US health authorities urged millions of residents of the New York City region to avoid non-essential travel due to surging COVID-19 infections there as deaths in the US rose.
The travel advisory late on Saturday came after the number of confirmed deaths in the US passed 2,000, more than double the level two days earlier.
It applies to the 8.6 million people of New York City, the hardest-hit US municipality, and others in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Photo: AP
The advisory cited “extensive community transmission” in the area and urged residents to avoid travel for 14 days.
Worldwide infections surpassed 660,000, with more than 30,000 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
The US leads the world with more than 120,000 reported cases. Five other countries have higher death tolls: Italy, Spain, China, Iran and France. Italy has more than 10,000 deaths, the most of any country.
The disease has spread to major US cities, including Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago, and into rural US, where hotspots erupted in Midwestern towns and Rocky Mountain ski havens.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said defeating the virus will take “weeks and weeks and weeks.”
The UN, which has its headquarters in New York City, donated 250,000 masks to the city.
Cuomo postponed the state’s presidential primary from April 28 to June 23.
The travel advisory by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that employees of trucking, food supply, financial services and some other industries were exempt.
It said governors of the three states had “full discretion” over how to carry out the advisory.
Earlier, Cuomo and governors of the other states rejected a suggestion by US President Donald Trump that he might impose a quarantine on the region.
Cuomo said that would be illegal, economically catastrophic and unproductive, as other areas are already seeing a surge.
In Detroit, which has a large low-income population, the death toll rose to 31, with 1,381 infections as of midday on Saturday.
“The trajectory of Detroit is unfortunately even more steep than that of New York,” said Teena Chopra, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the Detroit Medical Center.
Chopra said that many of the COVID-19 patients have ailments including asthma, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension.
“This is off the charts,” she said. “We are seeing a lot of patients that are presenting to us with severe disease, rather than minor disease.”
Some US states began to try to limit exposure from visitors from harder-hit areas.
Rhode Island National Guard troops were instructed to go door to door in coastal communities to find New Yorkers and advise them about a mandatory 14-day quarantine for people from the state.
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