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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS