New York City is days away from running out of essential equipment needed to keep hospitals running, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday, likening the COVID-19 pandemic to the Great Depression.
The city has the highest number of confirmed cases in the US and De Blasio said that its hospitals were at breaking point.
“Bluntly, we’re about 10 days away now from seeing widespread shortages of ventilators, surgical masks, the things necessary to keep a hospital system running,” De Blasio told CNN.
Photo: EPA-EFE
He pleaded with US President Donald Trump to mobilize the US military to help spur production and distribution of urgently needed medical supplies.
“If we don’t get more ventilators in the next 10 days, people will die who don’t have to die. It’s as simple as that,” De Blasio said.
He said that “the worst is yet to come” and called the rapidly spreading outbreak “the greatest crisis domestically since the Great Depression” of the 1930s.
“That’s why we need a full-scale mobilization of the military and we need the [US] Congress to act like we’re on the way to the next great depression,” De Blasio said.
“Forget bailing out the airlines right now. Bail out the people. Bail out the hospitals. Bail out the cities and states and counties,” he added.
Almost 27,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus in the US, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University.
More than 9,000 of them live in New York City, where there have been 60 fatalities.
A total of 114 people had died in New York state as of Sunday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters.
He said he had asked the US Army Corps of Engineers to build four temporary hospitals and ordered existing hospitals to increase capacity by 50 percent.
All non-essential surgeries would be scrapped from Wednesday to help free up space for coronavirus patients, Cuomo added.
He said that New York state needed 30,000 ventilators, which can cost up to US$40,000 each, lamenting that states are competing with each other to purchase them.
“This is just an impossible situation to manage. If we don’t get the equipment, we can lose lives that we could have otherwise saved,” Cuomo said.
US Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor, who is in charge of the government’s response effort, said that the demand for supplies, such as ventilators, was a “global problem.”
“We’re working hard every day here to meet those demands,” he told ABC.
The federal government would start “pouring” resources into New York, California and Washington state, US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said.
“The resources that are being marshaled are going to be clearly directed to those hotspots that need it most,” Fauci told CBS.
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