US registers less than 900 deaths in 24 hours for second day
Tuesday May 12 2020
A body is moved from a refrigeration truck serving as a temporary morgue to a vehicle at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York on April 8, 2020. PHOTO | BRYAN R. SMITH | AFP
The United States recorded 830 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 80,352, according to the real-time tally by Johns Hopkins University at 8:30 pm Monday (0030 GMT Tuesday).
The figure followed Sunday's toll of 776, the lowest daily tally since March, though major concerns remain over the number of deaths continuing to climb as some US states relax their lockdowns.
The country -- hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of the number of fatalities -- has now confirmed a total of 1,346,723 cases, the Baltimore-based school reported.
TRUMP DEATH CLOCK
A newly erected billboard in New York's Times Square shows the number of US coronavirus deaths that its creator says could have been avoided if President Donald Trump had acted sooner -- and it's called the "Trump Death Clock."
Created by filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, the "clock" was installed on the roof of a Times Square building, empty due to the pandemic. As of Monday, the counter showed more than 48,000 deaths out of a total of more than 80,000, by far the highest tally in the world.
The "clock" ticks on the assumption that 60 percent of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could have been prevented had the Trump administration implemented mandatory social distancing and school closures just a week earlier than it did, on March 9 instead of March 16, Jarecki explained in a post on Medium.
The New York-based filmmaker, who has twice won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, explained that 60 percent was a conservative estimate calculated by specialists following remarks made in mid-April by leading US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, who has become the trusted face of the government's virus response, had said that if "you had started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives."
"The lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership," Jarecki wrote in his Medium post.
"Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president's delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function."
US AIRLINE WILL GO UNDER
Meanwhile, Boeing's chief executive said it was "most likely" that a major US airline will go out of business due to the massive damage of the coronavirus pandemic on the aviation industry.
"It's most likely," Boeing CEO David Calhoun responded when an NBC journalist asked him if a major US carrier will go under.
Calhoun's answer, released in a clip on Monday, is part of a longer interview that will be broadcast Tuesday.
"You know something will happen in September," Calhoun said. "Traffic levels will not be back to a 100 percent, they won't even be back to 25."
Boeing itself is suffering as the global air transport industry is brought to its knees by travel restrictions and confinement measures aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19.
"Maybe by the end of the year we approach 50 (percent), so there will definitively be adjustments that have to be made on the part of the airlines," Calhoun added.
Boeing has been struggling due to the restrictions, which have deprived it of clients and jeopardized its order book.
Calhoun took the company's helm at the start of the year amid already grim circumstances: Boeing had been shaken by two major crashes involving its 747 MAX model that saw the plane rounded since March 2019.
A total of 346 passengers and crew members were killed in the Lion Air crash in October 2019 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March the following year.
The accidents revealed major flaws with the plane's design.