COVID-19: Donald Trump says 'working very hard' to help New York, slams 'fake news'

The US President Donald Trump has claimed on March 25 that he is “working very hard” to help the New York City and State and is currently in communication with both the mayor and the governor. Amid the unprecedented outbreak of deadly coronavirus, Trump said that he is trying to provide all states with sufficient resources to deal with the pandemic and said he allocated four medical centres as well as hospitals. The US President further targetted the media for saying that the White House is not helping New York because of Trump’s unlikeliness towards New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, instead, he said: “I do”.

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US can be ‘new epicentre’ of COVID-19

Trump comments came as the World Health Organisation has said on March 25 that the United States has the potential to become the new epicentre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak due to a “very large acceleration in infections” in the country. While the life in China, where the COVID-19 had originated in December 2019 is slowly coming back to normalcy, the fatal COVID-19 has spread to over 190 countries and the US has reported 54,881 confirmed cases of the virus and at least 782 fatalities. 

The crisis due to the pandemic has prompted more governors to join states ordering all citizens to stay at home and practice social distancing. WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris has told the reporters that over the past 24 hours, 85 per cent of the new cases worldwide were from Europe and the US and out of those, at least 40 per cent were just from the US.  However, the WHO spokesperson also lauded the improvements made in the country with more intensified testing among other efforts to isolate the sick and trace their immediate contacts exposed to the fatal COVID-19.

When she was further asked if the US can become the new epicentre, Harris replied that the United Nations health agency is now “seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the US. So it does have that potential. We cannot say that is the case yet but it does have that potential”.

She added that the US has a “very large outbreak and an outbreak that is increasing in intensity”.

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Image source: AP