A bipartisan group of senators is proposing a bill to ban the U.S. from buying animals from the Chinese "wet markets" that have been blamed for outbreaks including the current coronavirus crisis.

The government has previously used animals — including cats and dogs — purchased at those markets in gruesome experiments at a federal lab in Maryland.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said the purchases effectively subsidized the markets, which are believed to be the source of the current crisis as well as the 2002 SARS outbreak. "As Iowans, and all Americans, continue to battle COVID-19, we need to do all we can to ensure something like this never happens again. That includes preventing any more American tax dollars from going to unregulated 'wet markets' in China," Ernst said.

The bill proposed by Ernst and Sens. Mike Braun, R-Ind., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., would ban agencies and government grantees and contractors from spending money at the markets.

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Michael Bloomberg has volunteered to help a lead massive regional effort to test and trace the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus in the tri-state region of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.

Tracing the contacts of people found to be infected with the coronavirus — a public health strategy that's been widely credited for limiting its spread in South Korea — will be done across city, county and state lines around New York, Cuomo said.

"This entire operation has never been done before, so it's intimidating. You've never heard the words testing, tracing, isolate before," Cuomo said. "But I say, 'So what? Who cares that you've never done it?' That's really irrelevant. It's what we have to do now."

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A bipartisan group of five senators have written to the heads of the U.S. government's primary offensive and defensive cybersecurity agencies, asking for assurances that hackers won't cripple health care facilities during the coronavirus pandemic.

"We write to raise our profound concerns that our country’s healthcare, public health, and research sectors are facing an unprecedented and perilous campaign of sophisticated hacking operations from state and criminal actors amid the coronavirus pandemic," the letter states. 

The letter was sent to CISA, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity arm, and U.S. Cyber Command, which conducts offensive cyber operations on behalf of the U.S. military. CISA has already released some specific measures that IT staff can use to guard against hackers, like a list of about 2,500 coronavirus-themed domains that are likely malicious or scams. U.S. Cyber Command rarely makes much publicly known about its operations, but is tasked with defending critical infrastructure, which includes health care systems.

Last week, the State Department issued a "zero tolerance" warning against anyone attempting to hack allies' healthcare networks.

More than 470 New York state residents were reported dead from COVID-19 in the past day, officials said Wednesday, bringing the state's death toll beyond 15,000. 

Of the 474 confirmed fatalities in the past 24 hours, 446 were at hospitals and 28 at nursing homes,  Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at his daily briefing on coronavirus.

The confirmed death toll in New York state now stands at 15,302. That total does not included  presumptive deaths.

 "At least it isn’t going up anymore and it seems to be on a gentle decline," Cuomo said.

MIAMI — Sergio Caon was working in aviation maintenance when he was furloughed. His wife was let go from her job at a banquet hall. Now, they're scraping by and eating less to feed their daughter. Caon says sometimes he feels like eating a snack, but he doesn't.

"We are eating less," he said, speaking from inside his car as he waited at a food distribution event in Doral organized by Farm Share, which partners with other groups to distribute food throughout Florida.

Over 65 percent of Latinos across the country are having difficulty buying or finding necessities such as food and medicine, according to a recent survey by the polling firm Latino Decisions.

In Florida, where unemployment claims are processed slower than anywhere else in the country, workers have less to fall back on. The state has only paid six percent of over 1.6 million claimants, according to the online dashboard of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

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WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced on a call with party leadership Wednesday morning that the House would no longer consider remote voting by proxy this week, as initially planned.

Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., are instead creating a bipartisan group of lawmakers to review remote voting and how they can reopen the House.

Democrats had proposed a historic rules change earlier in the week that would have allowed for members to designate another member to vote for them on the House floor, allowing lawmakers to go on record without having to leave their districts amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The resolution would also have allowed for virtual committee proceedings and would have created a study to examine the feasibility of remote participation on the House floor.

Republicans, however, were strongly opposed to the resolution and made clear that they were prepared to put up a fight if Democrats moved ahead with the vote this week.

The Tooth Fairy has some wiggle room when it comes to social distancing, according to COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fauci shared the fact while chatting with a 7-year-old girl named Ava on Will Smith's new Snapchat series "Will From Home."

"When your tooth (falls) out, you stick it under the pillow, and I'll guarantee you that that Tooth Fairy is not going to get infected and is not going to get sick," Fauci explained.

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The coronavirus could kill 100,000 more Americans than current projections show if its spread in jails is not curbed by freeing more inmates, according to a new model released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union and academic research partners.

The group is advocating for a substantial reduction in jail populations across the country following reports of increasing rates of COVID-19 among inmates, and believes that recent models being used by the federal government that show fewer than 100,000 U.S. fatalities don't accurately account for the spread of the virus in jails.

"We are likely facing massive loss of life — both in jails and in communities around the country — if dramatic steps aren't taken to reduce the incarcerated population in this country," Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU's Justice Division, said in a statement.

The ACLU's model, done in partnership with university researchers from Washington state, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, also found that states that have begun to reduce jail populations are "quantifiably saving lives."

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Tyson Foods suspended operations Wednesday at an Iowa plant that is critical to the nation's pork supply but had been devastated by a growing coronavirus outbreak.

The company said that the indefinite closure of the Waterloo, Iowa, pork plant would deny a vital market to hog farmers and further disrupt the nation's meat supply. Tyson had kept the facility, its largest pork plant, open in recent days over the objections of the mayor and local elected officials.

More than 180 infections had been linked to the plant earlier this week and officials expect that number to dramatically rise. The company said that mass testing of its 2,800 workers would begin later this week.

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