The casino company Las Vegas Sands announced Tuesday it will close its Venetian and Palazzo resorts “out of an abundance of caution” until at least April 1.  

The company will continue to pay workers and does not plan any layoffs or furloughs. It also donated $250,000 to several local community organizations.

Century Casinos announced it closed its Colorado locations beginning Tuesday morning through March 17  to comply with a quarantine imposed by the Governor.

The Senate will move as quickly as possible to pass the House’s bill to stimulate the economy in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.

The Kentucky Republican said the goal was to “reassure the people around the country that we can operate on a bicameral bipartisan basis,” even if some of his fellow Republicans objected to the bill’s details.

“My counsel is to gag and vote for it anyway,” McConnell said he told his colleagues. “We’re able to rise above our normal partisanship and many times our normal positions, because these are not ordinary times. This is not an ordinary time,” he said.

The White House told Senate Republicans that Americans could see cash payments in late April, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said after the meeting the bill could cost more than $1 trillion.

The spread of the coronavirus through a Seattle-area nursing home seemed to underscore a key point about the disease: Older and sicker individuals are most at risk.

And while it is true that nursing home residents are particularly vulnerable to serious complications from the illness, younger and middle-age adults, those in their 30s, 40s and 50s, are far from immune from catching the virus.

Read more here. 

All Macy’s stores will temporarily close by the end of business on Tuesday through March 31 in response to the coronavirus outbreak, the company announced in a press release.  

The temporary store closures include all Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Bluemercury, Macy’s Backstage, Bloomingdales the Outlet and Market by Macy’s stores. The company’s ecommerce sites will remain open and impacted workers will receive benefits and compensation. 

Macy’s joins dozens of retailers including Nike, Nordstrom and PVH Corp that have announced they will temporarily close their stores in response to the outbreak.

Efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus — such as travel restrictions and closures of business and schools — won't result in lower case counts any time soon, experts said Tuesday. But social distancing measures are expected to help in the long term.

"Any change that we make now is not going to show up in the data for probably seven to 10 days," Caitlin Rivers, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said during a webcast Tuesday.

That's because the virus's incubation period is around five days. That's the time from when a person gets infected until symptoms show up. Rivers said it would take a few additional days for that person to go to the doctor and get tested.

"We need to maintain vigilance," she added.

The head of one of the biggest internet infrastructure companies said his company has seen a surge in traffic as people work from home — but consumers should not worry.

Matthew Prince, CEO of internet company CloudFlare, said usage in Seattle is up 40 percent in the last week.  

"Want to make sure it’s clear: this is not a risk to the functioning of the Internet," Prince said in an email. "There is increased usage, but the internet was designed to accommodate spikes like these. It’s not dissimilar levels of traffic to what we’d see during the Super Bowl or World Cup."

"The Internet was literally designed to be a network robust enough to survive a nuclear war," he added. "It is holding up exactly as designed during the additional load caused by people working from home during the Coronavirus emergency."

It's abundantly clear that governors and mayors, not the federal government, have the broadest quarantine and isolation authority. That's because the constitution leaves that kind of police power in the hands of the states.

Longstanding federal laws, and rules put in place at the end of the Obama administration, give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to quarantine people to stop disease outbreaks. The beefed up rules were imposed after the experience of the outbreaks of Ebola and MERS six years ago.

Broadly speaking, the CDC has the power to detain people suspected of having a communicable disease, without getting approval from state and local officials. It comes under the public health laws that allow the federal government to impose restrictions either on people coming into the country or traveling from one state to another.

However, that authority is rarely used, and when it has been invoked, it was directed at individuals and small groups.

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The City That Never Sleeps could be shutting down in 48 hours.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday that he was considering whether to impose a shelter in place order which would essentially require residents to stay in their homes and keep outside social contact to a minimum to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the nation's largest city.

"Be prepared right now for the possibility of a shelter in place order," de Blasio. "The decision will be made in the next 48 hours."

If imposed, the New York City order would be following the lead of several counties in the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Oakland, which are now prohibiting anyone from leaving their homes "except for essential needs."

Read the full story here.