New York State records highest number of deaths in single day

MADRID: When staff take a break to applaud at a sprawling field hospital set up at Madrid’s conference centre to treat people with coronavirus, it means a patient has been discharged.

Located just a short drive from Madrid’s airport, the Ifema conference centre normally hosts car shows, art fairs and concerts.

But in just two weeks soldiers converted it into Spain’s largest field hospital to treat victims of the pandemic, which has claimed nearly 11,000 lives in the country, nearly 5,000 of them in the Madrid region.

The facility opened on March 21 and it currently houses just over 1,000 patients, who are spread out in neat rows of white beds separated two metres (six feet) apart by removable partitions.

A nurse wearing a face mask comes to an abrupt stop at a yellow line on the floor marking the start of the area of the hospital deemed “dirty” or contaminated because it’s where the infected patients are treated.

Staff must wear full protective gear to enter this area.

In one unit with 12 beds separated by removable partitions, one patient is asleep, another plays with his mobile phone while a third peels an orange.

Three patients wearing face masks wait while sitting on chairs. They have been declared cured. Applause rings out when they get up to leave.

“It’s a good day for us because we are discharging more and more patients,” the general coordinator of the field hospital, Fernando Prados, told AFP.

Over 2,000 patients have passed through the facility since it opened, and about 900 were discharged after they were cured, he added. Eight patients have died.

Officials originally planned to set up 5,500 beds at the conference centre but they have stopped “for the moment” at 1,500 because hospitals in Madrid are slowly seeing a drop in the number of people seeking care, he added.

Every day Maria Sanchez Fernandez, a 29-year-old nurse from health centre who volunteered to work at the field hospital, carefully disinfects the screen of her plastic face shield.

“At the beginning they gave use four pairs of gloves, now they say two are enough. I wear three pairs, it’s my health after all,” she said.

Maria Luisa Prados Jimenez, a doctor who is also aged 29, is part of a team of young interns who have been sent to work here in addition to regular shifts at local hospitals and health centres.

The facility was designed to treat light cases but on Thursday she said a 63-year-old man without any major chronic conditions “suddenly worsened” and had to be sent to an intensive care unit where he is now in serious condition.

The sixties “seems young to me, that is my father’s age,” added Jimenez, the daughter of a doctor from the southern region of Andalusia.

The field hospital “was a bit chaotic and disorganised” when it opened but “it has improved greatly since Monday”, Jimenez said.

Doctors can now order lung X-rays and a small intensive care unit opened on the ground on Thursday, she said.

At a huge warehouse nearby, soldiers in combat gear are busy sorting healthcare material, some of it arrived from China.

At the exit of the conference centre, Eduardo Lopez, a 59-year-old builder, breathes a sigh of relief. He has just been discharged and is rushing to get a taxi to go home.

His voice shaken with emotion, he said he gave a “10/10” rating to the staff who cared for him “with tenderness and a great dose of humanity”.

But he said he will always remember “the suffering and uncertainty generated by the disease”.

“It greatly affects you psychologically to know that people are dying, that it’s a reality and not a series you watch on TV,” he added.

NEW YORK: The New York State reported its highest number of 562 COVID-19 deaths in a single day, with a person dying almost every two-and-a-half minutes, as Governor Andrew Cuomo allowed redistribution of ventilators and protective gear to hospitals with greater need.

Coronavirus cases in the state, the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, crossed 100,000 and it recorded the highest increase in the number of deaths from the virus in a single day between April 2 and 3, Cuomo said.

The death toll in the state now stands at 2,935, an increase of 562 deaths in just one day, Cuomo said.

The curve continues to go up, Cuomo said while addressing reporters on Friday. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state now stand at 102,863, nearly half of all COVID-19 infections in the US, where the tally has reached 277,953. New York City alone has 56,289 coronavirus patients.

Cuomo also gave a grim assessment of the rising number of casualties, saying the state witnessed the highest single increase in the number of deaths since we started.

More than 7,000 people have died in the US, and 1,867 in the New York City alone, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre.

“More people in New York died from the virus in the last 24 hours than in the first 27 days of March. The state’s death toll has nearly doubled in the last three days,” The New York Times said.

The Governor also expressed anger over the short supply of essential medical equipment for healthcare professionals to help them deal with the surge in the cases across the state and the country. He said personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks, gowns and face shields are in short supply in New York as they are across the country and there is need for companies to make these materials.

It is unbelievable to me that in New York State, in the United States of America, we can’t make these materials and that we are all shopping China to try to get these materials and we’re all competing against each other, he said. Holding up an N-95 mask and a medical gown, Cuomo said these are not complex materials and we will work with New York manufacturers, will finance the transition necessary to make these materials.

I mean we talk about them as if they’re very complicated, he said, adding that it can’t be that we can’t make these. It can’t be that companies in this country and in this state can’t transition to make those supplies quickly.”

Cuomo asserted that he is not going to get into a situation where the state is running out of ventilators and people are dying because there are no ventilators but there are hospitals in other parts of the state that have them but are not using.

He signed an executive order allowing the state to redistribute ventilators and personal protective equipment from hospitals, private sector companies and institutions that don’t currently need them and redeploy the equipment to other hospitals with the highest need.

Those institutions will either get their ventilators back or they will be reimbursed and paid for their ventilators so they can buy a new ones. I can’t do anything more than that. But I’m not going to be in a position where people are dying and we have several hundred ventilators in our own state somewhere else If you don’t get the ventilator back, I will give you my personal word, I’ll pay you for the ventilator. I’m not going to let people die because we didn’t redistribute ventilators, he said.