Comfort for the masses
Fatalities from coronavirus reach more than 400 a day as Trump abandons plans to lift restrictions by Easter
The USNS Comfort medical ship moves up the Hudson River past the Statue of Liberty, as she arrives in New York yesterday. The US Navy’s 1,000-bed sea-going hospital will be used to treat non virus-related patients, helping to ease the burden of hospitals overwhelmed by the crisis.
AMERICA’S death toll from coronavirus is about to overtake the number of people killed in the September 11 attacks as the outbreak continues to gather pace across the country.
Yesterday, more than 2,500 people had been killed by the virus, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. The number is now rising by around 400 a day.
It is expected to soon surpass the near 3,000 people killed when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by jihadists in 2001.
Potential death tolls were a point of debate yesterday.
On Sunday, Donald Trump used a press conference to abandon hopes of lifting strict nationwide guidelines by Easter.
The US president announced that the guidelines, which were due to expire yesterday, will instead be extended until April 30 and possibly beyond that.
That means Americans will continue to be told to avoid discretionary travel and eating in restaurants, not gather in groups of more than 10 and work from home if possible. Speaking in stark terms, Mr Trump said he had been told that 2.2 million could die in America without social distancing rules, but that number could be 100,000 to 200,000 with the guidelines.
The remark – that America could see a six-figure death count due to coronavirus even with current restrictions – offered a grim insight into how White House health experts believe the pandemic will develop.
Mr Trump, who has repeatedly talked of his desire to get the US economy open again, backed away from lifting restrictions before Easter after meeting his senior health officials.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, had given Mr Trump the stark death projections and urged him to extend the guidelines. “It would not have been a good idea to pull back at a time when you really need to be pressing your foot on the pedal as opposed to on the brakes,” Dr Fauci said on CNN.
Describing the conversation with Mr Trump, Dr Fauci said: “We showed him the data. He looked at the data. He got it right away… He just shook his head and said, ‘I guess we got to do it’.” Mr Trump mentioned harrowing stories from his home city of New York and a friend who was in a coma after catching coronavirus as he explained his new thinking, indicating that personal
‘I have been watching them bringing in trailer trucks, freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies’
connections may have shaped his view. “I’ve been watching that for the last week on television, body bags all over in hallways,” Mr Trump said on Sunday evening. “I have been watching them bringing in trailer trucks, freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies. There are so many of them. This is in essentially my community in Queens, New York. I have seen things that I have never seen before.”
There were more signs of the seriousness with which the outbreak was being treated in New York, the centre of the US outbreak, when the USNS Comfort, a navy hospital ship normally deployed to war zones and areas hit by natural disasters, docked yesterday to help with the shortage of hospital beds.
The ship, which has around 1,000 beds and a dozen operating rooms, was last deployed to the city after 9/11. In Central Park, a 68-bed field hospital has been set up by the charity Samaritan’s Purse. It has been located opposite Mount Sinai hospital and will act as a respiratory care unit.
Meanwhile, medical emergency calls have risen 40 per cent to about 6,500 a day, according to a union that represents emergency workers.
Other US cities are fast emerging as coronavirus hotspots too, including New Orleans, Detroit and Los Angeles. There are now more than 140,000
known Covid-19 cases in America, far exceeding any other country in publicly announced cases.
In Las Vegas, scores of homeless people were made to sleep in a disused parking lot less than 6ft apart after a resident at a Catholic Charities homeless shelter in the city tested positive for coronavirus, forcing it to close.
Mr Trump discussed the outbreak with Vladmir Putin, the Russian president, yesterday.
“Getting along with Russia’s a good thing,” he said before the call.