March 26, 2020 / By Holly Yan and Madeline Holcombe, CNN
(CNN) – While the US death toll from coronavirus has now topped 1,000, exhausted hospital workers are turning to increasingly desperate measures to combat the virus.
New York Bellevue Hospital Center created a makeshift morgue using tents and refrigerated trucks. At Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, 13 patients died from coronavirus within 24 hours.
In California, the number of cases is doubling every three to four days. And in Louisiana, where health care workers are making masks out of office supplies, hospitals are expected to run out of beds within two weeks.
If more beds don’t become available, “then we don’t have resources to save the lives that we need to save,” former Louisiana Secretary of Health Dr. Rebekah Gee said. “That’s why these stay-at-home orders are so important.”
The US has more than 74,000 cases of novel coronavirus, and least 1,046 people have died.
The highest number of deaths reported in a single day came Wednesday, with 223 deaths.
But “we have not seen the peak of the crisis yet,” Gee said.
