Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 50m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred forty-first day.
On this day in 1865, defeat at the Third Battle of Petersburg forces the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate government to abandon Richmond.
Recommended for reading in full —
and write Fact-checking President Trump’s marathon news conference:
“We inherited obsolete tests.”
There were no tests for the novel coronavirus, which only emerged in China late in 2019, so tests had to be developed specifically by countries starting in January. Trump appears to be referring to a system in place that relied on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take the lead in developing the tests. But a still-unspecified manufacturing problem caused the CDC to distribute flawed tests to state and local health departments. On top of that, having the CDC take the lead, rather than the private sector, was inappropriate for the task of testing potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
Two former Trump administration officials had warned on Jan. 28, in a Wall Street Journal article, that the CDC was not up to task and the private sector needed to be engaged. But the Trump administration waited another month before it fast-tracked the development of tests by private companies.
“I can only say that we are doing more than anybody in the world by far. We are testing highly accurate tests.”
Trump often makes this misleading claim about the level of testing in the United States. It is accurate when looking only at raw numbers. But the key indicator is tests per capita, which gives a read on the share of the population that has contracted the disease.
A crowdsourced tally provided by the Covid Tracking Project says the United States has tested 1.1 million people as of March 31. That represents about 1 in 297 people. Italy, for example, has a smaller population and a lower number of total tests, but it tested about three times as many people on a per capita basis: 1 in 133.
Bill Glauber reports Wisconsinites approve of government actions to stem coronavirus outbreak, new Marquette poll finds:
The big numbers: 86% said it was appropriate to close schools and businesses, and 51% strongly backed legislation directing cash payments to individuals, while 28% somewhat approved the measure.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was rated highly for his response to the crisis, with 76% approving of his handling of the issue, including a strong majority of Republicans.