Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Battle ensues for gear like masks and ventilators needed to fight virus.
Britain now pleads for help as Johnson issues restrictions
NEW YORK — With masks and ventilators in desperately short supply, more than one-fifth of the world’s population was ordered or urged to stay in their homes Monday at the start of what could be a pivotal week in the battle to contain the coronavirus in the U.S. and Europe.
Warning that the outbreak continues to accelerate, the head of the World Health Organization called on countries to take strong, coordinated action.
“We are not helpless bystanders,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, noting that it took 67 days to reach 100,000 cases worldwide but just four days to go from 200,000 to 300,000. “We can change the trajectory of this pandemic.”
Britain joined other countries in ordering residents to restrict their movements, imposing its most draconian restrictions ever in peacetime.
The scramble to marshal public health and political resources intensified in New York, where a statewide lockdown took effect amid worries the city of 8.4 million is becoming one of the world’s biggest hot spots. More than 12,000 people have tested positive in the city and almost 100 have died.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to convert a mammoth New York City convention center into a hospital with 1,000 beds. Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de
Blasio warned that the city’s hospitals are just 10 days away from shortages in basic supplies needed to protect health care workers and patients.
“This is going to get much worse before it gets better. We are still in the relative calm before the storm,” Cuomo said at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
In Italy, the hardest-hit country of all, declines in new cases and deaths for a second consecutive day provided a faint glimmer of hope, though it is too soon to say whether the crisis is leveling off.
Italian officials said Monday that the virus had claimed just over 600 more lives, down from 793 two days earlier. All told, the outbreak has killed more than 6,000 Italians, the highest death toll of any country, and pushed the health system to the breaking point there and in Spain.
The risk to doctors, nurses and others on the front lines has become plain: Italy has seen at least 18 doctors with coronavirus die. Spain reported that more than 3,900 health care workers have become infected, accounting for roughly 12% of the country’s total cases.
British health workers pleaded for more gear, saying they felt like “cannon fodder.” In France, doctors scrounged masks from construction workers, factory floors, an architect.
“There’s a wild race to get surgical masks,” François Blanchecott, a biologist on the front lines of testing, told France Inter radio. “We’re asking mayors’ offices, industries, any enterprises that might have a store of masks.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday night directed residents to stay home, with a few exceptions, and ordered shops that don’t sell essential goods to shut down. He called it a critical step to prevent the virus from spreading and warned that police would be authorized to break up public gatherings of more than two people.
New infections are increasing at an exponential rate, raising concern that the United Kingdom will be on a trajectory like Italy’s in a week or two if containment efforts don’t work.
The crisis kept easing in China. The city of Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged late last year, said it is allowing residents limited movement as its lockdown is gradually relaxed. China is now sending planeloads of protective gear and doctors to Europe.
“The U.S. is completely wasting the precious time that China has won for the world,” said Geng Shuang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokesman.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, promised that medical supplies are about to start pouring in and will be “clearly directed to those hot spots that need it most.”
Meanwhile, officials in South Africa — Africa’s most industrialized economy — announced Monday that the nation of 57 million people will to go into a lockdown for 21 days starting Thursday to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the measures in response to the increase of COVID-19 cases to 402. South Africa will be the third country in Africa to close down all but essential economic activity, after Rwanda and Tunisia.
Also, two former passengers of the virus-infected Diamond Princess cruise ship died, bringing to 10 the number of deaths from a ship that had over 700 infections.