President Trump, who had questioned the need for additional ventilators, pushed industry to make more. A new survey of mayors found dire shortages of urgently needed supplies. Health care workers outside Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York City on Friday. The hospital, in the borough of Queens, has seen a surge of coronavirus cases. There are now 100,000 known coronavirus cases in the United States. More than 100,000 people in the United States have now been infected with the coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, a grim milestone that comes on the same day the national death toll surpassed 1,500. Earlier this week the country surpassed the case totals in China and Italy. The number of known cases has risen rapidly in recent days as testing ramped up after weeks of widespread shortages and delays. And the outbreak has already transformed life in the United States, where millions of Americans have been asked to do what might have been unthinkable only a week or two ago: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, don’t leave the house, except in limited circumstances. The directives to keep people at home to stunt the spread of the coronavirus began in California, and have quickly been adopted across the country. By Friday, two dozen states and the Navajo Nation had told their residents to stay at home as much as possible, orders that affect at least 223 million Americans. The pandemic is also having an effect on the primary calendar, as states across the country scramble to protect voters and poll workers. Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin on Friday requested that absentee ballots be sent to all of the state’s 3.3 million registered voters ahead of its April 7 presidential primary. And on the same day, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania signed a measure postponing the contest from April 28 to June 2. Source
