U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Coronavirus Live Updates: 

U.S. Now Leads the World in 

Confirmed Cases

NYTimes,

26 March, 2020

Unemployment data set a bleak record and hospitals struggled with an influx of sick patients and lack of equipment. But the White House coronavirus response coordinator dismissed talk of shortages.

RIGHT NOW The Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort is expected to arrive in Manhattan on Monday, three weeks earlier than previously thought. It will bolster the capacity of New York’s hospitals, now straining with patients.

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.