Washington state virus death toll at 9

Three more Washington state residents' deaths were inked to the coronavirus disease on Tuesday, bringing total COVID-19 fatalities in the state and the US to nine as health officials warned that the country is on the brink of a larger coronavirus outbreak that may reflect the spread in other countries.

The first-known deceased in the US, a 54-year-old man and a woman in her 80s, both died last Thursday and were residents of a nursing home in Kirkland that has been at the heart of the nation's worst outbreak of the disease, officials reported Tuesday.

The two deaths brought the state's overall total to 30 of 118 cases so far reported in the US. State officials said 231 people are under public health supervision.

On Tuesday, new cases were reported in New York, North Carolina and Florida. The North Carolina case is a person who traveled to Washington state and was exposed to the novel coronavirus at the Kirkland nursing home, officials said.

Washington health officials were asking the state Legislature for an additional $100 million in funding to help respond to the virus.

"What is happening now in the United States may be the beginning of what is happening abroad," Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Tuesday. "We will continue to maintain, for as long as practical, an aggressive national posture of containment. That said, you might see some local communities taking specific actions to mitigate the disease."

While containment efforts focus on identifying and isolating cases of the virus, Messonnier warned that mitigation efforts – those that seek to reduce the virus' impact on communities once it's already spreading – may be coming.

The Trump administration is considering paying hospitals to treat uninsured coronavirus patients because 27 million Americans are without health care, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The administration is considering using a national disaster program to pay hospitals and doctors for treating uninsured patients, the newspaper said. The reimbursement program would pay providers 110 percent of Medicare for treating patients.

Hospitals and medical facilities are eligible to be reimbursed during natural disasters such as hurricanes.

Dr Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Health and Human Services department, said Tuesday during a congressional hearing that discussions are underway in regard to using the National Disaster Medical System reimbursement program.

In New York, Governor Mario Cuomo issued a directive requiring New York health insurers to waive costs associated with testing for coronavirus, including emergency room, urgent care and office visits. "We can't let cost be a barrier."

President Donald Trump on Tuesday again delivered on his promise to donate his presidential salary by giving a $100,000 check to the Department of Health and Human Services to help the federal government combat coronavirus.

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday reviewing the US response to the COVID-19 crisis, CDC and Food and Drug Administration officials faced questions about the rate of testing and availability of tests. The CDC has been criticized by other health professionals for initially coming up with a faulty test for the new coronavirus and then for conducting testing too slowly and on too few people.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said labs should have the ability to conduct up to a million tests by the end of the week. Hahn said that 2,500 test kits should be distributed to labs. Each kit can be used to conduct 500 tests.

World Health Organization Executive Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that data has shown the new coronavirus disease to be considerably deadlier than the typical seasonal flu, but he added that it also appears to spread less easily.

Tedros said about 3.4 percent of patients with COVID-19 have died, a huge increase in previous estimates that have ranged between 1-2 percent. Generally, the seasonal flu kills less than 1 percent of those infected, Tedros said by way of comparison.

New York state confirmed its second case, a man hospitalized with an "underlying respiratory illness", Cuomo said. The 50-year-old man lives in a suburb north of the city but works at a Manhattan law firm. He was diagnosed with the disease on Monday night. Cuomo said the man had no contact with anyone who recently traveled to stricken countries.

The first case involves a healthcare worker from Manhattan quarantined in her apartment.

Globally, the new coronavirus has infected 90,926 people since it was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, but 53 percent of those patients have recovered, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. A total of 3,117 coronavirus patients have died.

The novel coronavirus is now spreading faster outside China than within, with the number of confirmed cases outside China crossing 10,000 Tuesday, compared with some 80,300 inside the country, according to the WHO.

In China, the virus killed 31 more people Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 2,943. But the country reported just 125 new confirmed infections, the lowest number since nationwide daily updates began Jan 21.

Eighty percent of the new cases reported Tuesday came from South Korea, Italy and Iran, the WHO said. South Korea, the worst-hit country outside China, reported 851 new cases, while the number of confirmed cases in Iran rose 56 percent to 2,336.

In Italy, authorities on Tuesday reported a 23 percent increase in new cases to 2,502, the largest number in Europe. The death toll jumped to 79, an increase of 27 deaths in one day, Italian officials said.a