NEW YORK — The Trump administration urged Americans to cover their faces in public and limited exports of medical supplies Friday as New York’s governor took his own dramatic step to fight the coronavirus — vowing to seize unused ventilators from private hospitals and companies.
President Donald Trump announced new guidelines that call for everyone to wear makeshift face coverings such as T-shirts and bandannas when leaving the house, especially in areas hit hard by the pandemic, like New York. But the president said he had no intention of following the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s a recommendation, they recommend it,” Trump told reporters. “I just don’t want to wear one myself.”
The change comes amid concerns from health officials that those without symptoms can spread the virus, especially in places like grocery stores or pharmacies. Officials stressed that medical-grade masks should be reserved for health workers and others on the front lines of the pandemic, with critical equipment in short supply.
In one of the most aggressive steps yet in the U.S. to relieve severe shortages of equipment, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would sign an executive order to take ventilators that aren’t being used.
“If they want to sue me for borrowing their excess ventilators to save lives, let them sue me,” Cuomo said. He promised to eventually return the equipment or compensate the owners.
The move is aimed at the kind of shortages worldwide that authorities say have caused health care workers to fall sick and forced doctors in Europe to make life-or-death decisions about which patients get a breathing machine. To make matters worse, some U.S. states and cities have received essential equipment from the nation’s medical stockpile that’s broken or expired.
Cuomo says New York, the nation’s worst hot spot, could run out of ventilators next week. Louisiana’s governor said New Orleans could exhaust its supply by Tuesday.
Shortages of such things as masks, gowns and ventilators have led to fierce competition among buyers from Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
Trump took it further Friday, saying he was preventing the export of N95 respirator masks and surgical gloves under the Defense Production Act, a move he said was necessary to ensure that medical supplies are available in the U.S.
A regional leader in Paris described the scramble to find masks a “worldwide treasure hunt,” and the French prime minister said he’s “fighting hour by hour” to ward off shortages of essential drugs used to keep COVID-19 patients alive.
Cuomo, who has complained that states are being forced to compete against each other for vital equipment, called for a coordinated national approach that would send supplies and people to different areas as their needs peak.
The Democratic governor was praised by a hospital association for moving to seize extra ventilators, but some Republican elected officials outside New York City objected.
“Taking our ventilators by force leaves our people without protection and our hospitals unable to save lives today or respond to a coming surge,” 12 of them said in a statement.
The number of people infected in the U.S. exceeded a quarter-million, and the death toll climbed past 7,000, with New York state alone accounting for more than 2,900 dead, an increase of over 560 in just one day. Most of the dead are in New York City.
The economic damage from the lockdowns and closures mounted. The U.S. snapped its record-breaking hiring streak of nearly 10 years when the government reported that employers slashed over 700,000 jobs last month. But the true picture is far worse, because the figures do not include the last two weeks, when 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits.
Worldwide, confirmed infections rose past 1 million and deaths topped 58,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
