By Gregory B. Hladky and Mark Pazniokas

Retailers, hair cutters, offices and other businesses shuttered in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic are about to get detailed guidance on changes they must make before reopening on May 20, the first steps toward what state officials warned today would be a slow economic recovery.

Gov. Ned Lamont and his advisers outlined some of the granular details about what the new normal will look like in Connecticut hair salons and stores on the same day that the U.S. Department of Labor reported the loss of more than 20 million jobs in April, pushing the U.S. jobless rate to nearly 15 percent.

David Lehman, the state’s commissioner of economic and community development, said he had no immediate estimate on what the May 20 openings might do to improve employment in Connecticut, where more than 400,000 jobs were lost in the instant recession caused by COVID-19 closure orders.

“My expectation is that it’s going to happen very slowly,” Lehman said.

By Keith M, Phaneuf, Gregory B. Hladky, and Jenna Carlesso

As the state prepares to ease restrictions and allow some businesses to reopen later this month, officials want 42,000 COVID-19 tests to be processed each week — a significant increase in data collection that will include testing every single nursing home resident and employee in Connecticut, as well as other vulnerable populations.

The lack of pervasive testing remains a key hurdle to resuming many operations. The state today reported the results of 4,727 tests. A day earlier, it reported the results of only 2,804 tests — a one day spike that does not yet indicate a sustained increase in testing.

“We’ve ramped up our testing quite a bit,” Gov. Ned Lamont said. “But we want to get up to 42,000 diagnostic tests per week. That’s our goal over the next two weeks.”

Lamont said Connecticut so far has met some of the criteria required for certain businesses to reopen on May 20. He pointed to a 14-day decline in hospitalizations – figures reported today show a 30% drop since the state’s peak – and to adequate capacity in the state’s hospitals.

By Jenna Carlesso

Connecticut will join six other states in forming a consortium to purchase protective gear, medical equipment and testing supplies — an effort aimed at saving money and preparing for a possible second wave of the novel coronavirus.

Gov. Ned Lamont and leaders of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware will participate in the coordinated effort. The states will work together to identify the region’s needs, aggregate demand and stabilize the supply chain, officials said today.

“We just drove up prices by our own competition,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “It was a limited supply. It was primarily in China. And then you have 50 states and all these private entities and the federal government trying to buy from China. It made no sense.”

The seven states will coordinate policies over the inventory of personal protective gear — such as masks, gloves and gowns — and over the types of equipment each local government should have on hand for first responders or workers with private and nonprofit groups, officials said.

By Gregory Hladky and Mark Pazniokas

The latest Connecticut statistics on the COVID-19 pandemic today showed a continued decline in the number of people hospitalized with the virus, but the number of fatalities in the state rose by 79 — bringing the death toll to 2,168.

Gov. Ned Lamont said the overall numbers were an extension of “the positive trend we’ve seen now for over a week.” Coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 41 since Tuesday and there are now 1,691 victims of the disease in hospitals around the state.

But despite the falling statewide numbers of COVID-19 hospitalizations, officials in southeastern Connecticut reported seeing a slight rise in hospital cases in their region.

Lamont and other officials at his regular afternoon briefing reiterated that, despite the generally encouraging trends, Connecticut needs to go slow about reopening its economy.