The death toll from coronavirus in the U.S. surpassed 1,000 late Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
NBC News reports: The number of reported deaths associated with the disease in the U.S. was at least 1,001 as of Thursday morning, according to that count, and there have been more than 68,000 reported cases. Globally, reported deaths passed 21,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. The university puts the U.S. death toll even higher than the NBC News count, listing 1,050 as of around 2:30 a.m. ET. Deaths continued to rise in New York, which has been called the epicenter of the epidemic on the U.S. There have been at least 334 deaths linked to the illness caused by the novel coronavirus as of early Thursday.
The coronavirus deaths in New York included 13 in just 24 hours at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which has already reached its breaking point.
From the New York Times: Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens, has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other hospitals as it moves toward becoming dedicated entirely to the outbreak. Doctors and nurses have struggled to make do with a few dozen ventilators. Calls over a loudspeaker of “Team 700,” the code for when a patient is on the verge of death, come several times a shift. Some have died inside the emergency room while waiting for a bed. A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead. Over the past 24 hours, New York City’s public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died. “It’s apocalyptic,” said Dr. Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.
Watch a video report from the NYT below.
