NY DURESS:
US logs more than 213,000 infections amid the fear, grief
New York’s statewide death toll from the coronavirus doubled in 72 hours to over 1,900 as U.S cases passed 213,000.
NEW YORK — New York authorities rushed to bring in an army of medical volunteers Wednesday as the statewide death toll from the coronavirus doubled in 72 hours to more than 1,900 and the wail of ambulances in the otherwise eerily quiet streets of the city became the heartbreaking soundtrack of the crisis.
As hot spots flared around the country, the nation’s biggest city was the hardest hit of them all.
“It’s like a battlefield behind your home,” said Emma Sorza, 33, who could hear the sirens from severely swamped Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.
And the worst is yet to come.
“How does it end? And people want answers,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “I want answers. The answer is nobody knows for sure.”
Under growing pressure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belatedly joined his counterparts in more than 30 states in issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, taking action after conferring with President Donald Trump. The governors of Pennsylvania and Nevada, both Democrats, took similar steps. Mississippi’s GOP governor was expected to follow suit with an order to take effect Friday.
The U.S. recorded more than 213,000 infections and more than 4,700 deaths, with New York City accounting for 1,139, or about 1 out of 4 dead. About 8,400 people in the U.S. have recovered from the illness, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, which puts the number of confirmed cases worldwide at more than 930,000 and deaths at more than 46,000.
More than 80,000 people have volunteered as medical reinforcements in New York, including recent retirees, health care professionals taking a break from their regular jobs and people between gigs.
Few have made it into the field yet, as authorities vet them and figure out how to use them, but hospitals are expected to begin bringing them in later this week.
Those who have hit the ground already, many brought in by staffing agencies, have discovered a hospital system being driven to the breaking point.
“It’s hard when you lose patients. It’s hard when you have to tell the family members: ‘I’m sorry, but we did everything that we could,’ ” said nurse Katherine Ramos, of Cape Coral, Florida, who has been working at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
To ease the crushing caseload, the city’s paramedics have been told they shouldn’t take fatal heart attack victims to hospitals to have them pronounced dead. Patients have been transferred to the Albany area.
Meanwhile, in Washington, House Democrats are drafting legislation that would create a bipartisan commission to study the federal government’s response to the pandemic, modeled on one that examined the 9/11 attacks.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are working on separate bills establishing a commission. Draft legislation from
Thompson’s committee says the commission would provide a “full and complete accounting” of U.S. efforts.
“Americans will need answers on how our government can work better to prevent a similar crisis from happening again,” Thompson said.
Democrats have criticized President Trump’s administration for being slow to respond to the outbreak and to develop tests quickly enough. They hope that a review commission would be bipartisan and chartered by Congress, just as the 9/11 one was.
The 9/11 commission released a report in 2004 criticizing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies for failing to adequately prepare for terrorist attacks.
Elsewhere around the country, the number of dead in Louisiana was put at more than 270.
As coronavirus cases spike ever higher in Louisiana, the state’s nursing homes, assisted living sites and adult residential care facilities are showing more and more “clusters” of the virus, but the full scale of the outbreak at those sites remains uncertain.
Louisiana’s Department of Health has identified 47 long-term care facilities that it considers a cluster, with at least two apparently related cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
In Southern California, officials reported that at least 51 residents and six staff members at a nursing home east of Los Angeles have been infected and two have died.
The announcement came as California Gov. Gavin Newsom said extraordinary efforts to keep people home have bought time needed to prepare for an expected surge of cases in coming weeks. He said the slower-than-forecast increase in cases means the peak is now likely to occur in May.
Under Newsom’s direction, the state has been scrambling to add 50,000 hospital beds to its current 75,000.
On Wednesday, there were more than 8,200 cases and at least 180 deaths in California, according to data kept by Johns Hopkins University. Michigan, which has 30 million fewer residents, had about 7,600 cases and 259 deaths.