https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-19/gavin-newsom-california-1-billion-federal-aid-coronavirus
The extraordinary action comes as California Governor Galvin Newsom offered a grim projection about the toll the novel coronavirus might take on California.
The state projects that 25.5 million people in California will be infected over an eight-week period, Newsom said in a letter sent to President Trump on Wednesday requesting the deployment of the U.S. Navy’s Mercy hospital ship to the Port of Los Angeles through Sept. 1.
In a separate letter sent to the leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Newsom said the financial aid is crucial to the state’s ability to procure ventilators and other medical supplies, activate state-run hospitals, deploy mobile hospitals and meet other healthcare needs.
“The economic disruption caused by this public health crisis will have immediate and devastating effects on our entire country, including too many families in California,” Newsom wrote. “The magnitude of this crisis is extraordinary and federal-state-local government coordination will be more critical than ever before.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s letter to President Donald Trump on coronavirus assistance
The governor’s office declined to provide to The Times an explanation of the state’s projection that 25.5 million Californians will be infected with this virus. Instead, a spokesman for the governor said the state’s mitigation efforts could lower that estimate.
“Gov. Newsom has been honest about the threat of the virus and its impact on the health and welfare of Californians,” said Nathan Click, a spokesman for Newsom. “This projection shows why it’s so critical that Californians take action to slow the spread of the disease — and those mitigation efforts aren’t taken into account in those numbers. The state is deploying every resource at its disposal to meet this challenge, and we continue to ask for the federal government’s assistance in this fight.”
In a briefing Wednesday, the governor said the Navy hospital ship and two mobile hospitals would help the state care for an anticipated surge in patients. The governor said the state would need roughly 20,000 more beds if more than half of Californians come down with the coronavirus.
The governor’s secretary of health and human services, Dr. Mark Ghaly, offered only a brief explanation Thursday of the methodology that went into the state’s projection of 25.5 million infected Californians, saying it was arrived at in consultation with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was developed a few weeks ago.
The tens of millions of COVID-19 cases the Newsom administration is modeling represent an exponentially faster rate of spread than has been seen in other countries. Worldwide, there are about 245,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections since the outbreak began late last year.
Though testing in California and the United States is still in its beginning phases, reaching 25.5 million positives in eight weeks would exceed even Italy’s rate of infection, where about 600 people per each 1 million have tested positive, though that rate is still in flux.
Before Thursday, Newsom had recommended that bars, restaurant dining rooms and other businesses shutter and left legal orders up to the discretion of county officials, who he has argued are in the best position to determine the appropriate response in their communities.
No comments:
Post a Comment