NEW YORK, 2 April 2020:
With the coronavirus spreading quickly in the US, that country – in particular its East Coast – is taking serious measures to try and halt the infection spread. Amid this turmoil, a number of people have been accused of making terrorist threats by intentionally coughing on other people.
One of the most notorious cases is that of New Jersey resident George Falcone, who last week was shopping at a supermarket when he coughed, allegedly deliberately, near one of the store’s employees – telling her afterwards that he had the coronavirus.
The reckless act came after the female worker asked Falcone not to stand so close to the exposed food or to her – to which he responded by moving even closer and coughing while he laughed, authorities said.
As a result, Falcone was charged with making a third degree terrorist threat and obstruction of justice, said New Jersey attorney general Gurbir Grewal, and he is facing up to seven years in prison and a US$26,000 fine
“These are extremely difficult times in which all of us are called upon to be considerate of each other, not to engage in intimidation and spread fear, as alleged in this case,” Grewal said in a statement. “We must do everything we can to deter this type of conduct and any similar conduct that harms others during this emergency.”
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy described citizens of this kind as “knuckleheads” and issued a very clear warning to the public not to engage in similar behaviour.
Murphy said Falcone refused to cooperate with the police after the incident and did not want to provide officers with his name or driver’s licence for some 40 minutes.
“We are up and down the state and we will not take any non-compliant behaviour. Never mind an egregious behaviour,” Murphy added.
In Pennsylvania, similar cases have been reported, like the one involving 35-year-old Margaret Cirko – who last week decided to start coughing on exposed food in the bakery and meat section of a small grocery store in the town of Hanover. The food valued at about US$35,000- as a precaution – had to be discarded by the store.
During the incident, which the store owner said was a “twisted prank,” Cirko – who some reports say may have mental problems, a potential situation that is being looked into by authorities – allegedly made “verbal threats that she was sick while intentionally coughing and spitting saliva/bile on produce/meat/merchandise,” according to a press release put out by the local police.
Now, Cirko is facing multiple charges including threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction, making a terrorist threat and public disorder. A judge set her bail at US$50,000 and she was transferred to the Luzerne County jail, local media reported.
With the occurrence of a number of such cases, US deputy attorney general Jeffrey Rosen sent an internal memo to law enforcement officials and federal prosecutors instructing them to be attentive to this kind of threat, which could spread even more quickly than the virus itself.
He also said people who expose the general public or specific individuals to the virus could be charged with terrorism, given that the virus is considered to be a “biological agent.”
Both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the majority of such behaviour has been registered, share borders with New York state, which has emerged as the pandemic’s epicentre in the US, the world leader in numbers of confirmed virus cases at over 200,000.
In New York, more than 83,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 1,900 people have died from the Covid-19 pneumonia is often causes, while New Jersey is the state in the No 2 spot with 19,000 confirmed cases and Pennsylvania has about 5,000.
Florida joined more than 30 other states yesterday in issuing a stay-at-home order as the total number of Covid-19 cases in the US surpassed 200,000, while the leader of the state that accounts for more than a third of the total said the peak of the outbreak in New York is four weeks away.
After long resisting demands to impose state-wide restrictions, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said he decided to impose the lockdown after consultations with president Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force.
The Sunshine State, with a population of 21 million, has nearly 7,000 confirmed cases and 85 deaths. Most of the infections in Florida are in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, each of them home to busy international airports and cruise ship terminals.
All but 16 of the 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, have told people to stay home as much as possible – bringing the number of Americans under restriction to roughly 291 million, or roughly 89% of the population.
Florida has less than 10% the number of cases as New York state, which saw the number of infections climb to 83,712 yesterday and the death toll reach 1,941.
A day after the Trump administration cited an estimate that the number of fatalities nationwide from Covid-19 could range anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000, New York governor Andrew Cuomo referred to figures from the Gates Foundation projecting 93,000 deaths in the US, including 16,000 in the Empire State, which has 19 million residents.
“What we’re looking at now is that the apex, the top of the curve, will happen at the end of April,” Cuomo said.
The model the state government is working from, developed by McKinsey & Company, indicates that while authorities can do nothing to hasten the peak and subsequent decline, New Yorkers can reduce the strain on the health care system by following the rules on social distancing.
Right now, the expectation is the state will need 110,000 hospital beds and 75,000 ventilators to cope with the apex of the outbreak.
“That is our current model,” the governor said. “One of the great variables is, how effective is the social distancing? Are people complying with it?” Exemplary compliance has the potential to reduce the number of required beds to 75,000 and cut the need for ventilators to 25,000, Cuomo told a press conference in Albany.
“In this war, we must plan forward for the next battle. The next battle is the apex, the next battle is the top of the mountain. That’s where the enemy either overwhelms our health care system, or we’re able to handle it.”
Confirmed cases in the US exceeded 203,000 yesterday, according to the independent tallies maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The US, which last week became the first country to go above 100,000 infections, took just five days to pass the 200,000 threshold.
Italy is second overall in the number of cases with 110,574, but has the highest death toll, 13,155. Next on the list is Spain, with 102,136 cases and 9,053 fatalities, followed by China – where the pandemic began – with 82,361 cases and 3,316 dead.
Germany is No. 5 in terms of infections, 76,544, and has so far lost 858 lives to the novel coronavirus.
Within the US, New York City is far and away the hardest-hit metropolitan area, with 1,139 fatalities. Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) has reported 146 deaths, while 144 people have died in King County, Washington state, which includes Seattle. New Orleans has suffered 101 deaths from Covid-19.
– EFE