Coronavirus: New York state asks Trump for the army not to end Italy

The governor of New York asked the president of the United States Donald Trump to mobilize the army to avoid a medical meltdown that will be “worse than that that we are seeing in Italy ". In an open letter published in the Sunday edition of New York TimesGovernor Andrew Cuomo has warned that hospitals in New York state will soon reach a tipping point if the federal government does not intervene.

Governor Cuomo said intensive care units in hospitals in New York State, one of the most populous in America, with 20 million residents, were already at 80 percent capacity as of yesterday. He added that if a few hundred New Yorkers were to seek hospitalization for acute COVID-19 disease, the state health system would not have the ability to treat them. At present, Governor Cuomo said, New York is deficient in "thousands of ICU beds and thousands of ventilators." This scarcity can turn out to be "a failure and cause a worse situation than what we are seeing in Italy, where lives are lost because the country does not have the capacity for health careThe governor said.
To address the problem, Governor Cuomo urged President Trump to take an unprecedented step, i.e. mobilize the United States Army Corps of Engineers to upgrade public buildings into medical facilities. These include schools, gyms and college dormitories, Cuomo said, adding that New York State alone does not have "the physical capacity" to build new health facilities or retrofit existing buildings into medical units.
The New York governor went on to add that new medical facilities need to be set up in a matter of weeks. Until yesterday evening it was not clear whether the White House would respond to Governor Cuomo's request.

Coronavirus: New York state asks Trump for the army not to end Italy