Coronavirus: US death toll nears 1000 a day
As fatalities soar, NY Governor warns US ‘you’re going to get tens of thousands of deaths outside of New York’.
Coronavirus deaths in the US are now approaching 1000 people a day as the Governor of disease-ravaged New York warned that it would soon swamp other parts of the country with the same force.
The soaring death toll around the nation came as Americans tried to digest the shocking official White House forecasts that between 100,000 and 240,000 people would lose their lives in the pandemic even with social distancing.
Mr Trump said at the White House on Thursday (AEDT) that the weeks ahead are ‘going to be horrific.’
“Difficult days are ahead for our nation,’ he said. “(But) we pull together, we persevere, we overcome and we win.’
The global scale of the pandemic was underlined by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres who said it was the biggest challenge since World War Two.
“It is a combination, on one hand, of a disease that represents a threat to everybody in the world and, second, because it has an economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past,” he said from New York. “This is, indeed, the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War.”
In the US, the number of infections jumped to more than 210,000 while deaths soared to 4,669, close to 1000 more than the day before. Just one month earlier, on March 1, only one person had died of the virus in the US.
Almost 400 of the deaths on Thursday (AEDT) occurred in the virus hotspot on New York where almost 2000 people have died and where projections suggest that 16,000 are likely to die in the months ahead. The death toll has doubled in the past 72 hours.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that Americans should not start to believe that the virus was primarily a New York problem.
“This is not just New York,” he said. “If you believe these numbers — 16,000 deaths in New York — that means you’re going to get tens of thousands of deaths outside of New York,’ he said.
“So, to the extent people watch their nightly news in Kansas and say, well, this is a New York problem, that’s not what these numbers say. It says it’s a New York problem today. Tomorrow, it’s a Kansas problem and a Texas problem and a New Mexico problem.”
Mr Trump also warned that other cities and states were now being hit hard by the virus, naming Louisiana as one of those states that was now ‘exploding.’
The Vice President Mike Pence said on Thursday (AEFT) that the trajectory for the US looked similar to Italy, where more than 12,000 people have died and where coronavirus patients have overwhelmed the hospital system.
“We think Italy may be the most comparable area to the United States at this point,” Mr Pence said.
Mr Trump’s health experts have warned that unless all Americans strictly following social distancing guidelines, the death toll could exceed their forecasts of up to 240,000 deaths.
Mr Trump has warned Americans to brace for “one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country.”
Florida on Thursday (AEDT) was the latest state to join almost 30 other states in issuing stay-at-home orders.
Medical stockpile runs low
Meanwhile the US government’s emergency stockpile of respirator masks, gloves and other medical supplies is reportedly running low and is nearly exhausted.
State Governors have complained that they have had to try to source masks, protective equipment and ventilators from the open market, often at overblown prices, because the federal government was not heeding their calls for co-ordinated assistance.
New York, Louisiana and California and Michigan are among the states that have said they do not have enough emergency equipment to cope with the expected surge in patients in the coming weeks.
The scale of the looming disaster in the US is such that Democrats have called for a non-partisan congressional commission to conduct a 9/11-style post-mortem to America’s response to the pandemic.
“After Pearl Harbor and 9/11, we looked at what went wrong to learn from our mistakes,” Democrat House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff tweeted. “Once we’ve recovered, we need a nonpartisan commission to review our response and how we can better prepare for the next pandemic. I’m working on a bill to do that.”
Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia
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