation that he inherited a “broken” system of medical testing, Trump wheeled out a familiar – but false – tale about a general claiming in the president’s first week in office that the US military had no ammunition. “I’ll never forget the day when a general came and said, ‘Sir’ – my first week in office – ‘we have no ammunition.’ That was the military and we’ve now rebuilt our military… you wouldn’t believe how much ammunition [we have now],” Trump said. The Washington Post gave the story three Pinocchios when it fact-checked the claim in October 2019. The Post found that over time and repeated tellings, the president exaggerated the story from “low ammunition” to “no ammunition”. It also found that although there had been concern among military leadership that stockpiles of certain munitions had been running low, US officials were taking steps to address the situation before Trump took office. “When you hear that 2.2 million people could have died if we didn’t go through all of this, and now the number will be much lower number,” Trump says. “Hopefully it’s going to be the numbers that were talking about.” He adds: “I don’t want approval ratings from this. I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had and we didn’t have death. We didn’t have this horrible scourge, this plague, call it whatever you want: the virus. But we’re working very hard, that’s all I know. I see things, I see numbers, they don’t matter to me. What matters to me is that we have a victory over this thing as soon as possible.” Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the American government, says he believes the mitigation and social distancing efforts are “having an effect”. “It’s very difficult to quantitate it because you have two dynamic things going on at the same time,” he says. “You have the virus going up and you have the mitigation trying to push it down. But the decision to extend this mitigation process until the end of April was a wise and prudent decision.” Trump begins to take questions and is immediately asked about his suggestion that New York hospitals have made inappropriate use of their masks. “I want the people of New York to check – Governor Cuomo, Mayor De Blasio – that when a hospital that’s getting 10,000 masks goes to 300,000 masks in a rapid period, I would like to check that. I hear stories like that all the time. We’re delivering millions and millions of products and all we hear is: ‘Can we get some more?’ I heard that from one of the great companies of the world at doing this.” He adds: “I think people should check that because there’s something going on. I don’t think it’s hoarding, I think it’s maybe worse than hoarding. Check it out, check it out. I don’t know, I think that’s something for others to figure out.” A serious accusation but thin on specifics.