The mounting death toll from the virus outbreak in the US had it poised yesterday to overtake China’s grim toll of 3,300 deaths, with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo saying up to 1 million more healthcare workers were needed.
“Please come help us,” he said.
Hard-hit Italy and Spain have already overtaken China and now account for more than half of the nearly 38,000 COVID-19 deaths worldwide, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Photo: Reuters
However, the WHO yesterday said that while attention has shifted to epicenters in Western Europe and North America, the coronavirus pandemic was far from over in Asia.
“This is going to be a long-term battle and we cannot let down our guard,” WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Takeshi Kasai said. “We need every country to keep responding according to their local situation.”
In New York City, Cuomo and health officials on Monday warned that the crisis unfolding there is just a preview of what other US communities could soon face.
Photo: AFP
New York State’s death toll climbed by more than 250 people in a day on Monday to more than 1,200, most of them in the city.
“We’ve lost over 1,000 New Yorkers,” Cuomo said. “To me, we’re beyond staggering already.”
Even before the governor’s appeal, close to 80,000 former nurses, doctors and other professionals were stepping up to volunteer, and a US Navy hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, had arrived with 1,000 beds to relieve pressure on overwhelmed hospitals.
Photo: AFP
The Comfort, which was also sent to New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, has 12 operating rooms that could be up and running within 24 hours, officials said.
The ship is docked just north of a temporary hospital constructed inside the Jacob K Javits Convention Center.
State and city officials are trying to increase hospital capacity by up to 87,000 beds to handle the outbreak. There are 9,500 people in New York City hospitalized for COVID-19, with more than 2,300 in intensive care, while more than 66,000 New Yorkers have tested positive for the virus.
More than 235 million people — about two of every three Americans — live in the 33 states where governors have declared orders or recommendations to stay home.
In California, officials put out a similar call for medical volunteers as coronavirus hospitalizations doubled over the last four days and the number of patients in intensive care tripled.
“Challenging times are ahead for the next 30 days, and this is a very vital 30 days,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday. “The more we dedicate ourselves today, the more quickly we will emerge on the other side of the crisis.”
In contrast, the crisis continues to ease in China, where officials yesterday reported just 48 new COVID-19 cases, all of them brought from overseas.
More than three-quarters of a million people worldwide have become infected and at least 37,892 have died, according to the Coronavirus COVID-19 tracking map created by Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
More than 166,200 people have recovered, the map showed.
Italy and Spain saw their death tolls climb by more than 800 each on Monday, but WHO Health Emergencies Program executive director Michael Ryan said cases there were “potentially stabilizing.”
At the same time, he warned against letting up on tough containment measures.
“We have to now push the virus down, and that will not happen by itself,” Ryan said.
Italy’s death toll climbed to nearly 11,600, but in a bit of positive news, the numbers showed a continued slowdown in the rate of new confirmed cases and a record number of people recovered.
At least six of Spain’s 17 regions were at their limit of intensive care unit beds, and three more were close to it, authorities said. Crews of workers were frantically building more field hospitals.
Nearly 15 percent of all those infected in Spain, almost 13,000 people, are health care workers, hurting hospitals’ efforts to help the tsunami of people gasping for breath.
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