Evening Summary Thanks everyone for following along on another grim day, as the death toll in the US exceeded 55,000. Here’s a rundown of the day’s biggest news: Donald Trump touted a plan to increase testing at a White House briefing featuring chief executives from medical testing firms, pharmacies, and major grocers such as Kroger and Walmart. Trump also continued to blame China for the pandemic and suggested his administration was investigating what had happened. And the president refused to take responsibility for people who acted upon his bizarre and unsafe suggestion last Thursday that injecting disinfectant could help patients with Covid-19. No one should ingest or inject disinfectant; it is very unsafe and could kill you. A number of US states announced plans to reopen businesses despite concern from state officials and public health experts that they need to ramp up their testing capacity before it’s safe to ease restrictions. Ohio and Texas are among the states that outlined plans to reopen on Monday. New York state cancelled its Democratic primary, sparking outrage among supporters of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders campaign said the state should not get to send a delegation to the convention. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the state’s death toll was in decline. He will extend the stay-at-home order for some parts of the state, while allowing others to start easing restrictions on May 15. Our global liveblog for coronavirus updates is live here: Nursing homes have been hit hard by coronavirus across California, my colleague Sam Levin reports. In Los Angeles county, nursing home residents have accounted for more than 30% of Covid-19 deaths and 72% in the city of Long Beach. At one Central Valley facility, nearly all 167 residents and staff tested positive, and at a home in Riverside, nearly 100 residents were evacuated after staff failed to show up due to an outbreak. The Gateway center is now under criminal investigation. Behind the staggering numbers, advocates say, is a poorly regulated industry with a long history of chronic understaffing, inadequate infection control, a lack of critical equipment and weak labor standards. Experts and attorneys say the public health catastrophe was preventable, and that the botched response of some nursing homes constitutes criminal neglect. Trump continued to blame of China for the pandemic during today’s briefing. At one point, while riffing on “so much unnecessary death,” he appeared to suggest that China could have stopped the outbreak: “It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped faster but someone a long time ago decided not to do it that way.” He later said that his administration was conducting “serious investigations” into what happened with China. “We’re doing very serious investigations ... We are not happy with China,” Trump said. “We believe it could have been stopped at the source. It could have been stopped quickly and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world.” As Donald Trump speaks at the White House, the Daily Beast reports that Diamond and Silk, prominent African American supporters of the president, have lost their slot at Fox News due to their “bonkers coronavirus claims”. There’s no official confirmation that the “MAGA vlogging superstars” will no longer appear on Fox Nation, Fox News’ streaming service, but the Beast reports: The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast. Among such conspiracy theories and disinformation spread by Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson: the number of US coronavirus deaths has been inflated to make Trump look bad the disease was “man-made” and “engineered” that people should expose themselves to the virus by breaking lockdown that Bill Gates wants to develop vaccines in order to practice population control that 5G technology might be being used to infect people and fill up hospitals No word from Diamond and Silk either, though their Twitter account has been active all day. Trump has been cross with Fox News on Twitter recently, so you’d think the Beast report might provoke presidential comment before long… Debate over Fox News’ role in spreading disinformation about Covid-19 has become a prominent part of media coverage of the outbreak. Here’s David Smith’s look at the network’s close relationship with the Trump administration, from earlier this month. 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Fact check: Testing Trump announced at the White House on 27 April overall the US has now administered more than 5.4m coronavirus tests, which is approximately the same as the figure according to the Covid Tracking Project. From a very slow start, the US, which was previously testing at a rate lower than many other countries, has gradually ramped up. With a population of 329 million, 5.4m tests equates to one test for every 61 people. On 31 March, as the number of cases and deaths was rising fast, the US had conducted just over a million tests, or one for every 301 Americans. The briefing has ended. Fact check: Ventilator shortages Trump has at intervals questioned some state governors’ assertions that they face shortages of medical equipment and are likely to run out of ventilators, or expressed skepticism at numbers being stated, especially by New York leaders. It is true that some states, so far, have ended up with more ventilators than they originally projected they would need. California has loaned 500 ventilators to states like New York. California hospitals managed to increase their stock from 7,500 machines to more than 11,000, according to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. “That has put less strain and pressure on the state’s effort to procure additional ventilators,” Newsom said. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a national shortage. The US has roughly 173,000 ventilators, according to the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. Experts from Harvard Medical School predict that the US could end up needing 31 times that number to treat coronavirus patients. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine published on Wednesday 25 March categorically concluded that the US does not have enough ventilators to treat patients with Covid-19 in the coming months. The authors, American public health experts, wrote: “There is a broad range of estimates of the number of ventilators we will need to care for U.S. patients with Covid-19, from several hundred thousand to as many as a million. The estimates vary depending on the number, speed, and severity of infections, of course, but even the availability of testing affects the number of ventilators needed.... current estimates of the number of ventilators in the United States range from 60,000 to 160,000, depending on whether those that have only partial functionality are included. The national strategic reserve of ventilators is small and far from sufficient for the projected gap. No matter which estimate we use, there are not enough ventilators for patients with Covid-19 in the upcoming months.” Trump was asked whether he has any information about Kim Jong Un’s health, which has been the subject of rumors and speculation in recent days. He says: “I can’t tell you exactly. Yes, I do have a very good idea but I can’t talk about it now.” The vice president appears to be arguing that the administration actually met its goals because millions of test kits were distributed, even though they were not given and processed. That is quite an argument. We’re hearing a lot about very large numbers of tests that will be done during the month of May. But it’s worth remembering that we have heard big promises in the past about testing, such as the big promises of drive-through testing run by Google, that have yet to materialize. Asked if he takes any responsibility for reports of people ingesting disinfectant after his own remarks, Trump says: “No, I don’t.” Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan (who’s also chairman of the National Governors Association) said yesterday that his state’s health officials have received “hundreds” of inquiries about the safety of ingesting cleaning products after Trump last week raised the idea, saying internal use of disinfectant could be looked into as a possible treatment for the coronavirus. We’ve moved on to questions from the press. A reporter asks why the HHS secretary, Alex Azar, hasn’t been fired. Trump says it’s an unfair question and attacks Democratic politicians. Brett Giroir, the HHS assistant secretary, is now discussing an eight-part plan for testing. Apparently we are on step eight. Trump spoke again about testing, and has introduced Dr Birx to discuss a “blueprint” for states to expand testing. We also heard from Krogers, Walmart, and Rite-Aid. Now we’re back to the president.