The United States has become the first country to report more than 2,000 fatalities from the coronavirus disease in a single day and President Donald Trump said he will name a task force next week to decide when to reopen the country, and it does not have to be May 1, a date he has been reportedly considering.
The president also continued his feud with the World Health Organization (WHO) and said he will have an announcement abut US funding for it. He has accused the world body of getting the pandemic wrong and then being “China-centric” and siding with it to help conceal the true extent of their outbreak.
The United States continued to be hammered by the pandemic with the toll, which stood at 18,770 Saturday morning, set to overtake Italy’s 18,849. New York, the epicenter of the American outbreak, accounted for nearly half the country’s fatalities with 7,887; most of them in New York City, 5,820.
The number of confirmed cases in the United States went past the half-million mark in the same period to 501,560; the world total of cases was 1.7 million effecting 184 countries, and 103,800 deaths.
Despite the rising numbers of cases and fatalities US officials have said there are signs of an improvement in the situations, specially in the hotspots, geographies with high incidence of cases. New York, for instance, has seen a drop in hospitalization; adjoining states of New Jersey and Connecticut have stabilized and cities such as Boston and Chicago that continue to report cases, the rate of increase has stabilized.
{{/usCountry}}Despite the rising numbers of cases and fatalities US officials have said there are signs of an improvement in the situations, specially in the hotspots, geographies with high incidence of cases. New York, for instance, has seen a drop in hospitalization; adjoining states of New Jersey and Connecticut have stabilized and cities such as Boston and Chicago that continue to report cases, the rate of increase has stabilized.
{{/usCountry}}But the country has not yet reached the peak, health officials have said. “As encouraging as they are,” Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House task force on the coronavirus outbreak, said at the daily briefing Friday, “we have not reached the peak.” April 16 is the projected peak day.
The current strategy of social-distancing is working, she and other experts have said as they caution against easing up. “It’s important to remember that this is not the time to feel that since we have made such important advance in the sense of success of the mitigation, that we need to be pulling back at all,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading epidemiologist and a member of the task force Americans have come to trust the most.
President Trump has seemed in a hurry to open the the country and put it back to business as the economy is getting pummeled by the virus. Unemployment has shot up into double digits, with more than 16 million filing for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks, and experts are warning of the return of the Great Depression of 1929.
Trump is concerned about implications for his re-elections prospects and has reportedly sought a plan from aides to reopen the country by May 1. Asked if he is determined to remove the restriction by that date, he said, “I’m not -- I am -- I would love to open it. I’m not determined anything. The facts are going to determine what I do.”
The president then went on to announce he will be naming a task force or a council to decide when the country should be reopened. “This is really -- I call it, ‘The Opening Our Country Task Force’ or ‘Opening Our Country Council’, so we don’t get it confused with Mike’s task force (the White House task on coronavirus headed by Vice-President Mike Pence), which has done so great. And we’re going to have the great business leaders, great doctors. We’re going to have a great group of people.”
The president, who expects to name the embers of the body on Tuesday. also assured reporters he will abide by the advice of his experts on this issue.
Also next week, the American leader expects to announce his decision on continued funding of the WHO, with whom he has been carrying on a very public spat.”We’re paying them more than 10 times more than China,” he said Friday, referring to the annual contributions of the two countries, which he added, were around $450 million and $42 million respectively.
“They are very, very China-centric … China always seems the to get the better of the -- the argument, and I don’t like that.”
WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu has hit back and called on Trump to “quarantine politicizing COVID” earlier in the week.