Via The Guardian: US may become next centre of coronavirus pandemic, says WHO. Excerpt:
The US could become the new centre of the global coronavirus pandemic, according to the World Health Organization, which said case numbers were rising quickly there even as Donald Trump talked of reopening the country for business.
“We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the US. So it does have that potential [to become the centre of the pandemic],” the WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.
So far, 46,450 people in the US have become infected with the virus and there have been 593 deaths, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
In Spain, meanwhile, the numbers infected and tested rose from 33,089 to 39,673 on Tuesday, according to the health ministry, while the death toll rose from 2,182 to 2,696. Health workers accounted for nearly 14% of Spain’s total reported cases as of Tuesday, up from 12% the previous day, according to data presented by the health emergency chief, Fernando Simon.
Trump acknowledged that crucial healthcare supplies to protect frontline staff treating sick patients were becoming difficult to obtain.
In an early morning tweet, he said: “The world market for face masks and ventilators is crazy. We are helping the states to get equipment, but it is not easy.”
But while more US governors were urging people to stay at home, Trump appeared to play down the crisis on Monday night.
The president said he was considering ways to restart the economy in the coming weeks and wanted to avoid the pandemic becoming “a long-lasting financial problem”. It would not last as long as three or four months, he said.
“Our country was not built to be shut down,” Trump said. “This is not a country that was built for this.”
Trump’s senior advisers referred to current government restrictions as a “15-day challenge” and pledged to revisit in a week’s time the need for sweeping measures to prevent the spread of the virus.
The top coronavirus response official in Italy, the country with the highest death toll, attributed two successive declines in the daily death rate to a national lockdown that appeared to be finally bearing fruit.
But Angelo Borrelli also noted that the real number of infections was probably 10 times higher than the official count. He also said the nation of 60 million was on course to overtake China’s total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in a week.
“The measures we took two weeks ago are starting to have an effect,” Borrelli said in an interview with La Repubblica. He said more data over the next few days will help understand “if the growth curve is really flattening”.
