The coronavirus death toll in America doubled in the span of just two days as new potential hotspots emerge in urban centers around the country.
The US currently leads the world in coronavirus infections with 123,778 reported as of Sunday morning. The death toll surpassed 2,100 on Saturday, doubling figures reported two days earlier.
New York City remains the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak, with 30,765 cases and 672 deaths.
But several other cities including Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Boston are now being monitored as potential hotspots, threatening to push the overall case count in the US higher and higher.
Dr John Brooks of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the US is still ‘in the acceleration phase’ of the pandemic and that all corners of the country are at risk.
‘There is no geographic part of the United States that is spared from this,’ he said.
The US currently leads the world in coronavirus infections with 123,778 reported as of Sunday morning. The death toll surpassed 2,100 on Saturday, doubling figures reported two days earlier
The CDC has warned that the US is still ‘in the acceleration phase’ of the pandemic and all corners of the country are at risk
Officials in America’s biggest cities are taking extraordinary measures to ward off dismal outbreak projections as they plead with the federal government to increase testing capacity and send more supplies to hospitals bracing for an influx of COVID-19 patients.
Dr Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said this week that the task force expects that outbreak trends reported in existing epicenters like New York, New Orleans and Washington state will soon crop up in other areas.
Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has developed modeling tools designed to help public officials prepare for the spread of COVID-19, expressed concern that new hotspots could prove even more devastating than existing ones.
‘I’m worried that New York might not be the worst-case scenario when you think about other states that have even older and less-healthy populations, and fewer hospital beds available,’ Levi told The Washington Post.
On Saturday President Donald Trump said he was considering quarantining ‘heavily infected’ New York, and parts of Connecticut and New Jersey, in a desperate effort to slow the spread of coronavirus.
He backed down from that proposal and instead ordered a travel advisory after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the proposal to the limit the spread of coronavirus would be tantamount to a ‘federal declaration of war’.
‘If you start walling off areas all across the country it would just be totally bizarre, counter-productive, anti-American, anti-social,’ Cuomo told CNN.
‘This is a civil war kind of discussion. I don’t believe that any administration could be serious about physical lockdowns of states.’
Cuomo said that it would probably be illegal to quarantine New York, as well as totally ineffective, given the rise of other virus hotspots in the country such as New Orleans.
‘It makes absolutely no sense and I don’t think any serious governmental personality or professional would support it,’ Cuomo said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the advisory late on Saturday, saying: ‘Due to extensive community transmission of COVID -19 in the area, CDC urges residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately.’
The advisory does not apply to employees of critical infrastructure industries, ‘including but not limited to trucking, public health professionals, financial services, and food supply’, the CDC said.
The agency said that the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will have ‘full discretion’ to implement the advisory.
New York City remains the epicenter of America’s coronavirus crisis with nearly 31,000 cases
The US military is also watching coronavirus infection trends in Chicago, Michigan, Florida and Louisiana with concern to determine where field hospitals will be erected next.
Air Force General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military was doing its own analysis as well as looking at data on infections compiled elsewhere in the government.
‘There’s a certain number of places where we have concerns and they’re: Chicago, Michigan, Florida, Louisiana,’ Hyten told a group of reporters, when asked where field hospitals could head next.
‘Those are the areas that we’re looking at and trying to figure out where to go next.’
The Army Corps of Engineers said on Friday it was aiming to provide facilities for 3,000 people with the coronavirus at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center by April 24 for about $75 million.
Lieutenant General Todd Semonite, the Corps’ commander, said the Corps was looking at potentially converting 114 facilities in the United States into hospitals.
Asked about Hyten’s remarks, Semonite said he continued to be concerned about Michigan, Florida and Louisiana and had spoken with the governor of Louisiana. He said there could be a high demand for medical resources in Florida because of the aging population.
In Chicago, the Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to erect 2,500 patient quarters inside McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America.
At least 3,498 cases and 47 deaths have been reported across the state of Illinois as of Sunday.
Governor J.B. Pritzker on Saturday announced that an infant with COVID-19 had died in Chicago, possibly becoming the youngest coronavirus fatality in the US.
The child’s cause of death is still under investigation. No information about the victim, such as their age or whether they suffered from any other health issues, has been released.
Officials said the death of someone so young should serve as a strong warning to anyone who isn’t taking the virus seriously.
‘If you haven’t been paying attention, maybe this is your wake-up call,’ Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr Ngozi Ezike said.
Cases in Chicago and suburban Cook County accounted for about three-fourths of Illinois’ total as of Friday. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot closed popular lakeshore parks after people failed to practice social distancing, despite a statewide shelter-at-home order.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot closed popular lakeshore parks after people failed to practice social distancing, despite a statewide shelter-at-home order
The Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to erect 2,500 patient quarters inside Chicago’s McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America
Cases also have been rising rapidly in Detroit, where poverty and poor health have been problems for years. The number of infections surged to 1,381, with 31 deaths, as of noon Saturday. The city’s homeless population is especially vulnerable, officials said.
‘At this time, the trajectory of Detroit is unfortunately even more steep than that of New York,’ said Dr. Teena Chopra, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the Detroit Medical Center.
‘This is off the charts,’ she said.
Chopra said many patients have ailments like asthma, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. She also acknowledged that in Detroit, one of the nation’s largest African American cities, there is a distrust among some in the community of the medical system and government due to systemic racism.
‘In Detroit, we are seeing a lot of patients that are presenting to us with severe disease, rather than minor disease,’ said Chopra, who worried about a ‘tsunami’ of patients.
Trump approved a major disaster declaration for Michigan, providing money for the outbreak. He has done the same for New York, Louisiana and Illinois.
Detroit: Examination tents are setup at the Michigan State Fairgrounds on Friday in Detroit, where the city is preparing for coronavirus drive up testing
The governor of Kansas also issued a stay-at-home order to begin Monday, as the virus takes hold in more rural areas where doctors worry about the lack of ICU beds.
A cluster of three counties in rural Indiana have surging rates of confirmed cases. One of them, Decatur, population 26,000, has 30 cases with one confirmed death and another suspected, said Sean Durbin, the county’s public health emergency preparedness coordinator. Several cases were traced to large gatherings earlier in the month, including a religious retreat and a high school basketball tournament.
The disease threatens to be devastating for close-knit communities where everyone knows everyone, Durbin said, adding that he was a friend of the person believed to have died from the virus as well as others currently in critical condition.
The county health department has already run out of personal protective equipment, Durbin said. The last supply from the federal stockpile arrived more than a week ago and contained just 77 N95 masks and two dozen face shields.
‘I wish there was a stronger word for disappointed,’ he said. ‘I´m calling on them to do better.’
Blaine County, Idaho, a scenic ski haven for wealthy tourists, now has around 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the highest rate per capita outside the New York area. Two people have died.
Boston: Cars are gestured forward as medical personnel from AFC Urgent Care perform Covid-19 testing in the parking lot of their location in North Andover, Massachusetts on Friday
In the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said cases were spiking, putting the Southern California region on track to match New York City’s infection figures in the next five days.
The mayor spoke as he and California’s governor, who ordered all coronavirus-related evictions banned through May 31, toured a newly arrived naval hospital ship equipped with 1,000 patient beds at the Port of Los Angeles. Its sister vessel is to be deployed to New York Harbor in the near future.
At the Riverside County Fairground east of Los Angeles, California National Guard troops were setting up a 125-bed medical station to serve residents of the Coachella Valley, an area teeming with elderly retirees considered especially vulnerable to COVID-19.
Outside of New York City, Seattle has the highest number of confirmed cases, with 2,747.
The Seattle metro area was the earliest hotspot in the US, and the number of cases has continued to grow there at an alarming rate.
The next-largest outbreaks are Detroit (2,622 cases), Boston (2,227 cases) and Chicago (1,862 cases).
One emergency room doctor in Michigan, an emerging epicenter of the pandemic, said he was using one paper face mask for an entire shift due to a shortage and that hospitals in the Detroit area would soon run out of ventilators.
‘We have hospital systems here in the Detroit area in Michigan who are getting to the end of their supply of ventilators and have to start telling families that they can’t save their loved ones because they don’t have enough equipment,’ the physician, Dr. Rob Davidson, said in a video posted on Twitter.
Los Angeles: Retired nurse Donna holds an American flag as she waves toward the USNS Mercy Navy hospital ship after it arrived in the Port of Los Angeles on Friday
Louisiana has seen the fastest growth of new cases anywhere in the world, which local officials say may be due to last month’s crowded Mardi Gras celebrations.
Sophia Thomas, a nurse practitioner at DePaul Community Health Center in New Orleans, said the numbers of coronavirus patients ‘have been staggering.’
‘We are truly a hotbed of COVID-19 here in New Orleans,’ she said, adding that her hospital was trying to cope in part by shifting some patients to ‘telehealth’ services that allow them to be evaluated from home.
‘We are not through this. We´re not even halfway through this,’ said Joseph Kanter of the Louisiana Department of Health, which has recorded more than 2,700 cases, more than five times what it had a week ago. The United States became the first country to surpass 100,000 infections on Friday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
New Orleans’ sprawling Ernest N Morial Convention Center, along the Mississippi River, was being converted into a massive hospital as officials prepared for thousands more patients than they could accommodate.
The preparations immediately conjured images of another disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the convention center became a squalid shelter of last resort.
As the new health crisis loomed, economic catastrophe had already arrived in the city, where many already live in poverty and the all-important tourism industry has screeched to a halt.
‘I’ve never been unemployed. But now, all of a sudden: Wop!’ said John Moore, the musician best known as Deacon John, who has no gigs to perform with much of the city shut down. ‘It ain’t just me. It´s everybody.’
However as yet, no city is close to overtaking New York City, where on Friday total cases hit 25,573 deaths reached 366, and hospitals throughout the city reported being strained to the limit with critical patients.
At a press conference on Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he believes the city’s strained healthcare system has the personnel and supplies to make it through next week, but beyond that is uncertain.
‘After next Sunday, April 5, is when I get very, very worried about everything we’re gonna need,’ he said, saying that an infusion of medical staff and equipment was needed to stave of disaster.