Authorities in New York Saturday declared emergency in the city as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 89, while the nationwide death toll from the virus reached 19 on Saturday.
More than half of all US states have reported cases of the coronavirus, which originated in China last year and causes the sometimes deadly respiratory illness COVID-19. As the outbreak takes root, daily life has become increasingly disrupted, with concerts and conferences canceled and universities telling students to stay home and take classes online.
Organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a high-profile annual gathering that took place in Maryland last month, said on Saturday one of their attendees had tested positive for the virus after exposure prior to the event. The person had no interactions with President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, who were in attendance, the American Conservative Union said in a statement.
The two latest deaths were in Washington’s King County, the hardest hit area in the United States after the virus spread among residents at a nursing facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland. The first deaths on the East Coast were announced late Friday, with two people succumbing in Florida.
In New York, the number of confirmed cases rose by 13 on Saturday to a statewide total of 89 people, Governor Andrew Cuomo said. He issued a declaration of emergency.
“It allows expedited purchasing and expedited hiring, which is what we need right now,” Cuomo told a news conference.
Kansas, Missouri and Washington DC announced their first cases.
People walk through a sparse international departure terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) as concern over the coronavirus grows on March 7, 2020 in New York City.-AFP
In international waters off California, passengers on a cruise ship that was barred from docking in San Francisco after some aboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus did not know on Saturday when they might be able to step ashore.
Trump said on Friday he would prefer the Grand Princess’s 2,400 passengers and 1,100 crew remain out at sea, but that he would let others decide where she should dock.
After 19 crew and two passengers out of 46 tested on the Grand Princess were found to have the virus, Pence said the ocean liner will be taken to an unspecified non-commercial port where everyone on board will be tested again, and that those “who need to be quarantined will be quarantined” and those who need medical care will receive it.
US officials also began tracking another cruise ship that may have shared crew with the Grand Princess or the Diamond Princess, another ship where the coronavirus spread onboard, Pence said.
One Grand Princess passenger described a dull and sometimes queasy wait for news of when their limbo would end.
“It bugs me that my relatives in the Bay Area know what’s going to happen with us before I do,” Elizabeth Aleteanu of Colorado Springs said in an interview conducted via Facebook.
She turned 35 on Wednesday in a small, windowless cabin shared with her husband and two young children, where the rocking of the vessel sometimes left her nauseated.
“The cruise director and staff called my phone and sang happy birthday,” she wrote. “They delivered a princess notebook, birthday card, set of dominoes and a flower arrangement to my cabin. I’m not sure that we’re getting off today. It’s a big flower arrangement ... makes me think we’ll be on board for a hot minute.”
The ship’s captain had addressed passengers earlier to say he did not know when they could dock, and that one guest who was critically ill on Friday was taken off the ship, Aleteanu said. The ship has increased its offering of television programs to help passengers pass the time, she said.
The predicament of the Grand Princess was reminiscent of the Diamond Princess cruise liner, also owned by Carnival Corp, the world’s leading cruise operator. It was quarantined off Japan in February and was for a time the largest concentration of coronavirus cases outside China.
This image grab made frame video released by the California National Guard on March 5, 2020 shows Airmen from the Moffett Federal Airfield base, 129th Rescue Wing arriving by helicopter to deliver test kits to the Grand Princess cruise ship off the coast of California.-AFP
Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, told a news conference at the White House on Saturday that a total of 2.1. million coronavirus tests will have been shipped to non-public labs by Monday, as the Trump administration aims to counter criticism that its response to the disease has been sluggish.
Hahn said the focus is on getting tests to the highest risk areas in Washington state and California.
Multiple manufacturers will soon send millions more tests, he said. “What they told us is they believe they could scale up by the end of next week ... for the capacity for 4 million additional tests that could be shipped,” Hahn said.
The respiratory illness has spread to more than 90 countries, killing more than 3,400 people and infecting more than 100,000 worldwide.
The economic damage has also intensified and stock markets have continued to tumble. To mitigate against the virus, some banks in New York are dividing their teams of traders between central locations and secondary sites in New Jersey and Connecticut, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc had a scare this past week when an employee at its Lower Manhattan offices told the bank he had been at a temple service in a city suburb with a lawyer who later tested positive for the coronavirus. The bank said the employee was sent home and has been under self-quarantine since then “out of an abundance of caution.”
The employee, however, did not have contact with the lawyer at the service and has not shown any signs of illness, the bank said. He is expected to return to work next week when it would have been two weeks since he attended the service.
Goldman also cleaned the floor on which he worked at its headquarters. All floors remained operational, though Goldman let employees who felt uncomfortable work remotely, it said.
“We have no confirmed cases of employees who have contracted COVID-19 and all our buildings are fully operational,” the bank said.
The first patient of COVID-19, the mysterious viral pneumonia-like disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in Sindh has fully recovered, government officials said on Friday.
The patient, a young student from a town on the edge of Karachi, would be discharged from the hospital on Saturday as his third lab test for the novel coronavirus has come out negative, the officials said.
“The patient was in isolation and treatment for the past 10 days and was tested three times. The third test was done this (Friday) morning and it came out negative after which he was cleared by the authorities,” one official told The Express Tribune.
Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, who was informed about the development in a meeting of coronavirus task force in Karachi, congratulated family of the COVID-19 patient and called it a great victory.
The young patient, who is believed to have contracted the virus in the Iranian holy city of Qum, was diagnosed on Feb 26 and subsequently shifted to the isolation ward of a private hospital. He had travelled to the Islamic Republic in a group of 28 pilgrims.
The family of the young patient – including his father, mother and sister – were immediately placed in quarantine, but were discharged after their lab tests for the novel coronavirus came out negative.
the remaining two coronavirus patients in Sindh, the officials said one is recovering fast, while the other is also in a stable condition. Health authorities have advised the media against identifying the patients or sharing their personal details.
The development came a day after the state minister for health, Dr Zafar Mirza, confirmed a sixth case of the novel coronavirus, the mysterious virus which originated in a vet market of the central Chinese city of Wuhan and has since then spread to more than 90 countries of the world, killing over 3,400 and infecting over 100,000, mostly in China thus far.
But new outbreaks in Europe, the Middle East and in Asia have fanned fears of the contagion taking hold in poor nations that lack the healthcare infrastructure to cope.
There are growing fears in Pakistan — sandwiched between China and Iran, both hotspots for the disease — over how the country would deal with the outbreak.
Three of Pakistan’s confirmed coronavirus cases were in Karachi and the rest in Gilgit-Baltistan region – and all had a travel history to Iran where they are believed to have contracted the highly infectious disease.
Actor Ahmed Ali Butt believes that the slogan Mera Jism Meri Marzi is a Western campaign that is being exploited locally. In a recent Instagram story, Butt talked about how the slogan that otherwise goes against the country’s cultural values is being promoted in Pakistan ahead of the Aurat March on Sunday.
“I have even less sympathy for people who exploit the so-called Mera J Merey XYZ”. Its a Western campaign which supports, make abortion legal, abolish ban on organ sale and make prostitution legal,” he said in the story.
Butt then went on to talk about how it was said to see how people are following such “funded” movements. “When it comes to women rights, Islam has the most rights rights and respect for women. It’s sad to see how we forgot that and follow a trend and funded movements,” he said.
Contrary to Butt’s view point, the organisers of the Aurat March have on many occasions clarified that the slogan is about bodily autonomy and independence for women.
“‘Mera jism meri marzi’ means that women want bodily autonomy and independence. To be able to have the right to choose in matters concerning their bodies. To choose what to wear without fear of rape. To choose who to marry. To choose whether they want to have children, how many, and when they want to have them. To not have their husbands rape them because they feel entitled to their bodies after marriage. To have access to mobility in their day-to-day lives for work and for leisure. To not have their bodies maimed in the name of having their sexuality controlled,” a recent Instagram post from the Aurat March account read.
