India-born celebrity chef Floyd Cordoz died of complications from Covid-19 in New York City, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, as authorities ramped up medical supplies in the city and asked those who left it recently to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Cordoz, the culinary director of Mumbai’s Bombay Canteen and NewYork’s Tabla, died in a hospital where he had been under treatment since March 18. He had returned to the city from Mumbai earlier this month.
More than 800 people have died from Covid-19 in the US so far and some 60,000 people have tested positive. The surge in cases has prompted the WHO to warn that the US could potentially be the next epicentre of the outbreak.
New York City has been hit the hardest with more than 15,000 confirmed cases and nearly 200 deaths. America’s most populous city accounts for 56% of all US cases, 60% of all new cases and 31% of mortality.
As a consequence, the state of New York is the worst affected among the 50 states, with 30,811 confirmed cases and 285 deaths, followed by California. It is feared that, with 2,643 cases and 55 deaths, the West Coast state could be the next hot spot. Washington, another state on the West Coast, reported 2,469 cases and 123 deaths.
“We’re still on the way up the mountain,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said at his daily briefing on Wednesday. Both the NY state and New York City are facing an acute shortage of medical supplies including hospital beds and ventilators.
Cuomo has said the state needs upwards of 140,000 beds and currently has around 50,000 and is way short of ventilators. The government has sent four mobile hospitals with thousands of beds and is moving a US navy hospital ship also; likewise for ventilators, 4,000 on the way from the national stockpile.
New York’s medical facilities are under unprecedented pressure with new coronavirus infections doubling every three days, Cuomo said. NYC hospitals have seen a 10-fold increase in positive cases, officials have said.
US authorities are now also focusing on preventing New Yorkers fleeing to safety elsewhere in the country and people who travelled to New York City recently from spreading the virus. “For anyone in the New York metropolitan area who has travelled, our task force is encouraging you to monitor your temperature, be sensitive to symptoms,” vice-president Mike Pence, who heads the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, said at a briefing. “And we are asking anyone who has travelled out of the New York City metropolitan area to anywhere else in the country to self isolate for 14 days.”
Two leading medical experts on the task force had first made that case at the briefing, citing high incidence of new cases and the danger of travellers and New Yorkers leaving city for their own safety, carrying it to other areas. And that there have been cases that suggested infected people have left the city.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a member of the task force, added that self-isolation for these people was necessary “because we don’t want that to be another seeding point to the rest of the country, wherever they go”.
Stay-at-home orders are in effect in 17 states, covering 175 million people – more than a third of the population of the US – to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.
