The Mortality Report: More than a thousand people died of the coronavirus in the United States in the last 24 hours, the worst day yet. President Trump said, “We’re going to have a couple of weeks, starting pretty much now, but especially a few days from now that are going to be horrific.”

  As of this morning, nearly 217,000 people in the US have been infected and 5,137 are dead of the disease. 

  In the New York City epicenter, 1,374 patients have died. Overall, New York State has 84,000 cases and 2,220 deaths.

  Vice President Mike Pence said yesterday that the coronavirus outbreak in the US is “most comparable” to Italy, where 13,155 people have died.

  At this point, 30 days after the epidemic reached 500 cases in the US, this country is doing worse than any other country at the same point. That includes Italy, Spain, and China, where the outbreak began. The US has left China far behind.

  Of course, there’s reason to question whether China has reported the full extent of what’s happened there. They covered up when the outbreak began. Bloomberg News reports that  US intelligence concluded that China under-reported both total cases and deaths it has suffered from the disease. President Trump at the daily White House briefing said he has a good relationship with China but, “As to whether their numbers are accurate, I’m not an accountant from China.”

The Economy, Stupid: The Labor Department is expected to release a crushing unemployment report this morning, coming on top of last week’s report of 3.2 million unemployment claims.

 Following dire predictions of deaths in the US, the stock markets took another nose dive yesterday. The Dow Jones fell 973 points, nearly four and a half percent.

Five O’clock Follies: President Trump opened his coronavirus briefing with an announcement about a major anti-drug operation. “As governments and nations focus on the coronavirus, there’s a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists, and other maligned actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain,” he said.

  The operation involves destroyers, other combat ships, Coast Guard cutters, and aircraft, but we’re going to skip over that except that Trump took the opportunity to advertise his southern border wall; “Nobody’s seen anything like it, that’s how good it works.”

Supply and Demand: The federal government’s stockpile of medical gear is nearly empty and many of the ventilators held in reserve don’t work, The NY Times reports.

  The shortage leaves both the federal government and the states out there on the open market competing for what’s available.

  The paper also reports that while the Trump administration says it has 10,000 ventilators ready to send out to meet the coronavirus pandemic, thousands more are unavailable because the contract to maintain them lapsed and work did not resume until January.

  Trump said yesterday that, “I think we have 11 companies making ventilators right now. Very good companies and they’re making them.”

Home Rule: After resisting for weeks, Florida Gov. Gov. Ron DeSantis finally issued a statewide stay at home order for residents. He said he changed his mind after President Trump abandoned his rosy prediction that it would be safe to re-open the economy by Easter. 

  “When the president did the 30-day extension, to me, that was, ‘People aren’t just going to back to work,’”  DeSantis said at a news conference in Tallahassee, the state capital. “That’s a national pause button.”

  Two cruise ships with hundreds of sick people on board are being held off the coast of Florida. Two people on one of the ships have died and more are in bad shape. Governor DeSantis has been reluctant to let anyone off the ships.

  About 290 million people in 37 states and Washington, DC, the majority of Americans, — are now stay at home orders. President Trump is still balking at issuing a national stay-at-home order.

The Obit Page: Ellis Marsalis, a jazz pianist and educator who was the patriarch of a prominent New Orleans musical family, has died of the coronavirus at age 85. He was the father of the well-known Delfeayo, Branford, and Wynton Marsalis. — Also a coronavirus fatality, Adam Schlesinger, 52, a singer-songwriter for the bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy who also wrote the theme song for the 1996 Tom Hanks film, “That Thing You Do!”

Quackery: Suddenly, there’s a national shortage of the drug chloroquine, a remedy for malaria and other ailments that President Trump and others have touted as a potential cure for the coronavirus. “A real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” Trump tweeted.

  People who need chloroquine for approved uses are having trouble getting it. 

  Columnist Michael Hiltzik points out for the LA Times that hope for chloroquine as a miracle cure  “derives heavily from the work of a controversial French expert in infectious diseases, Didier Raoult, whose studies on the topic have been widely criticized as sloppy and inconclusive.”

  Hiltzik writes, “The hype has run so far ahead of scientific knowledge that red lights should be flashing and danger sirens sounding.”

  Raoult, who is a climate change denier, published a research paper that made it look like chloroquine had a 100 percent cure rate for coronavirus, but he eliminated the results from several patients who dropped out because they got sicker, one of whom died.

  Trump and ignorance have a symbiotic relationship,” Hiltzik writes. “The bedrock of his career has been the exploitation of ignorance; in return, he has done his best to spread ignorance as widely as possible. In this case, Trump, who is not a doctor and doesn’t even play one on TV, could be doing real harm.”

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