Coronavirus Pandemic: Latest Update (March 28, 2020)
Almost a full three months since a strange virus was first reported by Chinese authorities to the World Health Organization (WHO), people the world over are coming to grips with a pandemic which seems to have no end in sight and which has caused human suffering and economic disruption on an unprecedented scale.
From Alaska to Azerbaijan and from Yellowknife to Yokohama, local and national economies have been dealt such a harsh blow that it is almost impossible to forecast the start of a recovery.
When asked Friday by an ABC News reporter how long the state and city will remain in lockdown, an exhausted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shrugged his shoulders and said: “Your guess is as good as mine.”
There was a bit clearer of an answer Saturday evening. During a CNN Town Hall on COVID-19, Bill Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, estimated a return to some kind of normalcy in the US of upwards of 10 weeks. “The light is not at the end of the tunnel in terms of a mid-April re-opening,” Gates said
Though amidst a news cycle that has been dominated mostly by bad news, WHO was able to report Saturday that no new countries/territories/areas reported cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. That leaves a little less than 20 countries/territories which are free of the coronavirus.
The other good news is that overall numbers on the African continent, which has many densely-populated areas and countries with fragile health systems, remain low. That situation is reflected in the map below. Though in South Africa, where the government has been widely slammed for a poor response, there are 1170 cases - the highest on the continent. The majority of African countries, however, have a caseload below 50.
In Kenya, which has just 38 cases, the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta has taken heat for a disorderly response and strict measures have been introduced - including a nightly curfew from 7pm to 5am.
Outside of China, the hotspots are now Italy, Spain and New York City. On Saturday, Italy recorded 919 new coronavirus deaths, its highest daily figure in the outbreak so far, reports the BBC. In a grim statistic, the country has now surpassed the milestone of 10,000 deaths due to COVID-19. That is almost three time the total number of deaths in China and roughly one-third of the 30, 780 deaths worldwide. There are fears that the outbreak may explode in the poorer south of the country. Nationwide, 46 doctors have now died since the start of the pandemic.
An Italian doctor in the northern epicenter told BBC World News on Saturday that the peak of deaths and new cases should be “in the next days.”
“It’s as if the country is losing the population of a village day after day - BBC Rome correspondent Mark Lowen”
In Spain, the situation is becoming grimmer by the day. Confirmed cases as of Saturday have reached 64,059 - a double digit increase from each of the previous two days. Almost 5,000 people have died, with 769 in the past 24 hours alone.
And, in a stark indication of how quickly case and death numbers are spiking worldwide, the widely-quoted Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center was reporting more than 662,00 cases worldwide and 30,780 deaths as of 03:00 CET Sunday. That compares to WHO figures of just 17 hours earlier of 571,678 cases/26,494 deaths.
The United States has now become the country with the highest number of COVID19 cases worldwide - with the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reporting 121,478 as of 9pm ET Saturday.
Cuomo reported 7,681 new coronavirus cases in the state on Saturday morning, bringing the total up to 52,318 cases. The number of deaths in state is up to 728..
He added that he wished he could forecast when the state-wide lockdown will end: “People will know as soon as I will know. Because I put those numbers out every morning. It’s about data and science. There are no guesses here. There’s no political opinion here, this is about public health.
“So let’s do it intelligently based on numbers and science, and not hope and fiction.”
Healthcare workers worldwide are exhausted and under intense pressure. These two health workers in hard-hit Spain console each other.
As I have said on-air several times, part of the problem with containment measures is that different jurisdictions are using different measures to, for example, enforce social distancing. While the streets and the subway platforms of the nation's hotspot, New York City, remained deserted and under lockdown Saturday, beachgoers were photographed frolicking on the sands of St. Johns County in Florida. In the photo below you can see exactly where St. Johns ends and where Duval County (which has beach bans) starts.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has come under heavy criticism for refusing to order a state-wide closure of beaches. He has also singled out New Yorkers for spreading the virus and has issued an order for “all individuals flying into Florida to self-quarantine for 14 days.”
A photo from 3pm Saturday: You can see exactly where Duval County ends (which has beach closure) & where St John’s starts. Photo: Clay Archer
There are widespread fears that the slow response of authorities in the United States will worsen the impact of COVID-19 in the country. Said Johns Hopkins University Nursing Professor Jason Farley: “Italy warned us, yet we (the US) delayed. China showed us how to flatten the curve and yet we still delayed.”
Late Saturday, US President Donald Trump said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will issue a ‘strong travel advisory’ for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It was a climb down from his threat to impose a federal quarantine on three area after strong pushback by Cuomo and others.
Early Sunday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Trump’s handling of the response. “We should be taking every precaution. What the President, his denial at the beginning was deadly," Pelosi said in an exclusive interview with CNN's Jake Tapper.
“As the President fiddles, people are dying. We just have to take every precaution."
Just a day earlier, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had this to say about the prognosis for the outbreak: “People need to be ready for battle…April could be worse than March. And May could be worse than April.”
The mayor added that as many as half-a-million New Yorkers could become jobless due to the crisis.