WATCH LIVE at 5 p.m. Eastern: Members of the Coronavirus Task Force are holding a briefing – Watch it in the player above.
Health officials across the globe were scrambling to contain the global coronavirus outbreak Friday and grasping to better understand it, as the number of confirmed cases worldwide continued to climb.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins, there have been 101,583 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. A total of 55,863 people have recovered, and 3,460 people have died.
There have been 14 deaths in the United States – 13 in Washington state and one in California, according to Johns Hopkins.
President Trump signed an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill Friday to help fund work on a vaccine, and to help the United States catch up to other nations with testing.
The World Health Organization issued a plea Thursday for every country to pull out “all the stops” to test large numbers of people, and to aggressively control outbreaks where they do pop up.
The Trump administration has faced criticism over the availability of test kits in the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has said any American would be able to get tested for the disease — but he acknowledged Thursday, as the government raced to distribute tests, that the capacity wasn’t there yet.
