01:05

Our chief reporter writes:

We are now wrapping up our coverage of the day’s coronavirus news in the US and Donald Trump’s Rose Garden performance. You can keep reading the latest on coronavirus in the US and around the world in our global news blog. David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, will file a full report on the Trump extravaganza shortly.

Trump’s latest press briefing bore all the hallmarks we have become used to – misleading comments, exaggerations and ugly remarks directed at journalists trying to do their jobs including, again, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS and a representative of CNN.

An unidentified White House aide attempts to take the microphone from Yamiche Alcindor. Photograph: Stefani Reynolds/EPA

The main news line to emerge was that the president has bowed to the inevitable and accepted that his ambition of 12 April, Easter, as a date on which social distancing restrictions on Americans could start to be lifted was always a pipe dream.

The new date he gave was the end of April. Whether that sticks remains to be seen.

The president’s address was peppered with boasts – he compared “ratings” for his briefings to “Monday Night Football and the Batchelor finale” – and bizarre flights of fancy. Perhaps the strangest was his suggestion that hospitals in a coronavirus crisis city like New York were somehow stealing hundreds of thousands of surgical masks. He asked how the numbers of masks requested could shoot up from 10,000 to 300,000 overnight and said: “Are they going out the back door?”

According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, New York has recorded 965 of 2,433 coronavirus deaths in the US so far, and nearly 60,000 of close to 140,000 confirmed cases.

Coronavirus map of the US: latest cases state by state Read more

Trump also started invoking the figure of 2.2m possible deaths in America if nothing were done to mitigate the disaster – a figure drawn from modeling by scientists at Imperial College London earlier this month.

Trump pulled that statistic out of his bag of tricks to try to minimize the political fallout of an earlier statement from Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said that up to 200,000 Americans could die even when the benefits of social distancing are taken into account.

In Trump’s world, 2.2m is such a scary number it might put people off thinking that 200,000 is also pretty shocking. It might in turn give the impression that he is doing a great job, and not presiding over a historic failure of federal leadership.

Time will tell on that as well.