Category: COVID-19

CHICAGO (AP) — Bill Purdue waterproofs basements for a living, but he has spent the past few days in his buddy’s Washington, Indiana, auto trim and upholstery shop cutting rectangles of cotton fabric that his friend sews into face masks.

Fashion designer Briana Danyele left Italy last month to return to her mother’s Greer, South Carolina, home, where she has turned the living room into a mini sewing factory, making masks that she embroiders with the words, “We Got This!”

They’re among scores of people answering pleas from hospitals, doctors and nurses so desperate for personal protective equipment amid the viral pandemic that they’ve turned to the public, saying do-it-yourself face masks are better than nothing.

And for those sitting at home worrying as the virus strains hospitals and the economy teeters, sewing masks makes them feel less helpless.

“Whatever it takes to get the job done, that’s what I want to do,” said Purdue, 57, whose daughter works at the women’s hospital in Evansville, Indiana. He and his friend Mike Rice responded to a Facebook post last week from Deaconess Health System in Evansville asking the public for help.

The efforts mirror those in other countries, including Spain, where mask-making volunteers include a group of nuns and members of the Spanish Air Force. Around 500 masks a day are coming off sewing machines at the Paratroop School in Murcia, in the country’s southeast, according to the Air Force’s Twitter account.

In Belgium, what began as a one-woman operation about a week ago grew to a small army of home-sewing mask-makers within days.

For most people, the new virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority recover.

But the virus is spreading rapidly and starting to max out the health care system in several cities.

Deaconess spokeswoman Pam Hight said the hospital system realized it could face a shortage if local infections skyrocket like they have elsewhere. So officials produced and posted a how-to video that has being shared across the country.

“We had people who wanted to ship them to us from all over the United States and we started saying, ‘Please, please use them in your communities,’” she said. “It makes your heart warm; people are so good.”

She said Deaconess expects to collect thousands of masks this week at an off-hospital site and sanitize them before distributing them to nurses and doctors or sending them to local nursing homes and homeless shelters.

In a similar effort, Providence St. Joseph’s Health in the hard-hit Seattle area is putting together kits using special material and distributing them to people willing to sew them together as part of a 100-million mask challenge.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, New Hampshire’s largest hospital, is preparing kits with fabric and elastic and encouraging volunteers to sew face masks for patients, visitors and staff so medical-grade protective equipment can be conserved for front-line health care workers.

Federal officials had previously advised hospital workers to use surgical masks when treating patients who might be infected with coronavirus amid reports of dwindling supplies of fitted and more protective N95 respirator masks.

“If nurses quit or become too fatigued or even become ill themselves, then we don’t have a front line anymore,” said Wendy Byard of Lapeer, Michigan. She began organizing friends to make masks after learning her daughter, a nurse at a suburban Detroit hospital, was told to wear the same mask all day.

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly updated its guidance, saying hospitals that run low on surgical masks should consider ways to reuse them or to use them through an entire shift. And if hospitals run out out, the CDC said, scarfs or bandanas could be used ”as a last resort,” though some health officials warned cloth masks might not work.

Mary Dale Peterson, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists and chief operating officer at a Corpus Christ, Texas, children’s hospital, said she declined volunteers’ offers to make masks. She said construction and manufacturing industries instead should donate or sell the high-grade masks they have to hospitals.

“It would be only an extremely, extremely last resort that I would have my staff” wear homemade masks, she said. “I really hope it doesn’t get to that point in the U.S.”

At the Missouri Quilt Museum in Hamilton, Missouri, board members asked local hospitals if masks were needed and “they emphatically said yes,” said director Dakota Redford. Soon other health care providers, including ambulance crews and nursing homes, were requesting masks.

“This has been a true grassroots effort that has exploded across the country in the quilting world,” she said.

Businesses also are stepping up.

Crafts chain Joann Stores is making all of its 800-plus stores available for up to 10 people at each location to sew masks and hospital gowns, offering sewing machines and supplies, spokeswoman Amanda Hayes said.

Hayes said the number of people allowed in the stores adheres to CDC guidelines, the sewing stations will be six feet apart and staff will continuously sanitize the work areas and materials. The company also has special kits for customers who want to make masks at home.

“We’re enabling people to feel like they are contributing at a time when we don’t have control,” Hayes said.

In Baltimore, almost 160 volunteers with 414 3D printers between them are making plastic face shields for Johns Hopkins and other area hospitals and dropping them off at a maker space called Open Works. Executive Director Will Holman, who organized the effort, said he laid off 21 part-time employees last week because of the virus but has rehired some to assemble, sterilize and package the shields.

Danyele, the South Carolina fashion designer, said she made about 200 masks bound for a local nursing home and hospitals in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Illinois.

“If I’m one person creating 200 masks, imagine what we all could do,” said Danyele, 24. “It’s super sad that we’re at this point, but this is encouraging.”

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Durbin reported from Detroit and D’Innocenzio from New York. Associated Press writers Jeff McMillan and Michael Stobbe in New York; Martha Bellisle in Seattle; Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip; Barry Hatton in Lisbon; and Virginia Mayo in Atwerp, Belgium, contributed to this report.

A desperate race to find medical equipment continues as the World Health Organization warns that the outbreak is accelerating and calls on countries to take strong, coordinated action.

And as virus deaths accelerate in the U.S., President Donald Trump has gone against the advice of scientists and top health experts, claiming he will reopen the country and its ailing economy in weeks, not months.

Here are some of AP’s top stories Tuesday on the world’s coronavirus pandemic. Follow APNews.com/VirusOutbreak for updates through the day and APNews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak for stories explaining some of its complexities.

WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY:

— A series of missteps at America’s top public health agency created a critical shortage of reliable tests for the coronavirus. Those stumbles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hobbled the federal response as the pandemic spread across the nation.

— Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will propose a one-year postponement for the Tokyo Olympics during talks with IOC President Thomas Bach, Japan’s NHK public television reported Tuesday.

— A Phoenix-area man has died and his wife is in critical condition after the couple took an additive used to clean fish tanks known as chloroquine phosphate, similar to the drug used to treat malaria.

— Some experts don’t rule out a downturn in the United States that rivals the magnitude of the 1930s Depression.

— The virus and the nation’s crashing economy are scrambling the themes both political parties thought would carry them to victory in November. Gone are the hopes of Trump and GOP candidates to run on a strong economy. And Democrats must see if they can attack Trump’s competence when many Americans crave a return to normalcy.

— Low-income families still need food. Homeless people need beds. For decades, American nonprofits have relied on volunteers to help the country’s neediest. Now they aren’t able to show up.

— In the debut episode of “Ground Game: Inside the Outbreak,” host Ralph Russo talks to News Director for Greater China Ken Moritsugu about the lessons the rest of the world can learn from Asia to stem the spread of COVID-19.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover.

Here are the symptoms of the virus compared with the common flu.

One of the best ways to prevent spread of the virus is washing your hands with soap and water. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends first washing with warm or cold water and then lathering soap for 20 seconds to get it on the backs of hands, between fingers and under fingernails before rinsing off.

You should wash your phone, too. Here’s how.

Misinformation overload: How to separate fact from fiction and rumor from deliberate efforts to mislead.

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ONE NUMBER:

100 MILLION: There are more than 100 million people in Egypt, which is now under a two-week, 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, to help fight the spread of the virus.

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IN OTHER NEWS:

VIRUS BOT: While other industries struggle, Liu Zhiyong says China’s virus outbreak is boosting demand for his knee-high, bright yellow robots to deliver groceries and patrol malls looking for shoppers who fail to wear masks. Liu, CEO of ZhenRobotics Corp., is among millions of entrepreneurs who are gradually getting back to work after China declared victory over the coronavirus that shut down the world’s second-largest economy.

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The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

MADRID (AP) — The International Olympic Committee on Tuesday postponed this summer’s Tokyo Games for a year as coronavirus deaths mounted around the world and U.S. lawmakers closed in on a nearly $2 trillion deal to help cushion the economic damage from the crisis.

The IOC acted on the recommendation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, adding the Olympics to a long roster of sports events canceled because of the deadly outbreak.

In Washington, top congressional and White House officials said they expected to reach a deal Tuesday on a measure to shore up businesses and send relief checks to ordinary Americans. Ahead of the resumption of talks, U.S. stock futures rose sharply.

President Donald Trump urged swift action, tweeting: “Congress must approve the deal, without all of the nonsense, today. The longer it takes, the harder it will be to start up our economy.”

Meanwhile, Spain started storing bodies in an ice rink converted to a morgue, and the World Health Organization warned that infections around the globe are expected to increase “considerably.”

Some 85% of new infections came from Europe and the United States, according to the WHO, with Spain registering a record daily increase of 6,584 new infections and a leap of 500 in the death toll to 2,696.

In Madrid, vans driven by workers in protective suits and masks brought bodies to the Palacio de Hielo — Ice Palace — mall to store at its indoor skating rink until they can be buried or cremated after other facilities became overwhelmed.

The Spanish capital last week adapted two hotels to serve as emergency hospitals to help with the overflow of COVID-19 patients. It plans to convert five more. The city has also set up a field hospital.

As health care workers worked around the clock, they also struggled with scarce supplies.

“All over the country, you see examples of workers inventing homemade suits using plastics,” said Olga Mediano, a lung specialist at a hospital in Guadalajara, a city east of Madrid. “The protective suits are fundamental because without health workers we won’t be able to do anything.”

More than 387,000 people worldwide have been infected by the new coronavirus and more than 16,700 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.

For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever or coughing. But for some older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. More than 101,000 people have recovered, including more than 60,000 in China.

In Geneva, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris cited a “glimmer of hope” in hard-hit Italy after two days of slight declines in the number of new cases and deaths, while cautioning it’s “early days yet” — and the trend needed to be monitored.

In another positive sign, Chinese authorities said they would finally end a two-month lockdown in hard-hit Hubei province where the coronavirus outbreak first began.

Still, Harris said the scope of the global outbreak was “enormous” and that cases were expected to increase “considerably.”

“Just to put it in proportion: It took two years in the worst Ebola outbreak we ever had, the West African outbreak, to reach 11,000 deaths,” Harris said.

There have been more than 46,000 infections and 530 deaths in the U.S. as the virus continues to spread.

In New York, now one of the world’s biggest virus hot spots, authorities rushed to set up the thousands of hospital beds they will need in just weeks to protect the city’s 8.4 million people.

In Italy, Spain and France, the pandemic has already pushed national health systems to their breaking points.

The outbreak has killed more than 6,000 Italians, the highest death toll of any country. Officials said Monday the virus had claimed just over 600 more lives, down from 793 two days earlier.

Amid the spiking numbers in Spain, relatives of elderly people and retirement homes’ workers are expressing growing concern about the situation in retirement homes across Spain, especially in Madrid.

“We live in anguish, we have no information whatsoever,” said Esther Navarro, whose 97-year-old mother with Alzheimer is at the Residencia Usera in Madrid where some of the cases have been identified.

Spanish prosecutors are launching a judicial probe after Spanish army troops disinfecting elderly nursing homes discovered elderly people living among death bodies of those who had allegedly contracted the new coronavirus.

Confusion rippled through Britain on the first morning after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a three-week halt to all nonessential activity. The government has told most stores to close, banned gatherings of three or more people and said everyone apart from essential workers should leave home only to buy food and medicines or to exercise. But photos showed crowded trains Tuesday on some London subway lines.

“I cannot say this more strongly: we must stop all non-essential use of public transport now,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted. “Ignoring these rules means more lives lost.”

The Philippine Congress approved a bill declaring a national emergency and authorizing President Rodrigo Duterte to launch a massive aid program and tap private hospitals and ships to help as the virus outbreak starts to take hold in the Pacific nation, which has reported 552 cases.

Pakistan ordered its railways shutdown in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus as cases climbed to 903. Bangladesh, with only 39 infections, also shut down all passenger rail as a precaution and suspended all domestic flights.

In contrast to other European nations, German health authorities offered some hope that the country has flattened the exponential spread of the virus, which has already infected some 30,000.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government approved a massive new aid package to cushion the economic fallout of the outbreak, offering more than 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) to tide over small companies and entrepreneurs and pump capital into bigger companies.

The death rate in Germany has been low, with 130 recorded so far, and Germany has taken in patients from France and Italy for treatment.

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Rising reported from Berlin. Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.

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Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

The board overseeing New York City’s jails urged officials to start releasing vulnerable populations and those being held on low-level offenses as the coronavirus outbreak hit the notorious Rikers Island complex and nearby jails — infecting at least 38 people.

Another inmate, meanwhile, became the first in the country to test positive in a federal jail.

“Fewer people in the jails will save lives and minimize transmission among people in custody as well as staff,” Board of Correction interim chairwoman Jacqueline Sherman wrote in a letter to New York’s criminal justice leaders this weekend. “Failure to drastically reduce the jail population threatens to overwhelm the City jails’ healthcare system as well its basic operations.”

Sherman pushed for the release of more than 2,000 people in custody in New York City jails, including those over 50 years old; those with health conditions such as lung and heart disease; those being held for parole violations, such as missing a curfew; and those serving sentences of less than a year.

Such steps are needed, she said, to stem the tide of COVID-19.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said 23 inmates were set to be released Sunday, all older and at a low risk of offending again, and 200 additional inmates were being reviewed for release.

More than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States — more than anywhere in the world — and there are growing fears that an outbreak could spread rapidly through a vast network of federal and state prisons, county jails and detention centers.

It’s a tightly packed, fluid population that is already grappling with high rates of health problems and, when it comes to the elderly and the infirm, elevated risks of serious complications. With limited capacity nationally to test for COVID-19, men and women inside worry that they are last in line when showing flu-like symptoms, meaning that some may be infected without knowing it.

The first positive tests from inside prisons and jails started tricking out just over a week ago, with less than two dozen officers and staff infected in facilities spanning from California and Michigan to Pennsylvania. New cases pop up almost every day.

From the start, public officials and advocates called for a reduction in the size of their jail and prison populations, saying they were a tinderbox for the virus, not just inside correctional facilities, but society at large. Hundreds of incarcerated men and women have already been released, including 600 in Los Angeles and 300 in San Francisco. Other places talking about early releases include Travis County, Texas, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

“It’s like an approaching tsunami. Once it hits, it’s too late,” said James Pingeon, an attorney with Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. “I get that opening the doors of all the prisons is not realistic, but we should release as many that it’s safe to release in order to avoid a situation like the one at Rikers.”

The coronavirus outbreak in New York City jails was the largest so far nationwide.

More than half of the 38 who tested positive were people who were incarcerated.

New York State Senator Luis Sepúlveda and Assemblyman David Wepin wrote to Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday, asking him to convene an emergency committee to review all state prison inmates for possible early release. In addition to those at high risk of infection and non-violent offenders within three years of their release date, they said individuals convicted of violent crimes with just one year left should also be considered.

Cuomo suggested last week that lawmakers could approve a state budget on April 1 that could roll back last year’s bail reforms, giving judges discretion in holding people pretrial, while banning cash bail completely. Its a suggestion that worries activists and politicians on both sides of the aisle, especially at a time of crisis.

“New York is the only state in the country that is contemplating changing their bail laws during the pandemic to increase incarceration,” said Nick Milanowski, civil rights campaign director for VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization that works with low-income people affected by mass incarceration.

Laura Whitehorn, co-founder of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign, agreed.

“At a time when COVID-19 threatens illness and death on a massive level in jails and prisons, limiting the projected reforms to pre-trial detention is the very opposite of what public health and human rights demand,” she said.

In Chicago, prominent civil rights groups led by the Uptown People’s Law Center last week made a similar call to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, adding prisoners scheduled to be paroled within 120 days and those who are pregnant or living with infants should also be among those considered for early release.

The Law Center argued that simple measures to prevent the spread of the new Coronavirus are impossible to carry out in a prison setting, noting that hand sanitizer is viewed as contraband due to its alcohol content, and covering one’s mouth while coughing is impossible while handcuffed.

Alan Mills, the Center’s executive director, said state officials claim they are distributing more soap and allowing hand sanitizer inside, while men at Stateville Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, tell a different story.

“My sources at Stateville tell me that none of that has been distributed to inmates,” he said. “It’s been distributed to staff.”

A man incarcerated in New York City, meanwhile, became the first confirmed case in the federal prison system on Saturday.

The man, who is housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, complained of chest pains on Thursday, a few days after he arrived at the facility, the federal Bureau of Prisons told the AP. He was taken to a local hospital and was tested for COVID-19, officials said.

He was discharged from the hospital on Friday and returned to the jail, where he was immediately placed in isolation, the agency said, adding medical and psychiatric staff were visiting him routinely.

Others housed with the man are also being quarantined, along with staff members who may have had contact with him.

At a New York City news conference Sunday afternoon, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House judiciary Committee, said that on Thursday he sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr urging him “to put in place measures to ensure that both the flow of prisoners into federal facilities is slowed significantly and that prisoners who can and should be released are released forthwith.”

Others at the gathering voiced even greater alarm about the prospects for widespread infections with the jail and prison systems if decisive actions are not taken immediately.

Jonathan Giftos, the former medical director at Rikers, said human traffic in and out of jails and prisons makes it impossible to protect those who are incarcerated as well as correctional officers and other staff.

“They’re not closed systems,” Giftos said, adding that more than 500 patients at the Metropolitan Detention Center — nearly a third — are considered high risk for complications from COVID-19 because of their age or medical conditions. “There’s tremendous flux of people in and out of the facility, including officers and other staff who live in communities overwhelmed by positive cases,” he said.

Anthony Sanon, head of the American Federal of Government Employees local representing correction officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center, called on the Bureau of Prisons to immediately stop transferring people from one institution to another.

“There should not be any type of movement from institution to institution,” Sanon said. “We need to stop all movement in the Bureau of Prisons.”

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McDowell reported from Minneapolis. Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report