Coronavirus crisis – Global death toll tops 65,000; total tally 12 lakh

The coronavirus pandemic was still raging across the world, posing a test for countries and regions, as the global number of confirmed cases increased to 1,213,000, according to the latest update by the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).

New Delhi: The coronavirus pandemic was still raging across the world, posing a test for countries and regions, as the global number of confirmed cases increased to 1,213,000, according to the latest update by the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).

At time of writing, the CSSE data showed that that global death toll stood at 65,652

The US remains the worst-affected country in the world, with over 312,000 confirmed cases.

The city where the coronavirus pandemic began – Wuhan in China’s Hubei province – parts of the city are showing tentative signs of reopening. Residents have slowly been returning to the streets to buy street food – with some allowed to leave their homes for the first time since 23 January.

Trump says ‘toughest’ weeks ahead as death toll surges past 8,400

US president Donald Trump warned Americans that the country is headed into a few brutal weeks ahead where ‘there will be a lot of death’, and also circled back to his riff on reopening the economy as the coronavirus death toll surged past 8,400, overwhelming the domestic health care system.

‘There will be a lot of death, unfortunately. There will be death’, Trump said at a White House briefing on Saturday.

‘This country was not designed to be closed. The cure cannot be worse than the problem’, Trump said even as the country’s top infectious diseases experts pleaded with Americans to strictly follow social distancing guidelines in place from March 16.

‘This is the moment to do everything that you can listed on the presidential guidelines,’ Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus coordinator, urged Americans as the country’s caseload climbed to more than 300,000.

‘This is the moment to not be going to the grocery store, not be going to the pharmacy, and keeping your family safe. That means everybody doing the six feet distancing, washing your hands’, she said.

America’s foremost medical leaders on the US coronavirus task force are clear that ‘physical separateness’ is the most crucial behaviour needed to blunt the alarming curve of the virus spread in the US.

The next two weeks are ‘incredibly important’, Birx cautioned. The worst hit from the outbreak is likely in the coming 7-10 days, especially in the country’s top two hotspots of New York and New Jersey.

Based on the predictive models the US government is using, New York’s peak toll of 855 deaths on a single day is likely around April 10. As on date, New York is facing a shortage of more than 60,000 hospital beds to handle that projected peak load and is falling short of at least 11,000 intensive care unit beds. It’s what New York governor Andrew Cuomo is calling the ‘battle at the top of the mountain’, referring to the steep bell shaped curve of the predictive model.

New York and New Jersey are reporting 35 percent of their tests are positive. Louisiana follows close behind with a 26 per cent positive rate. Michigan, Connecticut, Indiana, Georgia and Illinois are at 15 per cent while Colorado, Washington DC, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are all at 13 per cent. Detroit and Pennsylvania are also beginning to look ‘concerning’, according to Birx.

‘As sobering and a difficult as this is, what we are doing is making a difference,’ Fauci said. But even as Fauci urged Americans to be patient and let mitigation efforts work, Trump said: ‘Mitigation does work. But again, we’re not going to destroy our country.’

Fauci returned to his earlier note of caution that America will see deaths continue to go up in the coming week or two. That, he said, ‘is really a cascading of events where you see new cases, hospitalisation, intensive care and deaths.’

Effective mitigation, Fauci said, tracks back to the number of new cases. ‘We’re going to pay close attention to that.’

Fauci remains hopeful that the social mitigation measures currently in place in the US will be able to blunt the attack rate.

Even as Trump kept coming back to strategies that could put the country back to work, Fauci emphasised how countries which followed a strict mitigation succeeded in blunting the curve.

‘Washington got hit really early and they put in a strong mitigation program. They’re still down there on the charts, doing well’, he said as Trump looked on.

Fauci has for long focused him messaging around what he calls the ‘two opposing forces’ of the virus’ path across societies and social distancing measures.

‘The virus wants to do what the virus wants to do. Viruses transmit from people to people. When people are separated from each other, virus does not transmit. It doesn’t go anywhere.

‘As sobering and a difficult as this is, what we are doing is making a difference,’ Fauci said.

According to Fauci, the ‘ultimate solution’ to a virus that might keep coming back is a vaccine and that, he has said, will take 12-18 months.

The Trump administration estimates that coronavirus will kill 100,000-200,000 people in America even with full mitigation measures in place.

Spain overtakes Italy in number of COVID-19 cases

The overall number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Spain has increased to 126,168, overtaking Italy’s tally of 124,632, making it the worst-affected European nation in terms of infections.

The tally placed Spain first in Europe and second only to the US worldwide in terms of confirmed cases. The US was currently the highest with a total of 312,076 cases, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at the Washington-based Johns Hopkins University.

The CSSE update showed that Italy had the highest number of deaths in the world at 15,362, followed by Spain in the second place with 11,947 fatalities.

Despite the grim figures, a glimmer of hope seems to appear in Europe’s battle against the virus, with some positive changes occurring, Xinhua news agency reported.

Spain reported 809 new deaths between Friday and Saturday, 123 fewer than the 932 deaths registered between Thursday and Friday.

The single-day increase of 7,026 new cases on Saturday was also down from the 7,472 recorded on Friday.

Italy also reported its first decline in the number of patients in intensive care units.

‘The number of patients in intensive care has decreased by 74 individuals,’ Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli said on Saturday.

‘It is the first negative number since we began managing the emergency,’ he added.

Saturday’s death toll of 681 also continued the declining trend.

‘The number of daily fatalities has constantly been decreasing’ from a high of 969 deaths on March 27, Borrelli pointed out.

France, despite a spike in death toll because of the inclusion of the deaths linked to COVID-19 in nursing homes, started to see a slowdown in the number of patients requiring life support.

It dropped to 2.6 per cent on Saturday from 4 per cent on Friday.

COVID-19 cases in Portugal on Saturday passed the 10,000 mark, reaching 10,524. But the number of infected people appears to be decreasing in recent days, according to the country’s public health experts.

(With Agency input)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story and may not have modified or edited by Quickclarity news)

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