Via The New York Times: Live Coronavirus News and Updates. These reports, taken together, are very saddening. Excerpt:
President Trump hints at a short shutdown: “I’m not looking at months.”
President Trump, in a nearly two-hour coronavirus briefing, hinted on Monday that the economic shutdown meant to halt the spread of the virus across the country would not be extended.
“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he said. “America will again and soon be open for business,” the president added, without providing a timeline for when he believes normal economic activity could resume.
“If it were up to the doctors, they’d say let’s shut down the entire world,” Mr. Trump said. “This could create a much bigger problem than the problem that you started out with.”
He later added, “I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now.”
Mr. Trump sent mixed signals from the White House lectern, agreeing at one point with his surgeon general and saying, “It’s going to be bad,” then suggesting that the response to the virus may have been overblown.
“This is going away. We’re going to win the battle,” Mr. Trump said, citing jobs, “anxiety and depression” and suicide as arguments for restoring the U.S. economy.
He compared deaths from the novel coronavirus to deaths from other causes — influenza and car crashes — suggesting that the scale of those preventable deaths means economic restrictions may not be appropriate to prevent the spread of the virus.
“We have a very active flu season, more active than most,” he said “It’s looking like it’s heading to 50,000 or more deaths — not cases, 50,000 deaths. Which is — that’s a lot. And you look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody, ‘No more driving of cars.’ So we have to do things to get our country open.”
While it is true that those causes of death outnumber deaths from the virus to date, projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that deaths from Covid-19 could range from 200,000 to 1.7 million people. Estimates from other scientists place the potential deaths in a range from several hundred thousand to several million deaths, substantially more than annual deaths from car accidents and flu combined.
Mr. Trump also suggested the economic contraction caused by restrictions on commerce and travel to prevent spread of the coronavirus could lead to large-scale fatalities from suicide — “probably more death from that than anything we’re talking about with respect to the virus,” he said. The number of suicides in the country would need to quadruple to approach the low end of the estimates for possible coronavirus deaths.
The White House team warns of an alarming “attack rate” in New York.
Even as the president seemed to see an end to the crisis, his team warned of an alarming spread in New York.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said that the New York metro area is experiencing a virus “attack rate” of nearly one in a thousand, or five times that of other areas.
In epidemiology, the attack rate is the percentage of a population that has a disease. In New York City itself, where there have been 12,339 cases in a population of 8.6 million, the attack rate works out to about 1 in 700. The city has about a third of the nation’s confirmed coronavirus cases.
Dr. Birx added that 28 percent of tests for the coronavirus in the region were coming up positive, while in the rest of the country the rate is less than 8 percent.
“So to all of my friends and colleagues in New York, this is the group that needs to absolutely social distance and self-isolate at this time,” Dr. Birx said. “Clearly, the virus had been circulating there for a number of weeks to have this level of penetrance into the general community.”
New York has tried to slow the spread of the coronavirus by closing its schools, shutting down its nonessential businesses and urging its residents to stay home almost around the clock. But it faces a distinct obstacle in trying to stem new cases: its cheek-by-jowl density.
New York is far more crowded than any other major city in the United States. It has 28,000 residents per square mile, while San Francisco, the next most jammed city, has 17,000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
