US Death Toll from Coronavirus Reaches 9

Tensions over how to contain the coronavirus escalated Tuesday in the United States as the death toll climbed to nine and lawmakers expressed doubts about the government's ability to ramp up testing fast enough to deal with the crisis.

All of the deaths have occurred in Washington state, and most were residents of a nursing home in suburban Seattle. The number of infections in the U.S. overall climbed past 100, scattered across at least 15 states, with 27 cases in Washington alone.

In the nation's capital, officials moved on a number of fronts.

A bipartisan $7.5 billion emergency bill to fund the government's response to the outbreak worked its way through Congress.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve announced the biggest interest-rate cut in over a decade to try to fend off damage to the US economy from the factory shutdowns, travel restrictions and other disruptions around the globe.

On Wall Street, stocks rallied briefly on the news, then went into another steep slide, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 785 points on the day, or 2.9%.

Also, the Food and Drug and Administration sought to ease a shortage of face masks by giving health care workers the OK to use an industrial type of respirator mask designed to protect construction crews from dust and debris.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill expressed skepticism about US health officials' claims that testing for the new virus should be widely available soon. CDC test kits delivered to states and cities in January proved faulty.

Authorities have said labs across the country should have the capacity to run as many as 1 million tests by the end of the week.

Elsewhere around the world, the crisis continued to ebb in China, where hundreds of patients were released from hospitals and new infections dropped to just 125 on Tuesday, the lowest in several weeks. But the crisis seemed to shift westward, with alarmingly fast-growing clusters of infections and deaths in South Korea, Iran and Italy.

Worldwide, more than 92,000 people have been sickened and 3,100 have died, the vast majority of them in China. Most cases have been mild.

"What China shows is that early containment and identification of cases can work, but we now need to implement that in other countries," said Dr. Nathalie MacDermott, an infectious-diseases expert at King's College London.

Source: AP