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New York City has recorded 85 deaths from coronavirus in 24 hours, with the number of patients on ventilators doubling, while hotspots emerge in New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit and early-hit states such as California and Washington continue to battle the virus.

“We are holding on,” said Mitch Katz, the head of the NYC Health and Hospitals system. “It is very rough, it is very challenging, but all of the hospitals are working above their capacity to meet the need.”

De Blasio described Donald Trump’s aspiration that the US could “get back to work” by Easter Sunday, 12 April, as “false hope” and said the city was prepared to be on a stay-at-home footing for its 8 million residents at least through May.

One of the reasons there is no published information on such work, according to all three investigators, is because the shadow project on the mine viruses at the Wuhan institute was being funded by the Chinese military.

The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

A report published in April, co-authored by Dr Robert Kadlec, who was responsible for the US’s vaccine development programme, concluded that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019 — just as the pandemic began. One of the US investigators said testimony from scientists connected to the Wuhan institute’s collaborators suggested Covid-19 vaccine work was going on at the laboratory before the outbreak.

New York is the center of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, and Elmhurst hospital in the New York City borough of Queens is the center of the center.In just one 24-hour period this week, at least 13 patients were reported to have died at the hospital, where the medical examiner’s office has stationed a refrigerated trailer to act as a makeshift morgue. Officials have described the hospital as “overwhelmed”, “overrun” and calling out for one thing: “Help.”

The US surpassed virus hotspots China and Italy with 82,404 cases of infection on Thursday night, according to a tracker run by Johns Hopkins University. Hours earlier, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, had announced there were 23,112 Covid-19 cases in New York City alone, and 365 deaths.

The hospital is located in one of the poorest and most diverse areas of the city, home to 20,000 recent immigrants from 112 different countries. It was already operating at 80% capacity before the coronavirus pandemic, with plans to expand its emergency department.

The White House is racing to prevent and prepare for a potential fourth coronavirus surge as more transmissible coronavirus variants spread across the US

In what would be a first, the White House is drawing up plans to surge vaccines to emerging hotspots in an attempt to blunt the virus' trajectory and protect those at highest risk, two senior administration officials told CNN.

"Everything we do is with the thought in mind that there might be another surge," a senior administration official said, summing up the administration's efforts to combat the virus and prepare for a surge.

The Key Ingredient to Fixing a Failing School

More than 90 percent of its students are black or Latino. Nearly all are low income. The school’s brochure says it was founded “to improve educational opportunities for low-income, underserved girls in Hamilton County.”

And critics can point to research published in Science magazine that suggests single-sex schools don’t foster better academic outcomes and accuse charters of pulling resources away from neighborhood schools.

Scientists have spent decades examining all the factors that can influence the rise of the seas, and their research is finally leading to answers. And the more the scientists learn, the more they perceive an enormous risk for the United States.

Much of the population and economy of the country is concentrated on the East Coast, which the accumulating scientific evidence suggests will be a global hot spot for a rising sea level over the coming century.

Because of their importance to navigation, they have been measured for the better part of two centuries. While the record is not perfect, scientists say it leaves no doubt that the world’s oceans are rising. The best calculation suggests that from 1880 to 2009, the global average sea level rose a little over eight inches.

Ruqia Hassan was 30, a woman who dared to defy ISIS in its stronghold of Raqqa, Syria.

Hassan was killed sometime late last year.

ISIS only informed her family of her death this week, saying she had been "executed" for "espionage." CNN is unable to independently confirm the circumstances of her death.

examined more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data across the Lower 48 states: They found that major areas are nearing or have already surpassed the 2-degree Celsius number that's “emerged as a critical threshold for global warming.”

“The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.”

“Basically … these hot spots are chunks of the future in the present,”

When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows.

Readings from ESA’s Sentinel-5P satellite show that over the past six weeks, levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over cities and industrial clusters in Asia and Europe were markedly lower than in the same period last year.

While not a greenhouse gas itself, the pollutant originates from the same activities and industrial sectors that are responsible for a large share of the world’s carbon emissions and that drive global heating.

Across the country, state and local officials, frustrated by what they described as a lack of leadership in the White House and an absence of consistent guidance from federal agencies, took steps on their own to prepare for the pandemic and protect their communities. In some cases, these actions preceded federal directives by days or even weeks as local officials sifted through news reports and other sources of information to educate themselves about the risks posed by the coronavirus.

With scant information about the virus and no warnings against large gatherings, cities such as New Orleans moved ahead in February with massive celebrations that may have turned them into hotspots for the virus.

“The leader in global pandemics and protecting the United States starts at the federal level,” said Nick Crossley, the director of emergency management in Hamilton County, Ohio, and past president of the U.S. Council of International Association of Emergency Managers.

Kolko calculated the number of coronavirus cases per million people within four different regional categories: those in large metropolitan areas of at least 1 million people; those in metros of 250,000 to 1 million; those in small metros with less than 250,000; and those in counties outside of metro areas. The consistent result was that, in most states, heavily populated areas are suffering many more cases per person.

The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category—New York City and its environs—have 12,454 cases per million residents. That’s compared with 3,304 in New York’s midsize metros, 1,556 in the smaller metros, and 915 in the nonmetro counties

In the survey, conducted in mid-March before the worst of the outbreak hit, large hospitals reported that they were using 17 times as many N95 masks as usual, Soumi Saha, the company’s senior director of advocacy, told me. Smaller hospitals were using about seven times as many. “The surge in demand that we are seeing currently is truly unprecedented,” Saha said.

research published in March found similar results. Tests from the U.S. government and other scientists found that the disease could be detected up to three hours in the air and up to 24 hours on cardboard. It also found it can linger for two to three days on surfaces like plastic and stainless steel, the Associated Press reported.

Most people don’t give bleach enough time to work its magic, though, so make a point to apply it, let it sit for a while, then wipe it clean

Health experts are also recommending using ethanol or bleach-based wipes rather than benzalkonium chloride or hydrogen peroxide disinfectants.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has issued his most dire statement yet about the coronavirus pandemic, warning that coronavirus infection rates are rising much faster than expected and the state’s hospitals are woefully unequipped for the deluge.

“The inescapable conclusion is that the rate of infection is going up,” Cuomo said at a press conference on Tuesday morning. “It is spiking. The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.”

In New York state, 25,665 cases of coronavirus were confirmed as of Tuesday morning, with 210 deaths – far higher numbers than elsewhere in the US – as 14,776 cases and 131 fatalities were concentrated in New York City alone.

Exactly a month after Donald Trump tweeted that the US had the coronavirus outbreak “very much under control”, the World Health Organization delivered a stark and jarring reality check: America faces being the centre of a pandemic that has paralysed much of the world.

Coronavirus has raced across the American continent with the aid of a chronic lack of preparation, deep-rooted dysfunction in the US healthcare system, and a president who has repeatedly dismissed the crisis and is now looking to scale back containment efforts in favour of restarting economic activity.

More than 46,000 people in the US have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and nearly 600 have died.

governors must also use this time to work with businesses on a plan for reopening the economy in a way that mitigates health risks. The White House is reportedly discussing ways to ease restrictions as early as next week, but local and state officials will have to produce well-considered plans to open up the economy in a relatively safe way.

A blanket lockdown can’t go on. Keeping every business closed and every worker at home until a vaccine is available won’t work

If this were the plague, with 50% of the infected dying, it might be a different story. But people won’t put up with losing many trillions of dollars to flatten the curve of this virus.

No wonder governments are opting for the more stringent controls needed to suppress the pandemic. Suppression has the advantage that it has worked in China.

suppression has a sting in its tail. By keeping infection rates relatively low, it leaves many people susceptible to the virus. And since covid-19 is now so widespread, within countries and around the world, the Imperial model suggests that epidemics would return within a few weeks of the restrictions being lifted

To avoid this, countries must suppress the disease each time it resurfaces, spending at least half their time in lockdown. This on-off cycle must be repeated until either the disease has worked through the population or there is a vaccine which could be months away, if one works at all.

Before the United States and other countries can return to business and life as usual, we will need some innovative new tools that help us detect, treat and prevent covid-19.

It begins with testing. We can’t defeat an enemy if we don’t know where it is. To reopen the economy, we need to be testing enough people that we can quickly detect emerging hotspots and intervene early.

having patients do the swab themselves produces results that are just as accurate. This self-swab approach is faster and safer, since regulators should be able to approve swabbing at home or in other locations rather than having people risk additional contact.

New Zealand 'halfway down Everest' as Ardern plans big easing of Covid lockdown

Under level two, the “bar” area of a bar would be off-limits because it has been identified as a transmission hotspot for the virus. This was evidenced by a cluster of dozens of people who went drinking at a pub in Matamata on St Patrick’s day in March.

Public spaces such as playgrounds and libraries would be reopened, bars and restaurants would be able to accept patrons, and domestic travel and competitive sport allowed to resume, including the professional leagues, but there will be no stadium crowds for now. Most workers would be allowed to head back to the office, though Ardern urged any who could stay home – or found it more productive – to do so. Widespread social-distancing rules would continue to apply, including patrons being seated two metres apart in public spaces, strangers keeping their distance from one another, and hairdressers, barbers and beauticians being required to wear PPE.

The US recovery from the pandemic lags way behind Europe – even as states reopen

The US may be moving to loosen social distancing restrictions around the same time as several European countries but it remains in a far different, and worse, stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

While infections and deaths from Covid-19 quickly raced to terrifying peaks in Italy and Spain, both countries have managed to arrest the increase and are now forcing the key trends downwards.