President Donald
Trump told Americans to brace for a big spike in coronavirus fatalities in the
coming days, as the country faces what he called the toughest two weeks of the
pandemic.
“There’s going to be
a lot of death,” Trump said at a briefing with newsmen on Sunday.
He pushed back on
criticism that the federal government has not done enough to get ventilators
that many critically ill coronavirus patients need to survive to the states.
According to him,
some governors are asking for more machines than they will need.
“Fears of shortages
have led to inflated requests,” Trump said of submissions his administration
has received to dole out equipment from the strategic national stockpile.
The U.S. has the
world’s highest number of known cases of COVID-19, the flu-like respiratory
disease caused by the coronavirus.
According to a
Reuters tally, over 306,000 people have tested positive in the U.S. and over
8,300 have died.
White House medical
experts have forecast that between 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could be killed
in the pandemic, even if sweeping orders to stay home are followed.
“We are coming up to
a time that is going to be very horrendous.
“We probably have
never seen anything like these kind of numbers. Maybe during the war, during a
World War One or Two or something,” Trump said at the White House.
On Saturday, Gov.
Andrew Cuomo said that in the grimmest day yet for the U.S. state hit hardest
by the pandemic, coronavirus-related illnesses had killed 630 people in the
last 24 hours in New York State.
“The disease has now
killed 3,565 people in New York and the situation is particularly worrying on
Long Island, east of New York City, where the number of cases is like a fire
spreading,” Cuomo told a news conference.
Health experts
calculate that New York, home both to bustling Manhattan and hilly farm country
stretching to the Canadian border, might be around a week away from the worst
point in the health crisis which has killed about 60,000 people worldwide.
“We’re not yet at
the apex, we’re getting closer. Our reading of the projections is we’re
somewhere in the seven-day range.
“It’s only been 30
days since our first case, it feels like an entire lifetime,” Cuomo said.
New York City alone
accounted for over a quarter of the U.S. coronavirus deaths tallied by Johns
Hopkins University.
Hospitals and
morgues in the city are struggling to treat the desperately ill and bury the
dead.
Because of the risk
of infection, many people with critically ill relatives in New York City are
unable to see their loved ones in their final hours.
A resident at New
York-Presbyterian hospital said he and his colleagues have made several death
notification phone calls every shift this week.
“There’s something
sort of unquantifiably painful about telling a family their loved one died
without letting them see them,” he said.
The emergency
stockpile of medical equipment maintained by the U.S. government has nearly run
out of protective garb for doctors and nurses.
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