The U.S. now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases.
Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday.
In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths — more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.
With 330 million residents, the United States is the world’s third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.
A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nation’s response.
Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.
States plead for more federal help, but White House cancels ventilator production plan.
In a White House briefing, Deborah L. Birx, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, insisted that talk of ventilator and hospital bed shortages was overwrought, but she warned of new hot spots developing in and around Chicago and Detroit.
In New York, now the hardest-hit area in the United States, doctors scrambled as the number of hospitalized patients jumped by 40 percent in a day — to 5,327 patients, of whom 1,290 were in intensive care, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Several medical schools in Massachusetts and New York said this week that they intended to offer early graduation to their fourth-year students, making them available to care for patients eight weeks earlier than expected.
To further support New York, the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort is expected to arrive at Manhattan on Monday, three weeks earlier than previously thought. The ship will take patients from area hospitals who do not have symptoms of the virus.
Despite bleak jobs data — more than three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week — Wall Street was in rally mode on Thursday. Investors bid up shares of companies that were set to receive support from Washington’s $2 trillion coronavirus aid bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would pass the bill on Friday “with strong bipartisan support.”
American attempts at “disaster diplomacy” with Iran and North Korea haven’t gotten very far.
The Iranians angrily dismissed the offer, calling it insincere and demanding broader relief from crippling American sanctions. The North Koreans, angry with the United States over stalled nuclear negotiations, said they appreciated the offer but did not publicly accept, warning of “big difficulties” in their relationship with the United States.
But the two cases illustrate the way Mr. Trump continues to pursue his foreign policy goals amid the pandemic, and the way the virus is shaping his approach. Administration officials see the crisis as creating new opportunities, but it also brings new risks as China and Russia seek to take advantage of a moment of perceived weakness and disarray for their American adversaries.
Experts call it disaster diplomacy — the way nations use disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis and diseases to advance their agendas overseas. Historically, that has involved local catastrophes; now Mr. Trump and other world leaders are calibrating their political responses to a crisis afflicting all of humanity.
Governors, seeing a sea of red ink, warn that the federal stimulus will fall short.
With the economic slowdown wrought by the coronavirus draining states of much-needed tax revenues as responding to the crisis is driving up their expenses, governors across the country are warning that the new federal stimulus bill will not give states the money they need.
While several governors said that the bill was a positive — and appreciated — start, they also said that it was not nearly enough to deal with plummeting state revenues and growing pleas for assistance from their residents.
“It does include some money that Maryland needs — not nearly enough for us or the other states,” said Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat from California, thanked his party’s leadership in Congress, but said there also needed to be more. During a news conference on Wednesday, Governor Newsom said the state was slated to receive about $10 billion in a block grant.
“No one is naive about the magnitude of this crisis,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that the magnitude of this stimulus will even meet the moment. I certainly have strong points of view that there needs to be more in the future.”
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican, said the benefits of the stimulus will depend in part on how the Treasury Department interprets how some of that money flows to her state.
“We do see that there is some reimbursement for costs associated with our response to Covid-19 in the state of South Dakota,” she said during a Thursday news conference. “There is some concern on what we do about revenue loss at the state level because we do have revenue loss dramatically impacting our state right now.”
Perhaps the most critical state leader was New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. He has complained that the bill was “terrible” for his state, which has been the hardest hit by the virus. Mr. Cuomo, who said New York faces a projected shortfall of between $10 billion and $15 billion due as tax collections plummet due to the economic slowdown, said that the roughly $3.1 billion to address New York’s budget gap was disproportionately low.
What you can do to protect yourself and everyone else.
You can take several steps to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and keep yourself safe. Be consistent about social distancing. Wash your hands often. And when you do leave your home for groceries or other essentials, wipe down your shopping cart and be smart about what you are purchasing.
Reporting was contributed by Donald G. McNeil Jr., Maya Salam, John Eligon, Michael Crowley and Lara Jakes, Jesse Drucker, Carl Hulse and Emily Cochrane.