Coronavirus News (163)

Iraqi hospitals become nexus of infection as coronavirus cases rise dramatically among doctors   On the front lines, Iraq's doctors are contracting the coronavirus by the hundreds, as a rising wave of infections threatens to crush the country's health-care system. ..........  “Our hospitals are meant to treat people. Instead, they’re breeding the infection” .........   “My doctor friends who get it now wait 10 days for test results, even though they know they have it. The management doesn’t care about our safety, they just care that the staff is working.” ...........  Poor medical infrastructure, shortages of personal protective equipment and public skepticism about the severity of the threat are all to blame for the increasing cases across Iraq .............    “I dreamed all my life of being a doctor. I regret that now.” .............   He said his cousin, a doctor in the eastern province of Diyala, died in March, begging for an ambulance to take him back to a facility that would treat him. ........  many in Iraq worry it could bring an already staggering health system to its knees. ...........  “Don’t breathe too much,” said a security guard at the door. “Covid is everywhere here.” ............ In 2019, Iraq allocated just 2.5 percent of its national budget to health care. .........  Zena al-Rubaia, a technician in the Baghdad laboratory that runs coronavirus tests, woke up May 28 to find her limbs were too heavy to move, she recalled in an interview. In the next room, her mother was calling out with a fever. Days later, both tested positive for the coronavirus, and Rubaia felt sure that her work had brought it home. She was hospitalized for a week, and at the height of her pain, she feared her lungs would give up. ..............    Her mother’s breathing was ragged and her limbs were turning blue. Rubaia sat at her bedside for days in the hospital, feeling ridden with guilt as she watched her final breaths. .........  “I am the one who did this to her,” she wrote on her Facebook. Days later, her father died, too.

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm  “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up”    

Trump claims the coronavirus pandemic is ending. Data and the experts disagree.  “Nasdaq hit 10,000 for the first time, an all-time record,” Trump said. “Nasdaq, that was three, four days ago. In the middle of the pandemic, not in the middle, toward the end of the pandemic.” That’s where Trump would like to think the country is: at the tail end of the pandemic. This isn’t really a new impulse for Trump, who has consistently played down the scale of the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States. ...........   In February and March, such efforts were mostly in service of not spooking the markets, which got spooked anyway. It seems quite possible that Trump’s motivation now is the same, that he seeks to maintain the sense that the country is ready to see a return to normal economic activity to make the outcome self-fulfilling. ........... “If I didn’t act, we would have had 3 million deaths,” Trump claimed. “And instead we’re at 110,000. And we could be heading to a number that’s, you know, higher than 150,000 to 200,000. It could be ending all now depending on how it goes.” .............. Fauci’s broader point wasn’t that there’s been a new surge in coronavirus cases. “We’re still in the first wave,” he said, “because even though there’s variability throughout the country, where some places, like New York City, are going very nicely down, staying down so that they can start to reopen, simultaneously, we’re seeing in certain states an increase in cases and even now an increase, in some of the states, of hospitalization.” .................   Over the entire duration of the pandemic, about 5 percent of those who contracted the virus have died.  .........  If the number of new cases each day holds near 25,000, the eventual toll will depend on how often those cases are deadly. If the mortality rate moving forward is as low as 2 percent, that means we’ll land at 500 deaths per day — or 15,000 more deaths each month. ........... more than 200,000 deaths by Oct. 1. .........  the model predicts an increase in the number of deaths per day toward the end of the summer, when students go back to school and parents are then better able to return to work ......... The efforts to contain the virus that halted the economy, for example, are estimated to have prevented 60 million additional coronavirus infections. .......    One, Trump’s, is based on hope and optimism, while the other, Fauci’s, is based on the data. ........ Time eventually weighed in. The subject of the dispute was the drug hydroxychloroquine, and Fauci and data won the debate.