Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

2002 for Wednesday, April 29. In today's news, President Trump orders meat plants to stay open, even as more become

hot spots.

A former reporter in China now shapes Trump's hardline stance toward Beijing.

And West Point cadets are being forced to fly back to campus

so they can watch Trump give a speech.

It's a public health nightmare. But first the big idea. The United States now has

more than 1 million confirmed coronavirus infections, about a third of known cases worldwide.

More than 58,000 of our fellow Americans have succumbed to this contagion.

As results from antibody tests have started to trickle in,

they bolster the consensus among disease experts

that this virus is significantly more lethal than

seasonal flu and has seated the most disruptive pandemic in the past century.

The new serological data, which is provisional, suggests that coronavirus infections greatly

outnumber confirmed COVID-19 cases, potentially by a factor of 10 or more.

Many people experience mild symptoms or none at all,

and they never get the standard diagnostic test with a swab up the nose,

so they're missed in the official case counts. Higher

infection rates mean lower lethality risk on average, but the corollary is that

this is a very contagious disease capable of being spread by people who

were asymptomatic, a challenge for communities hoping to end their shutdowns.

The crude case fatality rates, covering people who have a diagnosis, have been about 6% globally, as well as in the United States.

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