Live updates: Italy surpasses China in coronavirus infections as global total reaches 600,000; Trump calls former troops to active duty for pandemic response – The Washington Post

Following several days of back-and-forth criticism with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), President Trump granted her request for a disaster declaration, as well as one for Massachusetts, according to White House statements released Saturday.

Whitmer made the request for a federal major disaster declaration on Thursday, stating “we’re still not getting what we need from the federal government.”

“With the exception of the gloves, that allotment is barely enough to cover one shift at that hospital,” Whitmer said.

The request would help the state secure assistance for various programs, including for meals and housing, and capacity-boosting measures for state hospitals taking coronavirus patients.

Hours after Whitmer’s Thursday request, Trump lobbed insults during a Fox News interview. He implied she didn’t understand the situation facing her state and complained “all she does is sit there and blame the federal government.”

In remarks Thursday and Friday, Trump repeatedly refused to refer to Whitmer by name. On Fox he referred to her as “the young, a woman governor, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan,” repeating a version of it during a briefing only identifying her as “the woman from Michigan.”

The president’s criticisms come amid his own admission that his response to different state requesting disaster relief are tied to his personal feelings — usually grievances. During Friday’s briefing he revealed he told Vice President Pence, who leads the White House’s coronavirus task force, not to call Gov. Jay Inslee (D) of Washington or Whitmer despite both states facing among the highest rates of the virus; both governor’s have criticized the federal government’s handling of the crisis.

Whitmer announced Friday that the state was already receiving supplies from the strategic national stockpile.

The statement from the White House on the declaration’s approval noted that Trump granted the declaration Friday and that it included crisis counseling support for first responders.

LONDON — British sports commentators are among those who have suddenly found themselves out of a job as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. No sporting events, no work.

But luckily for their fans on social media, some have deployed their broadcasting skills to everyday events that may seem mundane in less capable hands. Things like feeding the dogs or crossing the street or even grocery shopping are all potential targets for bored broadcasters.

Andrew Cotter, whose velvety voice will be recognizable to fans of Wimbledon and other big sporting events, on Friday was lighting up social media with video of his Labrador dogs Olive and Mabel. The clip, viewed over 5 million times, shows Olive devouring her food — “focused and relentless, tasting absolutely nothing” — more quickly than Mabel, who seemed to have a problem with her bowl and presumably didn’t know it was a race anyway.

Nick Heath, a sports commentator based in South London, is similarly out of work. In his Twitter profile, he describes himself as “freelance so currently staring at an empty sport/work diary.” He normally covers rugby, but these days he’s posting clips of Londoners crossing the street, pushing buggies and, most recently, yes, “pigeon dressage.”

In one clip, he films “two lonely blokes in a park” kicking a soccer ball. He then spots “a few runners in the distance, not keeping enough distance.”

In another, he’s at a grocery store, where there are tricky decisions to be made, especially with “so many hummuses in the modern game.”

A centenarian from northern Italy has reportedly been released from a hospital after a battle with covid-19.

The man, identified as “Mr. P,” was admitted to the hospital last week and released on Thursday, Gloria Lisi, the deputy mayor of the city of Rimini, told local media.

Mr. P was born in 1919 during the historic flu pandemic, which claimed between 30 million and 50 million lives around the world.

“He has seen everything: war, hunger, pain, progress, crisis and resurrections,” Lisi said, according to the Local, an English-language news outlet in Italy. “And then at the age of over 100 years, fate brought him this new challenge, invisible and terrible at the same time.”

His recovery came at a moment when Italy could use good news.

The country now has more confirmed cases than China, according to a database from Johns Hopkins University tracking worldwide infections.

As of Saturday morning, Italy had nearly 86,500 confirmed coronavirus cases, second only to the United States, which has 104,000.

The country recently cheered the recovery of a 95-year-old woman in Modena — then the oldest patient in Italy to recover.

Lisi called Mr. P’s story, “extraordinary.”

“Mr. P made it. The family brought him home yesterday evening,” she said. “To teach us that even at 101 years the future is not written.”

When Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called President Trump last Sunday, he delivered a blunt message: If you reopen the nation’s economy too early against the advice of public-health experts, you will own the deaths from the novel coronavirus that follow.

Graham’s private plea, which some of Trump’s advisers have echoed to the president, illustrates the political calculations underway inside the leadership ranks of the Republican Party as the president balances dual crises as he seeks reelection: the pandemic that is claiming lives and overburdening hospitals and the resulting economic meltdown that already has left millions jobless, with many facing financial ruin.

Read more here.

The editor of the Lancet medical journal on Saturday slammed the British government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying its strategy had “failed.”

The criticism followed an extraordinary day in British politics: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Friday announced they had tested positive for coronavirus. England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, who often appears next to the prime minister at news conferences, said that who was also experiencing symptoms of a covid-19 infection.

Richard Horton, the Lancet’s editor in chief, wrote that the government’s “Contain — Delay — Mitigate — Research strategy failed. It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow the World Health Organization’s advice to ‘test, test, test’ every suspected case. They didn’t isolate and quarantine. They didn’t contact trace. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque.”

The British government has faced a barrage of criticism for what some say was, at least initially, a laissez-faire approach to the outbreak — its schools, pubs and restaurants remained open until last week, later than many European countries.

Horton has said the government wasted valuable time. Earlier this week, he told a parliamentary select committee — via video — that the government ignored the early warning signs coming out of China at the beginning of the year. The Lancet published three papers in January, which Horton said “set out the severity of Covid-19.”

Britain, he said, missed the month of February to prepare. “We could have used the month of February based on what we knew in January,” he said.

ISTANBUL — Iran’s Health Ministry said Saturday that 139 people had died of coronavirus-related symptoms since Friday and that officials had recorded 3,076 new infections, as President Hassan Rouhani said the government was considering harsher measures against infected people who refused to self-quarantine.

Such people were “accomplices” to the virus, he said during a televised speech, adding that some of Iran’s provinces were still reporting “upward trends” in infections and fatalities.

Iran has been among the worst-hit countries in the world during the pandemic, with more than 35,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and 2,517 deaths, according to the latest Health Ministry figures. The high rate of infection has unnerved Iran’s neighbors and forced Tehran to take extraordinary measures — including furloughing prisoners — to stem the outbreak.

There have also been growing calls for the Trump administration to ease sanctions on Iran during the pandemic, including from countries like Pakistan and some U.S. lawmakers.

As the crisis grows, hundreds of people in Iran have died after ingesting methanol, apparently in the mistaken belief it protects against the virus, the Associated Press reported on Friday.

Iranian media reports said that nearly 300 people had been killed after ingesting methanol, but a doctor advising Iran’s health ministry who spoke to the AP said the number was higher, with as many as 480 people killed.

“Other countries have only one problem, which is the new coronavirus pandemic. But we are fighting on two fronts here,” Hossein Hassanian, the Health Ministry adviser, told the AP.

MANILA — Doctors and critics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte are up in arms over his government’s call to pay volunteer medical professionals helping to contain coronavirus a daily wage of less than $10.

The amount — offered across the board to volunteer doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, medical professionals and nonmedical professionals — is less than minimum wage and has been described by some as “a pittance.”

Food and accommodation would be provided, according to the government volunteer portal. If a health-care worker catches the virus, they are entitled to compensation worth almost $2,000. If they die on the job, their family will receive PhP 1 million (more than $19,600).

In the Philippines’ overcrowded hospitals, health workers are often overworked and underpaid, and many turn to life abroad. The country is one of the top exporters of nurses.

Duterte’s government is also facing criticism on other fronts for its response to the pandemic, such as alleged prioritized testing for politicians and the lack of protective gear for front-line responders. When public transportation was suspended last week, health-care workers across Metro Manila were stranded.

As of Thursday, at least nine doctors had reportedly died as a result of coronavirus. The Philippines now has over 1,000 cases and 68 deaths.

One radiologist, Dr. JK Galvez Tan, said in a viral Facebook post that the outrage surrounding the low wages is not solely about the money itself — but how it is used. Some doctors, he added, would have even worked for free.

“If this is indeed all [the Health Department] can give, I want them to show us, point by point, peso by peso, why this is all they can afford,” Tan said. “We know there is money. We do not know where it is going.”

MADRID — Spain suffered its largest single-day death count because of the coronavirus on Saturday, recording 832 fatalities in a 24-hour stretch.

That same day also brought about 8,289 new confirmed cases of the virus. Spain has now had more than 72,000 confirmed cases and nearly 5,700 deaths.

While the Health Ministry confirmed that 12,285 people have been released from the hospital, Spanish health professionals say the numbers are actually lower, given the lack of testing. The ministry’s figures only include cases that have been confirmed via testing.

Spain’s transportation ministry announced Saturday that it had received 1.2 million protective masks and would distribute between medical professionals and security forces.

The news came as the Spanish military sent an A400M military plane, with a storage capacity of 37 tons, to China to pick up badly needed supplies that Spain purchased earlier in the week.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday warned that an “explosive spread” of coronavirus infections was looming over the country and urged citizens to prepare for a “long-term battle.”

In an evening news conference, Abe said cases of unknown origin were spiking, especially in the urban hubs of Tokyo and Osaka, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

“An uncontrollable chain of infection could lead to explosive spread somewhere,” he said.

To shepherd the Japanese economy through the pandemic, Abe pledged to put together an emergency spending package bigger than the stimulus plan Japan approved after the 2008 financial crisis, Japan Today reported. He also called for heightened vigilance from the public as Japan works to stave off a surge of infections that could devastate the country’s large elderly population.

For now, Abe said he will hold off on declaring a state of emergency.

Abe’s remarks came after Japan tallied a record increase of 123 coronavirus infections in a single day, 60 of which emerged in Tokyo. Testing has lagged in the country, which has reported about 1,500 confirmed cases and at least 49 deaths.

Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike issued a similarly dire warning earlier in the week when cases began to spike, saying the city was facing an “important phase in preventing an explosive rise in the number of infections,” according to Japan’s public broadcaster NHK.

Koike on Friday called on residents to act responsibly and avoid “nonessential” outings. But even as cases have climbed, officials have resisted ordering the broad public lockdowns akin to those in Europe and the United States that have shuttered tens of millions of people inside their homes.

LONDON — Ireland woke up to tighter restrictions on Saturday after the government imposed new curbs on movement in a bid to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said that the public should stay at home for the next two weeks in almost all circumstances.

“These are radical actions aimed at saving as many people’s lives as possible,” he said in a televised address on Friday.

The public was told that, as of this weekend, they should stay at home unless traveling for work that was deemed essential, shopping for food, attending medical appointments, providing care for family members, or “brief, individual” exercise that should take place within a 2-kilometer radius.

The prime minister also added that residents over the age of 70, and those deemed at risk, should stay “cocooned” until April 12. Ireland closed its schools, pubs and bars earlier in the month, just days before St. Patrick’s Day. As of early Saturday, there are 2,121 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Ireland and 22 reported deaths.

At the end of one of its news broadcasts on Friday, the Irish state broadcaster RTE featured one of Ireland’s best known poets, Derek Mahon, reading his poem, “Everything is Going To Be All Right.”

Two weeks ago, President Trump promised a network of drive-through covid-19 testing sites across the country where people could be tested “very safely, quickly and conveniently.” In a Rose Garden news conference, chief executives of Target, Walgreens, Walmart and CVS said they would work with the government to provide space in store parking lots.

While the four retailers have a combined 26,400 U.S. stores, this vision of a proliferation of coronavirus testing sites has yet to materialize. Walgreens and CVS have opened one site each, while Walmart last weekend opened two drive-through testing locations near Chicago. Target hasn’t opened any. Rite Aid, which joined the effort later, has opened one drive-through facility in Philadelphia.

Like much of the nation’s coronavirus response, the burden of organizing and operating these testing sites has fallen to state and local governments. On occasion, they’ve enlisted the help of private industry. But an array of logistical challenges, ranging from a shortage of testing supplies to funding, has meant only a small fraction of Americans can get diagnosed for covid-19 in a way that is routine in South Korea and elsewhere.

“We have to change how we are approaching this, or we will just hope that people will stay isolated or pay attention,” said Garrett Contreras, the fire chief in the Bay Area city of Hayward, who managed to launch a testing site Monday after he personally appealed to scores of pharmaceutical companies to provide equipment. “I mean, how did some knucklehead fire chief from Hayward find a lab? It’s just wrong.”

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations, said the administration’s initial drive-through testing ambitions had to be scaled back because of the lack of tests nationwide. Another initial challenge was trying to minimize long lines at the drive-through testing sites, this official added, so the sites were encouraged to use their own discretion to filter individuals, such as limiting tests only to first responders and medical professionals.

Read more here.

MedFetUK, a British online company known for selling “medical fetish, kink and role-play” products, said it had donated its entire stock of disposable medical scrubs to one of the country’s hard-hit hospitals in response to the novel coronavirus.

The donation was made Friday after the company was contacted by representatives of Britain’s National Health Service from “all over the country, trying to source basic protective equipment and clothing,” the company wrote on Twitter.

Medical workers around the world fighting the coronavirus pandemic have complained about a lack of protective gear. It’s no different in Britain, which moved slower than the rest of Europe in taking strict measures to halt the spread of the virus and where nurses have been forced to wear garbage bags to stave off infection.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and British Health Secretary Matt Hancock both said Friday they had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The MedFet donation amounted to just a few sets of scrubs because “we don’t carry large stocks,” the company said, adding that “a decade of chronic underfunding and cuts” had “left the NHS barely able to cope under normal circumstances.”

“When we, a tiny company set up to serve a small section of the kink community, find ourselves being sought out as a last-resort supplier to our National Health Service in a time of crisis, something is seriously wrong,” the company wrote. “In fact, it’s scandalous.”

NEW DELHI — The workers set out on foot in the wee hours of the morning for villages hundreds of miles away, walking along the roads they helped build and past apartment towers they helped raise.

Chandra Mohan, a 24-year-old plumber in a suburb of India’s capital, left at 3 a.m. on Friday. By midmorning, he had walked 28 miles, one bag on his back and another slung across his chest. He still had more than 600 miles to go to reach his home in the state of Bihar.

Mohan is one of thousands of people leaving India’s largest cities one footstep at a time, fleeing a pandemic in a historic exodus. There are no planes, no trains, no interstate buses and no taxis. So Mohan walked east with 17 other young men, all laborers like him. They were unsure of their route or where they would sleep or how they would eat, but one thing was certain: Without work, they cannot survive in the city.

“We’re doomed,” Mohan said bitterly. “If we don’t die of the disease, we’ll die of hunger.”

India has begun a 21-day nationwide lockdown — the biggest in the world — in a desperate bid to stop the coronavirus from spreading out of control in this densely populated nation of 1.3 billion people. There are more than 700 confirmed cases in India, a number that is rising rapidly. Nonessential businesses are shut, state borders are closed to regular traffic, and people have been asked to stay in their homes except to buy food or medicine.

Read more here.

Italy has more confirmed coronavirus cases than China, according to a database from Johns Hopkins University tracking worldwide infections.

As of Saturday morning, the country had nearly 86,500 covid-19 cases, passing China, which had roughly 82,000, according to the database.

Italy now has the second-most cases of any country, after the United States, which has more than 104,000.

The rapid spread of the virus has fallen especially hard on Italy, where nearly a quarter of the population is over age 65, the demographic most vulnerable to severe infection.

A nationwide lockdown took effect in mid-March. Hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients for weeks, particularly in the Italy’s northern provinces. Crucial equipment such as respirators and intensive care beds are in short supply, though the country has aggressively tested people for the disease, which could account in part for the soaring number of cases.

To date, more than 9,000 Italians have died in the pandemic. On Friday, Italian health officials reported 919 deaths from covid-19, the largest single-day toll reported by any country.

South Korea marked a new milestone on Saturday, as more coronavirus patients, 4,811 total, have been discharged than those currently undergoing treatment, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 4,500 people still remain in isolation and are undergoing treatment.

Cases were first confirmed in South Korea on Jan. 20, and spiked dramatically in the following months. A huge cluster was linked to a religious sect in Daegu, who got sick in February. But public health experts there say that the country has now managed to slow the tide, and achieve a 50 percent recovery rate — a significant achievement.

South Korea has been routinely held up as one of the model countries for responding to the coronavirus outbreak, and has been praised for very aggressively testing suspected patients at one of the highest rates in the world. Officials in Seoul are now preparing new guidelines to ease the megacity back into normalcy, a process that will be closely watched.

An emergency room doctor in Washington state said he was fired Friday after publicly criticizing his hospital’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ming Lin, who spent 17 years at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Wash., wrote in a late-night Facebook post that he had been terminated by his employer, the physician contractor TeamHealth.

Lin, whose termination was first reported by the Seattle Times, repeatedly decried coronavirus preparations at PeaceHealth in social media posts and interviews, saying the hospital had failed to protect patients and staff members from infection.

He said tests were taking too long and weren’t being administered to enough patients. Lin warned that protective equipment was running low and faulted the hospital for screening patients in a crowded waiting area when they could be screened outside. He urged the hospital to more regularly check staff for the virus.

“I feel so overwhelmed,” Lin told the Associated Press earlier this week. “We’re like a high school basketball team that’s about to play an NBA team. The storm is coming, and I don’t feel that we’re prepared.”

Lin said he was motivated to speak out by his experience working in the emergency room at a hospital near the World Trade Center on 9/11.

He seemed well aware that he was tempting fate by going public with his criticisms. On March 15, when he posted a letter to his hospital’s chief medical officer on Facebook, he wrote, “Hopefully I still have a job afterwards.” He said his supervisors instructed him to take down his social media posts, but he refused.

Lin told the Times he got a message on Friday saying, “Your shift has been covered.” His supervisor later told him over the phone he’d been terminated, according to the newspaper.

TeamHealth didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment early Saturday. The hospital told the Times last week that it was “actively preparing” for a surge in coronavirus infections and was planning to expand screening.

After two more sailors tested positive for the novel coronavirus — unrelated to the first positive case on the base announced Thursday — the U.S. Navy has ordered a lockdown of its Yokosuka base, home of the Seventh Fleet and the most strategically important naval base in the Pacific.

“The origin of these two cases has not been identified,” Yokosuka Capt. Rich Jarrett said in the statement posted on Facebook. Residents, he said, should remain at their quarters “to the maximum extent possible.”

In an update Saturday morning, the commander of fleet activities posted on Facebook that “this is not a time to do lawn maintenance, take the dog for a long walk, or go for a run. Time outdoors should be for necessities only, and should be conducted as quickly as possible.”

The first sailor to test positive on the base was believed to have contracted the virus on a trip to the United States, and who returned to Japan on March 15. The sailor, who had been confined to a room, started exhibiting symptoms about 10 days later. He was placed in isolation at the Naval Hospital in Yokosuka. He was the first serviceman in Japan to test positive.

President Trump issued an order Friday night that permits the Pentagon to bring former U.S. troops and members of the National Guard and Reserve back to active duty to augment forces already involved in the U.S. military’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, senior American officials said.

Trump signed an executive order that allows Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper to order units and individual members “and certain Individual Ready Reserve” members, chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman said in a statement released just after midnight on Saturday morning. The Individual Ready Reserve comprises former active-duty and reserve service members, who are commonly considered out of the military and rarely recalled.

Hoffman, who could not be reached for comment early Saturday, said that decisions about which people may be activated are still being reviewed. The statement did not address whether anyone will be involuntarily recalled.

“Generally, these members will be persons in Headquarters units and persons with high demand medical capabilities whose call-up would not adversely affect their civilian communities,” Hoffman’s statement said.

Before relying on any National Guard Reserve forces, Esper and the Department of Health and Human Services will consult with state officials, Hoffman added. Governors have control of their own National Guard forces in most cases.

Read more here.

President Trump on Saturday denied an ABC News report saying he phoned former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez to ask for help responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

“More Fake News!” Trump wrote in a 12:40 a.m. tweet.

Earlier, ABC News’s John Santucci and Katherine Faulders reported that Trump sought input on the coronavirus response from Rodriguez and actress Jennifer Lopez, his fiancee.

Citing multiple anonymous sources, Santucci wrote that Rodriguez was one of many people called during a “marathon day of meetings earlier this week.”

Trump didn’t ask Rodriguez or Lopez to play an official role in response efforts, but wanted to hear the baseball commentator’s thoughts, according to Santucci and Faulders.

Before becoming president, Trump frequently mocked and criticized Rodriguez on Twitter over his use of performance-enhancing drugs. In 2015, while Trump was on the campaign trail, he and Rodriguez exchanged pleasantries at a charity event at Trump’s golf course in the Bronx, as the New York Daily News reported at the time.

In Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Thailand are facing devastating strain to their health care systems, as confirmed coronavirus cases surpassed 1,000 in both countries.

Indonesia reported its highest single-day jump of cases on Friday, with 87 fatalities in total — the highest number of deaths in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, one more person died on Saturday, bringing the total number of deaths to six among the over 1,200 positive cases.

Health-care experts warn though that these countries are not testing as aggressively, and that the number of cases are likely widely underreported. The same holds true for the Philippines, which has reported 54 deaths among its 803 confirmed cases. Malaysia has the highest number of infections in the region, at 2,161, and has 26 deaths.

The high ratio of deaths, medical experts say, is an indication that the caseload is probably much bigger than initially suspected.

Delta Air Lines announced Friday it would fly medical workers without charge to parts of the country where coronavirus infections are spreading rapidly.

Certain medical volunteers will be able to book free round-trip Delta flights to Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan, where they’ll be deployed by state and local authorities to work at hospitals hardest hit by the virus, according to the airline.

“We are witnessing the heroic efforts of our medical professionals around the world as they combat COVID-19, and we have deep gratitude for their selfless sacrifice,” Bill Lentsch, Delta’s chief customer experience officer, said in a statement. “Our hope is that offering free travel gives more of these professionals the ability to help in critical areas of the U.S.”

Volunteers will be vetted and approved by state authorities, according to Delta. The free flights will be available during the month of April.

Delta was among the corporate beneficiaries of the $2 trillion emergency spending package President Trump signed into law Friday. The legislation provides passenger airlines $25 billion in grants and $25 billion in loans.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) praised President Trump’s decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to force General Motors to manufacture hospital ventilators for coronavirus patients but declined to join the president in criticizing the company’s turnaround time on the devices.

“I applaud the president on his use of the Defense Production Act in his conversation about General Motors,” Cuomo said in a CNN interview Friday evening. “That gives him the muscle of the law to get companies to actually respond to the production of ventilators, which is exactly what we want.”

CNN host Erin Burnett asked Cuomo if he believed General Motors was “dragging their feet.”

“Dragging their feet suggests a pejorative,” Cuomo said. “When you use the Defense Production Act and you have the law on your side you can basically order a private company to do something, to manufacture a product. It’s an extreme measure no doubt, but this is an extreme time.”

He added: “From the president’s point of view, from what he said, General Motors was not delivering the product and not gearing up. And look, if a corporation is dealing with it’s normal time frame that suits them, that is one thing, but here the president is saying, ‘I need this product, and I need it fast.’ ”

“These ventilators are going to be a matter of life and death,” Cuomo said, “and whether they’re delivered in four weeks or six weeks or 10 weeks or 12 weeks, you’re talking tens of thousands of lives that will be relying on it.”

As covid-19 cases surge in New York and around the country, officials say hospitals are quickly running out of ventilators to treat patients with severe symptoms. The looming shortfalls are all but certain to force doctors to make painstaking life-or-death decisions about which patients they connect to the devices.

In invoking the Cold War-era law, Trump accused GM of “wasting time” and said that his actions would help save lives. But it’s not clear what, if anything, Trump’s order will do to speed up production. GM is already contracting with a ventilator manufacturer, Ventec Life Systems, and the first batch of the devices is expected to arrive in late April, as The Washington Post reported Friday.

GM said in a statement Friday that it had been working “around the clock for over a week to meet this urgent need.”

“Our commitment to build Ventec’s high-quality critical care ventilator, VOCSN, has never wavered,” the company said.