Health authorities are asking everyone who has been in New York recently to quarantine themselves for 14 days because new sources of contamination have been detected in resorts where New Yorkers have taken refuge before confinement.
New York is becoming the epicenter of the pandemic, it is the WHO that says so. New York already represents a third of American cases, 60% of new cases detected in United States are in New York. The infection rate is 8 to 10 times higher than in the rest of the country, and the number of cases doubles every three days. The governor Cuomo throws out vibrant and desperate appeals, he says the curve is coming faster than expected, and will be higher than expected, therefore more violent. The peak is estimated to be reached in mid-April.
And at that moment, it will be necessary to have more than 140,000 beds, that is, as much as the population of Brest or Aix-en-Provence. The other day, he estimated the peak of beds needed at 110,000. It is accelerating dangerously.
Field hospitals will be set up
Many field hospitals are being edited. In a convention center, the National Guard and the engineers of the US Army are delivering beds, ventilators, etc., for a hospital with 1,000 beds as of next week, another 1,000 more will be delivered the following week. There is a big problem with the fans too. It would take tens of thousands, the White House delivered a few hundred, the governor of New York bangs his fist on the table, a few thousand more are on their way, but that won’t be enough.
New York governor steps up to the plate
Cuomo, is the son of a former governor. Some attribute dreams of the White House to him. His press conferences, broadcast on all channels, are the exact opposite of the fluctuating discourse of the president trump. Really, he’s reassuring, and even Republicans, people who’ve been on the Trump team, say that Cuomo is the man today to live up to the task in America. Yet he doesn’t announce anything cheerful, but he’s like “a lighthouse in the night “ headlines the press. It is thanks to him that many New Yorkers find sleep at night.
He doesn’t hide that it’s going to be very hard, but nevertheless he appears as President Trump’s counter-model to pro-business optimism who already announces the end of the tunnel, who wants business will resume by Easter, in two and a half weeks. There will be deaths, but there are also deaths from influenza and road accidents without stopping the economy.
Governor Cuomo replies that this calculation is brutal. Saying “They are old, they are vulnerable, they are going to die anyway, so why interrupt the economy?” He finds that scandalous. He also called his battle plan “Mathilda” after his mother, 89 years old. Cuomo explains: “We are not going to put a dollar price on a human life.”
