‘A battlefield behind your home’: Deaths mount in NYC
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 U.S. in places like New Orleans and Southern California, the nation’s biggest city was the hardest hit of them all, with bodies loaded onto refrigerated morgue trucks by gurney and forklift outside overwhelmed hospitals, in full view of passing motorists.
“It’s like a battlefield behind your home,” said 33-year-old Emma Sorza, 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.”
President Donald Trump acknowledged that the federal stockpile is nearly depleted of personal protective equipment used by doctors and nurses.
“Difficult days are ahead for our nation,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a couple of weeks, starting pretty much now, but especially a few days from now that are going to be horrific.”
Scientists offered more evidence Wednesday that the coronavirus is spread by seemingly healthy people who show no clear symptoms, leading the U.S. government to issue new guidance warning that anyone exposed to the disease can be considered a carrier.
Stocks tumbled on Wall Street and markets around the world, with 100,000
to 240,000 deaths projected in the U.S. before the crisis is over. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 970 points, or over 4 percent.
A new report Wednesday from the United Nations said the global economy could shrink by almost 1 percent this year instead of growing at a projected 2.5 percent.
Under growing pressure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belatedly joined his counterparts in more than 30 states in issuing a statewide stay-home order, taking action after conferring with fellow Republican Trump. The governors of Pennsylvania and Nevada, both Democrats, and Mississippi’s GOP governor took similar steps.
Trump said his administration has agreed to ship out 1,000 ventilators — breathing machines that are vital for treating people with severe cases of COVID-19. He said that the U.S. government has a stockpile of nearly 10,000 but has kept a close hold on them so they can be deployed quickly to states that need them.
Meanwhile, European nations facing extraordinary demand for intensive care beds are putting up makeshift hospitals, unsure whether they will find enough healthy medical staff to run them. London is days away from unveiling a 4,000-bed temporary hospital built in a huge convention center.
Worldwide, more than 900,000 people have been infected and over 45,000 have died, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University, though the real figures are believed to be much higher because of testing shortages, differences in counting the dead and large numbers of mild cases that have gone unreported.
The U.S. recorded about 210,000 infections and about 4,600 deaths, with New York City accounting for about 1 out of 4 dead.
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 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, found 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, Fla., who has been working at New York Presbyterian Hospital. “It’s even harder when we really don’t have the time to mourn, the time to talk about this.”
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. A Navy hospital ship has docked in New York, the mammoth Javits Convention Center has been turned into a hospital, and the tennis center that hosts the U.S.
Open is being converted to one, too.
With New York on near-lockdown, the normally bustling streets in the city of 8.6 million are empty, and sirens are no longer easily ignored as just urban background noise.
“After 9/11, I remember we actually wanted to hear the sound of ambulances on our quiet streets because that meant there were survivors, but we didn’t hear those sounds, and it was heartbreaking. Today, I hear an ambulance on my strangely quiet street and my heart breaks, too,” said 61-year-old Meg Gifford, a former Wall Street worker who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Cuomo moved to close the city’s playgrounds because of too much crowding, but people can still use wide-open green spaces as long as they stay 6 feet apart.
Police went around in patrol cars, blaring warnings to obey the rules.
Nearly 6,200 New York City police officers, or one-sixth of the department, were out sick Wednesday, including about 4,800 who reported flu-like symptoms, though it was not clear how many had the virus.
Cuomo said projections suggest the crisis in New York will peak at the end of April, with a high death rate continuing through July.
“Let’s cooperate to address that in New York because it’s going to be in your town tomorrow,” he warned. “If we learn how to do it right here — or learn how to do it the best we can, because there is no right, it’s only the best we can — then we can work cooperatively all across this country.”