New Orleans – The city of New Orleans was rushing Friday to turn its convention center into a field hospital as worrying new ones emerged. coronavirus outbreaks in the United States, deaths were rising in Italy and Spain, and the world was struggling through a pandemic in which more than half a million people have become infected.
The United States also became the first country to exceed 100,000 cases on Friday, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.. And while New York was still the hardest hit city in the country, Americans were preparing for a worsening of the situation elsewhere, with worrying numbers of infections in New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit.
“We are not done with this yet. We are not even halfway there,” said Joseph Kanter of the Louisiana Department of Health, who has recorded more than 2,700 cases, more than five times what he had a week ago.
The sprawling Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, on the banks of the Mississippi River, was being transformed into a huge hospital as part of the preparations for the possible arrival of thousands of more patients than the authorities can handle at the moment.
Such preparations conjured up images of another disaster, that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the convention center became a hostel in a city that has weathered a series of storms, not to mention huge fires and a yellow fever epidemic in centuries past. .
While the new health crisis was looming, an economic catastrophe had already been present in the city, where many lived beforehand in poverty and the tourist industry is totally stopped.
“I’ve never been unemployed. But now, suddenly, wop!” Said John Moore, the musician better known as Deacon John, who has no concerts to offer because most of the city is closed. “It’s not just me. It’s everyone.”
In New York State, where there are more than 44,000 cases, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 exceeded 6,000 on Friday, twice as many as three days earlier.
Governor Andrew Cuomo asked to prepare 4,000 more temporary beds in New York City, where the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center has already been transformed into a hospital.
“This is going to take weeks and weeks and weeks.”Cuomo told members of the National Guard who work at the Javits Center. “This will be a long day, and it will be a difficult day, and it will be an ugly day, and it will be a sad day.”
President Donald Trump, After initially rejecting Cuomo’s requests for tens of thousands of additional respirators to be delivered to him, and the governor’s exhortations to enforce the Defense Production Law, he invoked the law on Friday, and ordered General Motors to begin manufacturing those machines.
Trump enacted a gigantic 2.2 trillion dollar economic stimulus packageit is after the House of Representatives approved it in an oral vote. Lawmakers from both parties backed the law to send checks to millions of Americans, boost government unemployment support, help businesses, and throw a life preserver into a totally overwhelmed health system.
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