“New York is getting closer to Italy”, warns a health official

Authorities in New York, now the American epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic, which a federal official compared to Italy, on Monday called on Donald Trump to declare national coercive containment and order the private sector to manufacture urgently masks and respirators.

The first American metropolis, the economic capital of the country with 8.6 million inhabitants, known for its particularly dense habitat, had more than 12,000 cases Monday morning, or nearly a third of American cases.
The state itself had more than 20,800 cases – more than half of American cases – and 157 deaths. “These containment measures (closing non-essential activities and forcing people to stay at home, editor’s note), which New York and California have taken, must be everywhere” in the United States, insisted Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We have to take these extreme measures.”

We need the federal government to use the Defense Production Act so that we can get the medical supplies we desperately need.

We can’t just wait for companies to come forward with offers and hope they will.

This is a national emergency.

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 23, 2020

“Unfortunately, we see that New York is getting closer to Italy,” said Jerome Adams, federal administrator of public health, lamenting that people do not seriously apply the federal recommendations of containment, non-coercive, announced the week. last, for 15 days. “The numbers we see reflect what happened two weeks ago. Too many people are waiting too long to use these 15 days to seriously stop the spread,” said Adams.

Both Mr. de Blasio and the governor of New York State have also revived their calls on federal authorities to order private companies to manufacture respirators and masks, which are sorely lacking in the United States, like many others. country. “Yes, this is an assertion of government power over private companies, so what? It’s a national emergency,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said. “We can no longer continue to be supplied on an ad hoc basis”.

Donald Trump hésitant

For now, President Donald Trump has resisted imposing such measures, worried about their impact on the economy, even though about one in three Americans is already expected to live in confinement. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” he tweeted on Monday again. The president, who initially downplayed the outbreak, said he would make a decision when the 15-day deadline set for federal recommendations expired.

Robert De Niro is watching you. Stay home. Save lives.#NewYorkStateStrongerTogether pic.twitter.com/WgAsBuIrKk

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 23, 2020

For New York City alone, the mayor called for the urgent dispatch of “hundreds of respirators and hundreds of thousands and then millions of masks”. “If they don’t start arriving this week, we will get to the point where people cannot be saved when they could have been saved,” he warned, pointing out that things would get worse in April. and in May.

“A few days ago, I thought we could hold out until April, but it’s going so fast now that I can’t even say that anymore.”

New York is also awaiting help from the National Guard and the US Army Corps of Engineers to set up additional hospital beds. The large conference center at the Javits Center in Manhattan, now deserted, must be transformed into a hospital center with a capacity of 1,000 beds. Mr De Blasio said he hoped it would be “operational” this week, and Mr Cuomo was due there on Monday.

“Nervousness”

Faced with this increasingly dramatic situation, anxiety mounted among the inhabitants of this city which had suddenly become strangely calm. After new rules came into force on Sunday evening to limit activity to businesses deemed essential, New York City, a symbol of hyper-activity and permanent decibels, was abnormally silent. Even if buses and taxis continue to circulate, the streets were almost deserted, construction sites at a standstill.

Images of deserted New York streets https://t.co/IbQVxHeHmc pic.twitter.com/yG30FPxwsA

– THE WORLD (@elmundoes) March 23, 2020

Christian Hofer, 42, father of a family of two children yet very organized in the face of the epidemic, said on Sunday that he was struggling to keep his calm. The hardest part, he said, is “not knowing how long this will last. I go through a whole range of emotions, from nervousness to a feeling of absurdity: I have seen a “meme” (comic edit, Editor’s note) on the internet that said, “our grandparents were called to war, we are called to stay on the sofa”, that helps put things in perspective “.

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