Credit…Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
- Some places will have to wait for masks and ventilators, a top U.S. official says.
- Mnuchin says he expects a vote on a stimulus package on Monday.
- Washington State warns it could run out of ventilators.
- Thousands of health workers in Spain test positive, as countries worldwide struggle.
- Trump wrote to Kim Jong-un offering help, North Korea says.
- Hawaii orders a 14-day quarantine for all arrivals.
President Trump’s top emergency management official, confronting growing cries from governors and other elected officials for more hospital masks, ventilators and other medical supplies, said on Sunday that localities not severely affected by the outbreak would simply have to wait.
“There’s hundreds of requests — virtually every state in the union looking for the same thing, and it’s not just the demand nationally, it’s a demand globally for these items,” said Peter T. Gaynor, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The number of identified cases across the country, however, has been limited by the availability of testing. In places like New York that have increased their testing capacity, the number of cases has soared.
Local elected officials around the country have called on Mr. Trump to use his authority under the Defense Production Act to mobilize the private sector to increase production of scarce goods. Mr. Trump has so far declined to do so, Mr. Gaynor said, and is instead using the threat of the act as “leverage to demonstrate that we can.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said there were still not enough supplies at hospitals in her district, and argued that places where the epidemic was not as severe could ill afford to wait.
“The fact that the president has not really invoked the Defense Production Act for the purposes of emergency manufacturers is going to cost lives,” she said on “State of the Union.”
Navy Vet
Article URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-news.html