New York City is just two to three weeks away from running out of essential medical supplies, mayor Bill De Blasio has warned.
The city needs three million N95 masks, 50 million surgical masks, 15,000 ventilators, and 25 million each of personal protective equipment, surgical gowns, coveralls, gloves and face masks, to deal with rising coronavirus cases.
Mr De Blasio told reporters: "I don’t have the perfect day for you, we’re assessing all the time but it is a day, two weeks from now or three weeks from now where we must, by then, have had a very substantial resupply.
"So I think the simple way to think about it, is that the federal government has, essentially, two weeks to get us major resupply or the people of New York City are going to be in much greater danger.”
It came as state governors met with President Trump on Thursday along with members of the coronavirus task force.
Governors, including Phil Murphy of New Jersey, said they are worried that things like masks and disposable gowns are in short supply.
The president said states should be working to get whatever equipment they need on their own, but the federal government would help where possible.
Days after Mr Trump insisted that access to testing wasn’t an issue, Illinois governor JB Pritzker said the state did not have enough equipment to properly conduct tests. He said those were being “monopolised” by the drive-through sites the federal government was operating. The administration insisted that wasn’t true.
On Thursday it emerged that a passenger on a Delta airline flight from JFK airport to Rochester, New York had coronavirus.
The flight took off at 4:05am on 14 March and the department believe the passenger was contagious onboard.
Meanwhile Amazon confirmed on Thursday that it would close a warehouse in Queens, New York, after one Amazon associate tested positive for coronavirus.
The case is the first among Amazon’s warehouse employees in the United States. Two Amazon office workers at the firm’s headquarter campus in Seattle had already tested positive for the virus.
