In brief

World virus deaths pass 100,000, with New York area hit hard

NEW YORK — The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 Friday as the epidemic in the U.S. cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains and buses.

In the bedroom communities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to the east on Long Island and north to Connecticut, officials were recording some of the worst outbreaks in the country, even as public health authorities expressed optimism that the pace of infections appeared to be slowing.

As of Friday, the New York metropolitan area accounted for more than half the nation’s over 18,000 deaths, with other hot spots in places such as Detroit, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

“Once it gets into the city, there are so many commuters and travel, it gets everywhere,” said Matt Mazewski, a Columbia University economics student who tried to get away from the epicenter by leaving his apartment near the New York City campus for his parents’ house in Long Valley, New Jersey.

Worldwide, the number of deaths hit another sad milestone, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, while confirmed infections reached about 1.7 million.

Tracking NYC’s coronavirus fight, from 911 call to ER door

NEW YORK — The coronavirus crisis is taxing New York City’s 911 system like never before.

Operators pick up a new call every 15.5 seconds. Panicked voices tell of loved ones in declining health. There are multitudes of cardiac arrests and respiratory failures and others who call needing reassurance that a mere sneeze isn’t a sign they’ve been infected.

The system is so overwhelmed, the city has started sending text and tweet alerts urging people to only call 911 “for life-threatening emergencies.”

As the city staggered through its deadliest week of the pandemic, its emergency response system and army of operators, dispatchers and ambulance crews is being pushed to the brink.

The fire department said it has averaged more than 5,500 ambulance requests each day — about 40% higher than usual, eclipsing the total call volume on Sept. 11, 2001.

In a test of faith, Christians mark Good Friday in isolation

JERUSALEM — On the day set aside to mark Christ’s crucifixion, most churches stood empty. Streets normally filled with emotional processions were silent. St. Peter’s Square was almost deserted. And many religious sites in the Holy Land were closed.

Instead, Christians around the world commemorated Good Friday behind closed doors, seeking solace in online services and trying to uphold centuries-old traditions in a world locked down by the coronavirus pandemic.

Inside Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the chanting of a small group of clerics echoed faintly through the heavy wooden doors, as a few people kneeled outside to pray. In St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis presided over a candle-lit procession, with nurses and doctors among those holding a torch.

The Jerusalem church, built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead, is usually packed with pilgrims and tourists. But on Friday, four monks in brown robes and blue surgical masks prayed at the stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa, the ancient route through the Old City where Jesus is believed to have carried the cross before his execution at the hands of the Romans. It runs past dozens of souvenir shops, cafes and hostels, nearly all of which are closed.

In any other year, tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world retrace Jesus’ steps in the Holy Week leading up to Easter. But flights are grounded and most travel canceled as authorities try to prevent the spread of the virus.

Analysis: Virus shows benefit of learning from other nations

In 1910, when a contagious pneumonic plague was ravaging northeastern China, a physician there concluded that the disease traveled through the air. So he adapted something he had seen in England. He began instructing doctors, nurses, patients and members of the public to wear gauze masks.

That pioneering of masks by Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated modernizer of Chinese medicine, is credited with saving the lives of those around him. A French physician working with Wu, however, rejected putting on a mask. He perished within days.

More than a century later, now that the new coronavirus has spread across the United States and claimed more than 16,000 lives, some scholars and health system experts are shaking their heads that lessons from other countries were not learned in time to help Americans reduce the toll of the pandemic within their borders.

“No matter how long I live, I don’t think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster that is unfolding,” says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer.

His comment came as the United States was surging past 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, facing a critical lack of ventilators, masks and testing. Now it is more than 400,000. The Trump administration says its approach has been proactive and, thus far, effective, and has blamed others for any missteps.

1st results in on Gilead coronavirus drug; more study needed

More than half of a group of severely ill coronavirus patients improved after receiving an experimental antiviral drug, although there’s no way to know the odds of that happening without the drug because there was no comparison group, doctors reported Friday.

The results published by the New England Journal of Medicine are the first in COVID-19 patients for remdesivir. The Gilead Sciences drug has shown promise against other coronaviruses in the past and in lab tests against the one causing the current pandemic, which now has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

No drugs are approved now for treating the disease. At least five large studies are testing remdesivir, and the company also has given it to more than 1,700 patients on a case-by-case emergency basis.

Friday’s results are on 53 of those patients, ages 23 to 82, hospitalized in the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan. Thirty-four of them were sick enough to require breathing machines.

All were given the drug through an IV for 10 days or as long as they tolerated it.

Groups used to serving desperately poor nations now help US

In Santa Barbara, forklifts chug through the warehouse of Direct Relief, hustling pallets of much-needed medical supplies into waiting FedEx trucks. Normally those gloves, masks and medicines would go to desperately poor clinics in Haiti or Sudan, but now they’re racing off to Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California and the Robert Wood Johnson Hospitals in New Jersey.

Direct Relief is just one of several U.S. charities that traditionally operate in countries stricken by war and natural disaster that are now sending humanitarian aid to some of the wealthiest communities in America to help manage the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are responding to the greatest unmet needs,” said Direct Relief CEO Thomas Tighe.

He is organizing flights of supplies directly from the group’s own manufacturers in China to the Santa Barbara warehouse, and also coordinating shipments from other producers around the world. After spending two decades providing relief to disaster zones, Tighe exudes a calm in the midst of this emergency.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders spent months fighting coronavirus around the world and is now trying to save lives just down the street from their New York offices. The group is supporting soup kitchens, setting up hand-washing stations, and training local officials how to prevent the spread of infection. Samaritan’s Purse International erected a 14-tent field hospital with an ICU in Central Park.

White House points to hopeful signs as deaths keep rising

WASHINGTON — At the end of a week officials had warned would be this generation’s Pearl Harbor, White House officials pointed to hopeful signs Friday that the spread of the coronavirus could be slowing, even as President Donald Trump insisted he would not move to reopen the country until it is safe.

At the same time, Trump said he would be announcing the launch of what he dubbed the “Opening our Country” task force next Tuesday to work toward that goal.

“I want to get it open as soon as possible,” he said at a Good Friday briefing, while adding: “The facts are going to determine what I do.”

With the economy reeling and job losses soaring, Trump has been itching to reopen the country, drawing alarm from health experts who warn that doing so too quickly could spark a deadly resurgence that could undermine current distancing efforts.

But Trump, who had once set Easter Sunday as the date he hoped people in certain parts of the country might begin to return to work and pack church pews, said he would continue to listen to health experts like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as he considers what he described as the “biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

The howling: Americans let it out from depths of pandemic

DENVER — It starts with a few people letting loose with some tentative yelps. Then neighbors emerge from their homes and join, forming a roiling chorus of howls and screams that pierces the twilight to end another day’s monotonous forced isolation.

From California to Colorado to Georgia and upstate New York, Americans are taking a moment each night at 8 p.m. to howl in a quickly spreading ritual that has become a wrenching response of a society cut off from one another by the coronavirus pandemic.

They howl to thank the nation’s health care workers and first responders for their selfless sacrifices, much like the balcony applause and singing in Italy and Spain. Others do it to reduce their pain, isolation and frustration. Some have other reasons, such as to show support for the homeless.

In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis has encouraged residents to participate. Children who miss their classmates and backyard dogs join in, their own yowls punctuated by the occasional fireworks, horn blowing and bell ringing.

“There’s something very Western about howling that’s resonating in Colorado. The call-and-response aspect of it. Most people try it and love to hear the howl in return,” said Brice Maiurro, a poet, storyteller and activist who works at National Jewish Health.