Morbidity Report: In a chilling indicator of what the country faces, The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked the Pentagon for 100,000 body bags as the coronavirus pandemic spirals.

  This morning the US reports 245,573 cases and 6,058 deaths, another overnight jump of nearly a thousand as the statistical curve turns sharply upward.

  New York City has had nearly 52,000 cases and 1,562 deaths.

  Spain has had 10,975 deaths and Italy, 13,915. Around the globe, cases have crossed the million mark and 53,975 people have died, a death rate of 5 percent.

Spare a Dime: As the financial crisis deepens in the wake of the coronavirus, the Labor Department announced that 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance last week in addition to the 3.2 million who filed in the previous week.

  Until last week, the worst week for unemployment filings in US history was 695,000 in 1982.

  The numbers do not fully reflect the severity of the situation. Not everyone who lost work qualifies for unemployment insurance and state governments are so overwhelmed with claims that thousands have yet to be processed and counted.

  The Congressional Budget Office expects unemployment to top 10 percent for the second quarter of 2020, equal to the peak of the Great Recession in 2010.  The investment firm Goldman Sachs predicts 15 percent unemployment by mid-summer.

Five O’clock Follies: President Trump and his lieutenants continue to brag about what a great job they are doing. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said,  “We’ve done things that the government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before.”

  Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin made the effort to point out that when the Obama administration sent out relief checks “it took months and months and months.”

  Trump said, “It’s incredible the job that everybody’s been doing. Everybody. They don’t sleep. They don’t go to bed.” 

  Medical workers all over the country are short on supplies, re-using surgical masks while endangering themselves and patients. One nurse in New York said, “Every day I go to work I feel like a sheep going to slaughter.”

The First Victim: President Trump in his briefing yesterday attacked congressional Democrats for announcing the establishment of an oversight committee to monitor the government response to the pandemic. He said, “You see what happens. It’s a witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt. And in the end, the people doing the witch hunt they’ve been losing, and they’ve been losing by a lot.”

  There are legitimate questions to be asked about the government response in light of Trump’s initial declarations that the coronavirus was inconsequential. Congress has a right to examine what the government does. Nevertheless, Trump wrote a letter to Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer. “I’ve known you for many years but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for New York until I became president,” Trump wrote, complaining about “your ridiculous impeachment hoax.”

 Take a Breath: Amid increasing concerns and decreasing supplies, President Trump yesterday used the Defense Production Act to order companies to produce ventilators for deathly ill coronavirus patients.

  A White House statement said the order is designed to clear up supply chain problems and direct needed parts and materials to six companies making ventilators. Trump previously invoked the act to order General Motors to make ventilators.

  They can’t move fast enough. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said yesterday that, “At the current burn rate, we have about six days of ventilators in our stockpiles.”

  New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in his briefing that the city had received 400 new ventilators but, “We will need 2,500 to 3000 more ventilators next week, during next week, to get through next week.”

  Kushner, the President’s go-to man for failure, made his debut at the coronavirus briefings yesterday and said,  “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” He said, “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Leaky Ship: The captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, has been relieved of duty over the leak of his letter to commanders requesting that most of his ship’s crew of 5,000 be taken off the ship to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. At least 93 crew members have been infected.

  “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” Capt. Brett Crozier wrote in his letter. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”

  Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said he “lost confidence” in Crozier’s ability.  

  The Navy said they didn’t object to the letter itself, only that it had gone public. What that means is that they were prepared to deal with the truth but not the embarrassment. It’s a classic military response. They didn’t say whether Crozier leaked the letter himself, but noted that the letter was emailed to 20-30 people and leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle.

  After it all went public, the Navy announced plans to remove 2,700 sailors from the ship.

New Menu: The coronavirus is believed to have been transmitted originally from animals sold in the wildlife markets of Wuhan, China, where people eat things like bats, snakes, and the scaly pangolin anteaters.

  Now, the city of Shezhen has become the first in China to ban the sale and consumption of cats and dogs in an effort to cut back on what may be a dangerous cuisine.

  What we’d like to know is how you properly cook bats and pangolin.

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