Coronavirus: US in for horrific time, says Donald Trump

Coronavirus deaths in the US are nearing 1000 people a day as the Governor of New York warned the rest of the country wasn’t immune.

Dr Sherry Yu demonstrates a free-standing booth for COVID-19 testing at a Boston hospital on Thursday. Picture: AP

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 were “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 UN secretary-general Antonio Gut­erres, who said it was the biggest challenge since World War II.

“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,” Mr Guterres­ 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 216,721, while deaths soared to 5137, over 1000 more than the day before. Just a month ago, on March 1, only one person had died of the virus there.

Almost 400 of the deaths occurre­d in the virus hotspot of New York City and state, where nearly 2000 people have died and where projections suggest that 16,000 are likely to in the months ahead. The death toll has doubled since Monday.

Worldwide there were 952,171 cases and 48,320 deaths.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Americans should not 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. 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 warned that other cities and states were being hit hard by the virus, describing Louisiana as “exploding”.

Vice-President Mike Pence said that the trajectory for the US looked similar to Italy — where 13,155 people had died and 110,574 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 follow 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 was the latest state to join almost 30 others in issuing stay-at-home orders.

Meanwhile, the US government’s emergency stockpile of respirato­r masks, gloves and other medical supplies is reportedly running low and is nearly exhausted.

Governors say they have had to try to secure 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, California and Michigan are among the states that say 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,” House of Representatives intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff tweeted. “Once we’ve recovered, we need a non-partisan 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