t*****r
发帖数: 543 | 1 整个城市成了一个大毒罐子
New Orleans Faces a Virus Nightmare, and Mardi Gras May Be Why
Louisiana may be experiencing the world’s fastest growth in new cases.
Medical experts said Mardi Gras might have accelerated the crisis.
A deserted Bourbon Street in New Orleans, which has had more coronavirus
cases than all but 15 states.
William Widmer for The New York Times
By Katy Reckdahl, Campbell Robertson and Richard Fausset
March 26, 2020
NEW ORLEANS — Yanti Turang, an emergency room nurse at a New Orleans
hospital, walked out into the parking lot in full protective gear early this
month to meet a woman with flulike symptoms who had just returned home
after a layover in South Korea. The woman was immediately taken to an
isolation room.
Around the same time, a man who had never left the country and had been in
New Orleans throughout the just-concluded Mardi Gras season, showed up at
the E.R. with a high fever and a dry cough. He was placed in a neighboring
room, and cared for by hospital workers without any special gear.
To everyone’s relief, the woman who had traveled through Asia tested
positive for the standard flu. The man, however, did not, Ms. Turang said.
His symptoms improving but his diagnosis unclear, he was told to take
Tylenol and get some rest. And he was sent back out into the city.
Ms. Turang does not know what became of that man, but he was on her mind two
days later, when the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus was
announced in Louisiana — another person, at another hospital. Coronavirus
had been in the city all along. Since then, the outbreak here has become one
of the most explosive in the country.
According to one study, Louisiana, with nearly 1,800 cases as of Thursday
morning, is experiencing the fastest growth in new cases in the world; Gov.
John Bel Edwards said on Tuesday that the current trajectory of case growth
in Louisiana was similar to those in Spain and Italy. This week, President
Trump approved the governor’s request for a major disaster declaration,
which unlocks additional federal funding to combat the outbreak.
The situation in and around New Orleans is particularly acute, with the city
reporting 827 confirmed cases as of Wednesday night, more than the total
number of cases in all but 15 states. Hospitals are overwhelmed and critical
safety gear is running low.
Orleans Parish, which shares its borders with the city of New Orleans, has
suffered the highest number of deaths per capita of any county in the nation
. Of the parish’s 37 deaths — nearly three times the death toll of Los
Angeles County — 11 are from a single retirement home, where dozens more
residents are infected.
In a grim irony, there is a rising suspicion among medical experts that the
crisis may have been accelerated by Mardi Gras, the weekslong citywide
celebration that unfolds in crowded living rooms, ballrooms and city streets
, which this year culminated on Feb. 25.
It is the city’s trademark expression of joy — and an epidemiologist’s
nightmare.
“I think it all boils down to Mardi Gras,” said Dr. F. Brobson Lutz Jr., a
former health director of New Orleans and a specialist in infectious
disease. “The greatest free party in the world was a perfect incubator at
the perfect time.”
Mardi Gras revelers on Bourbon Street on Feb. 22, weeks before Louisiana’s
first confirmed coronavirus case.
William Widmer
The feeling is at once familiar and distinct for a city whose history is
punctuated with epic disasters, including the deadly yellow fever outbreaks
of 1853 and 1905, and Hurricane Katrina a century later in 2005. Once again,
New Orleanians are afraid they could be neglected by national leaders, only
this time because the coronavirus is a worldwide calamity.
“This hurricane’s coming for everybody,” said Broderick Bagert, an
organizer with the community organizing group Together Louisiana.
Mr. Edwards, who, like most other Louisiana governors, has extensive
experience dealing with hurricanes, said the state was struggling to
confront this new kind of disaster. “We don’t really have a playbook on
this one,” he said.
“If you have a flood or a hurricane it’s only a small part of the country
that’s affected, so you can get the full attention of the federal
government and you can get a lot of help from sister states,” he said. “
That’s not possible right now because this is in every state in our country
.”
As a kind of ghostliness settles over a locked-down nation, the effect of
social distancing feels particularly jarring in New Orleans, a city that
runs on intimacy — from the deep webs of kinship and geography that connect
families and neighborhoods to the fleeting threads that bind strangers and
regulars in storied restaurants and packed, sweaty clubs.
Now the grand restaurants are offering takeout, if they are open at all. The
clubs are silent. Bourbon Street is just another lonely street, its only
crowds the hordes of rats that have become increasingly brazen in their hunt
for food.
Dr. Catherine S. O’Neal, an infectious disease specialist and chief medical
officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge,
compared this year’s Mardi Gras to the infamous 1918 “Liberty Loan”
parade in Philadelphia. That gathering took place in the midst of an
influenza pandemic, packed 200,000 people onto city streets and likely
contributed to Philadelphia’s grisly death toll, with more than 12,000
people dying within a six-week period.
But Dr. O’Neal blamed no one for failing to take action to limit Mardi Gras
festivities. At the time, no cases of the virus had been identified in
Louisiana and there were fewer than 50 known cases in the United States. “
We were still talking about handwashing,” she said.
Dr. Susan Hassig, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the Tulane
University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, said there were
other likely reasons, beyond Mardi Gras, that may explain why New Orleans
has been so hard-hit — the dense, compact nature of the city; its tourism
industry; its port, which connects it to the world; and the way people
connect culturally.
“Everybody talks to everybody, which means you stop and you have a
conversation and then you move on and have a conversation with somebody else
,” said Dr. Hassig, who rode in a Mardi Gras parade with the Krewe of Muses
this year.
Ms. Turang, the emergency room nurse, who worked in Sierra Leone during the
Ebola epidemic in 2015, said doctors and nurses now talk of the patients who
had shown up to hospitals between Mardi Gras and the announcement of that
first case on March 9, people with moderate flulike symptoms who had tested
negative for the flu.
“We were blindsided,” she said, “by the fact that it was actually here in
New Orleans already.”
That first confirmed case in Louisiana was announced less than two weeks
after Fat Tuesday. Around the same time, reports had begun popping up around
the South — Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas — of people who had tested
positive after recently returning from New Orleans.
The first people to test positive in New Orleans, according to Dr. Jennifer
Avegno, the city’s health director, had not recently returned from anywhere
. But their array of unusual symptoms had troubled doctors.
“They just had a sense that something wasn’t right,” Dr. Avegno said. “
It became clear pretty quickly that there was community spread, that the
cases were not directly linked to each other.”
Within days, the state’s schools were shut down and large public gatherings
in New Orleans were banned — including the huge annual St. Patrick’s Day
parade, though enough people came out anyway that Saturday to draw the
police. A week after the first case was announced, the governor issued an
order closing restaurant dining rooms and bars, some of which had to call
carpenters to install locks on doors that had not been secured for years.
New Orleans canceled its St. Patrick’s Day parade, but people still
celebrated in the Lower Garden District. Now the city’s bars are closed and
its clubs silent.
William Widmer for The New York Times
As testing ramped up, the number of cases in Louisiana surged. A medical
worker at the city jail tested positive, as did a founder of the Grammy-
winning Rebirth Brass Band. Sean Payton, the coach of the New Orleans Saints
, announced that he had tested positive. The archbishop of New Orleans did,
too.
The growth rate of new infections in Louisiana was the fastest in the world
when comparing areas during the two weeks that followed their first
confirmed diagnosis, according to a recent study by Gary A. Wagner, an
economics professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In a small
and close city like New Orleans, that means that nearly everyone knows
someone who has been infected.
“One of my members, Sister Monica, is on a ventilator,” said Tyrone
Jefferson, 46, pastor of a church in the city’s St. Roch neighborhood. “
Another rushed to a hospital yesterday. Two are at home with it.”
Doctors and nurses at city hospitals, like hospital workers all over the
country, describe a dire shortage of critical protective gear. The Cajun
Navy, one of the informal Louisiana volunteer brigades famous for rescuing
people from floodwaters, and the Cajun Army have delivered several boxes of
masks and gallons of hand sanitizer to medical workers.
But the deluge of patients keeps coming.
Mr. Edwards, a moderate Democrat in his second term, has always been careful
about criticizing the Trump administration for both political and practical
reasons: After a hurricane, there is little use in picking a fight with a
federal government that holds the key to disaster relief.
On Tuesday, however, Mr. Edwards said he would like to see the Trump
administration get more involved in the coronavirus response in a way that
prioritized harder-hit areas.
Ventilators and personal protection equipment should be allocated, he said,
“based upon demonstrated need, as opposed to the current situation, where
every state, every health care provider, is working the best they can but
independent from one another.”
As the disease spreads and sickens those fighting it, a potential shortage
of medical workers, particularly nurses and respiratory therapists, is for
many the biggest worry. For now, many exposed health care workers — a
description that accounts for more than half of the city’s emergency
medical technicians — are wearing masks and checking their temperatures but
, as long as they are not showing symptoms, staying on the job.
Yanti Turang outside University Medical Center in downtown New Orleans
before starting her shift as an emergency nurse on March 26.
William Widmer for The New York Times
The attendant tragedy of the pandemic — economic devastation to a city that
lives on tourism and good times — has been following close behind. Most of
the city’s tens of thousands of hotel and restaurant jobs do not pay
enough for workers to have sufficiently saved for weeks on lockdown, but
they pay better than nothing at all.
“Our food banks say they’ll be out of food by next week,” said Mayor
LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans, adding that the city was estimating a budget
deficit of at least $100 million next year, given the vanishing sales tax
revenues.
“And,” the mayor continued, “we have hurricane season coming in June.”
In his request for a federal emergency declaration, Governor Edwards said
that projected hospitalizations would exceed the state’s capacity by April
4, and that the state had begun contracting to “build out hotels” to
provide additional hospital beds. Three state parks have also been outfitted
with trailers to house more than 300 patients.
Jackson Square in downtown New Orleans was mostly empty on March 18.Law
enforcement used loudspeakers to encourage people to return to their homes
and hotels.
William Widmer for The New York Times
If hospitals hit capacity, state officials are considering housing
noncritical patients at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center,
which housed thousands of residents who were forced from their homes by
Katrina’s floodwaters, and became a symbol of the chaotic response to that
disaster.
For now, the death toll continues its steady climb. A 39-year-old woman
found dead in her kitchen before her test results had returned. A well-known
44-year-old D.J. who championed the city’s bounce music scene. A 53-year-
old man who drove for Uber and Lyft at Mardi Gras.
Ellis Joseph was friends with Oliver Stokes, the D.J., and also with Ronald
Lewis, a New Orleans cultural icon who died on Friday of the coronavirus, as
a test would posthumously confirm. In another time, Mr. Joseph would have
walked with his bass drum behind the coffin at Mr. Lewis’s funeral
procession, leading a brass band in the traditional dirge “Just a Closer
Walk With Thee.” Hundreds if not thousands of people would have followed or
lined the streets.
“I’m going to say a silent prayer for Mr. Ronald now and roll for him
later,” said Mr. Joseph, who is now trying to avoid even going to the store.
The funeral was on Monday. In accordance with the current regulations, it
was limited to a pastor and nine others.
Katy Reckdahl reported from New Orleans, Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh
and Richard Fausset from Atlanta.
Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about
the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and
criminal justice. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, including
as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City.
NEWSLETTER
Sign Up for the Morning Briefing
Get what you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox. | S**********p
发帖数: 331 | 2 不是说黑人不得吗？我们这里封城了黑人还是三五成群的玩耍 | b*****2
发帖数: 11103 | | l******t
发帖数: 55733 | 4 我弟和小弟们的各种出神入化的操作把中国人都看傻了 |
|
