March 27th, 2020 at 05:42 am
BREAKING! U.S. now leads the World in Covid-19 with over 85,000 cases
Unemployment data set a bleak record and hospitals struggled with an influx of sick patients and lack of equipment. But the White House coronavirus response coordinator dismissed talk of shortages.
Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday.
In the United States, at least 81,321 (now over 85,000) people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths — more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.
With 330 million residents, the United States is the world’s third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.
A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nation’s response.
Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.
On Tuesday, the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University became the first in the United States to announce an offer of early graduation, in an email to students. That followed similar moves earlier this year in Italy and Britain, which advanced many final-year medical students into intermediate clinical service.
On Thursday, the medical schools at Tufts University, Boston University and the University of Massachusetts announced that they planned to move up their graduation dates to April from May, after a request from the state of Massachusetts to help expand the medical work force. Harvard Medical School said it was “actively considering” the same step.
Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. Grossman, said the school’s decision came as its hospitals were overwhelmed with an increasing number of Covid-19 patient cases. “That led us to conclude: Why not graduate students who are interested in serving in hospitals now? They’ve completed their requirements and they’re prepared.”
The White House had been preparing to reveal a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators. Then word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.
The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.
Government officials said that the deal might still happen but that they are examining at least a dozen other proposals. And they contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt. Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce.
The shortage of ventilators has emerged as one of the major criticisms of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. The need to quickly equip hospitals across the country with tens of thousands more of the devices to treat those most seriously ill with the virus was not anticipated despite the Trump administration’s own projection in a simulation last year that millions of people could be hospitalized. And even now, the effort to produce them has been confused and disorganized.
SOURCE: New York Times