The infection rate is also rising in New York – there are currently 30,000 infected people, the number of deaths is almost 300. The authorities are trying to prevent a collapse of the health system.
By Peter Mücke, ARD-Studio New York
Times Square – almost deserted. The Brooklyn Bridge – Tourist Free. The luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue – closed. MoMa, Metropolitan Museum and Opera are tight. The Broadway stages are dark. A good three weeks after the first case was detected in Manhattan, the corona virus also paralyzed New York. “I think that’s terrible, but necessary. The risk would be far too great. So we have to deal with what the government says,” says a passerby.
Companies fire their workforce
And it has ordered all “non-vital facilities” to be closed. The companies fire their workforce in rows. There is hardly any protection against dismissal. Short-time work anyway. Even the restaurants that are still trying to keep themselves afloat with take-away dishes have put most of their employees on the street:
“We once had 30 employees,” says one restaurant owner. “On Sunday we had to lay off 90 percent of them. These are people who have hardly any money anyway. It’s a very harsh reality.”
The number of infected people doubles every three days
Which threatens to become even harder. Around 4,000 people are already being treated for a coronavirus infection in hospitals in the city. The number of people infected is currently doubling every three days. The emergency rooms are full. Hospitals have set up tents so that the sick do not have to wait outside.
“We are the US epicenter of this crisis,” says New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “And because we’re the largest city in the US and the whole country depends on us, we need help from Washington.”
For days, Mayor de Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo have been outdoing each other in daily press conferences to get more support from the US government.
“New York is the canary in the coal mine,” says Cuomo. “We have the highest and fastest growing number of infections. What happens in New York will also happen in California, Washington State or Illinois. It’s only a matter of time. But we’ll be the first.”
Intensive beds and staff are missing
A hospital ship of the US Marie is due to anchor in New York in early April. The city’s largest conference center is being converted into an emergency hospital. Cuomo wants to make the dormitories of the long-closed universities available to the overburdened hospitals. A total of up to 140,000 hospital beds would be required – there are currently 53,000. But most urgently there was a lack of intensive care beds, staff and, above all, ventilators.
“The patients have acute breathing difficulties,” says Cuomo. “They need the ventilators. In the end, these machines make the difference whether these patients die or survive.” 40,000 ventilators are needed in New York state, Cuomo says.
The hospitals only hold 3000. A few thousand more are now on the way. However, that is not enough, which is why in some hospitals two patients are civilized with one machine. And time is of the essence, says Cuomo. Because the pandemic will peak in two to three weeks – much earlier than previously expected.
“The infection rate is increasing faster, and overall more people are being infected than expected. That’s a bad combination,” says Cuomo.
