914 Dead in N.Y.C., and City’s Virus Case Count Tops 38,000. UPDATES

The outbreak’s toll continued to rise amid a hopeful sign: the arrival of a Navy hospital ship to ease the strain on the city’s overwhelmed hospitals.

Here are other developments from Monday:

New York reported almost 7,000 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to nearly 66,500. Most of the cases were in New York City, where, officials reported later on Monday, 38,087 people had been infected.


The number of virus-related deaths in New York City rose to 914 Monday afternoon, up 138 from around the same time Sunday, officials said.

In New York, the number of people hospitalized was 9,517, up 12 percent from yesterday. Of those, 2,352 are in ventilator-equipped intensive care rooms.
In a hopeful note, Mr. Cuomo said that while the number of hospitalizations continues to grow, the rate which it is growing was tapering off. “We had a doubling of cases every two days, then a doubling every three days and a doubling every four days, then every five,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We now have a doubling of cases every six days. So while the overall number is going up, the rate of doubling is actually down.”

More than 4,200 people have been discharged from hospitals.

New York has tested more than 186,000 people in March, about one percent of the state’s population. But while New York’s testing capacity far outpaces that of other states, it has not reached the critical-mass level public health experts say is necessary to more precisely identify the spread of the virus.

Nurses Die, Doctors Fall Sick and Panic Rises on Virus Front Lines

A supervisor urged surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan to volunteer for the front lines because half the intensive-care staff had already been sickened by coronavirus.

“ICU is EXPLODING,” she wrote in an email.

A doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan described the unnerving experience of walking daily past an intubated, critically ill colleague in her 30s, wondering who would be next.

Another doctor at a major New York City hospital described it as “a petri dish,” where more than 200 workers had fallen sick.

Two nurses in city hospitals have died.

The coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 30,000 people in New York City, is beginning to take a toll on those who are most needed to combat it: the doctors, nurses and other workers at hospitals and clinics. In emergency rooms and intensive care units, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of colleagues get sick.

“I feel like we’re all just being sent to slaughter,” said Thomas Riley, a nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, who has contracted the virus, along with his husband.

Medical workers are still showing up day after day to face overflowing emergency rooms, earning them praise as heroes. Thousands of volunteers have signed up to join their colleagues.

But doctors and nurses said they can look overseas for a dark glimpse of the risk they are facing, especially when protective gear has been in short supply. In China, more than 3,000 doctors were infected, nearly half of them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, according to Chinese government statistics. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who first tried to raise the alarm about Covid-19, eventually died of it. In Italy, the number of infected heath care workers is now twice the Chinese total, and the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists has compiled a list of 50 who have died. Nearly 14 percent of Spain’s confirmed coronavirus cases are medical professionals.

Mr. Riley, the nurse at Jacobi, said when he looked at the emergency room recently, he realized he and his colleagues would never avoid being infected. Patients struggling to breathe with lungs that sounded like sandpaper had crowded the hospital. Masks and protective gowns were in short supply.
“I’m swimming in this,” he said he thought. “I’m pretty sure I’m getting this.” His symptoms began with a cough, then a fever, then nausea and diarrhea. Days later, his husband became ill. Mr. Riley said both he and his husband appear to be getting better, but are still experiencing symptoms.

Like generals steadying their troops before battle, hospital supervisors in New York have had to rally, cajole and sometimes threaten workers.

“Our health care systems are at war with a pandemic virus,” Craig R. Smith, the surgeon-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, wrote in an email to staff on March 16, the day after New York City shut down its school system to contain the virus. “You are expected to keep fighting with whatever weapons you’re capable of working.”

“Sick is relative,” he wrote, adding that workers would not even be tested for the virus unless they were “unequivocally exposed and symptomatic to the point of needing admission to the hospital.”
“That means you come to work,” he wrote. “Period.”

Arriving to work each day, doctors and nurses are met with confusion and chaos. At a branch of the Montefiore hospital system in the Bronx, nurses wear their winter coats in an unheated tent set up to triage patients with symptoms, while at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, patients are sometimes dying before they can be moved into beds.

When the pandemic first hit New York, medical workers changed gowns and masks each time they visited an infected patient. Then, they were told to keep their protective gear on until the end of their shift. As supplies became even more scarce, one doctor working on an intensive care unit said he was asked to turn in his mask and face shield at the end of his shift to be sterilized for future use. Others are being told to store their masks in a paper bag between shifts.

An emergency room doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center put it more bluntly: “It’s literally, wash your hands a lot, cross your fingers, pray.” Doctors and nurses fear they could be transmitting the virus to their patients, compounding the crisis by transforming hospitals into incubators for the virus.

Frontline hospital workers in New York are now required to take their temperature every 12 hours, though many doctors and nurses fear they could contract the disease and spread it to patients before they become symptomatic.

They also say it is a challenge to know when to come back to work after being sick. All medical workers who show symptoms, even if they are not tested, must quarantine for at least seven days and must be asymptomatic for three days before coming back to work.

Lillian Udell, a nurse at Lincoln Medical Center, another public hospital in the Bronx, said she was still weak and experiencing symptoms when she was pressured to return to work. She powered through a long shift that was so chaotic she could not remember how many patients she attended. By the time she returned home, the chills and the cough had returned. “I knew it was still in me,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t myself.”

There is also the fear of bringing the disease home to spouses and children. Some medical workers said they were sleeping in different rooms from their partners and even wearing surgical masks at home. Others have chosen to isolate themselves from their families completely, sending spouses and children to live outside the city, or moving into hotels. “I come home, I strip naked, put clothes in a bag and put them in the washer and take a shower,” one New York City doctor at a large public hospital said.

This week, the Health and Hospitals Corporation recommended transferring doctors and nurses at higher risk of infection — such as those who are older or with underlying medical conditions — from jobs interacting with patients to more administrative positions.

“We’re left for dead”: Fears of a catastrophe at Rikers Island are growing.

In the nearly two weeks since the coronavirus seeped into New York City’s jail system, fears have grown of the potential of a public health catastrophe in the cellblocks where thousands are being held in close quarters.

Public officials have been working to release hundreds of people in jail, but while that effort is moving forward, law enforcement officials concerned about public safety have urged caution.

“You’re on top of one another no matter what you do,” said one man who was recently released from Rikers Island. “There’s no ventilation. If anything is floating, everybody gets it.”

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that about 650 people had been released. Still, the rate of infection has continued to climb, and by Monday, 167 inmates, 114 correction staff and 20 health workers had tested positive and two correction staff members had died.

The number of homeless New Yorkers to test positive neared 100.

As of Sunday, 99 people staying in 59 shelters were infected, according to the city’s Department of Social Services. Two of them, a man in his 60s and a man in his 70s, died last week. Twenty-seven homeless people remained hospitalized on Sunday, officials said.

The city’s main shelter system for homeless people is made up of about 450 traditional shelters, hotels and private apartment buildings. There are an estimated 79,000 homeless people in the city; about 5 percent live unsheltered on the city’s streets.

Seven people living on the streets and three people who were staying in what is considered unstable housing have tested positive for the virus, officials said.

As of Sunday, there were 140 people staying in special isolation units operated by the social services agency at four locations.

They can’t afford to quarantine. So they brave the subway.

Subway ridership in New York City has plummeted in recent weeks. But in poorer areas, many people have jobs that do not allow them the luxury of working from home. So they keep riding.

In the Bronx, two stations that have had relatively low drops in ridership serve neighborhoods with some of the highest poverty rates in the city, an analysis by The New York Times found.

The 170th Street station in the University Heights neighborhood and Burnside station in Mount Eden are surrounded by large Latin American and African immigrant communities where the median household income is about $22,000, one-third the median household income in New York State, according to census data.

It is a striking change on a system that has long been the great equalizer among New Yorkers, where hourly workers crowded in with financial executives. Now the subway is more like a symbol of the city’s inequality.

Many residents say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Even worse, a reduction in service in response to plunging ridership has sometimes caused crowding and has made it impossible to maintain the social distancing public health experts recommend.

“This virus is very dangerous,” said Yolanda Encanción, a home health aide who works in Lower Manhattan. “I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want my family to get sick, but I still need to get to my job.”

Justice Dept. investigates at least one lawmaker’s stock trades before coronavirus spike in U.S.

The Justice Department is investigating stock trades made by at least one member of Congress as the United States braced for the pandemic threat of coronavirus, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The investigation is being coordinated with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is looking at the trades of at least one lawmaker, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As head of the powerful committee, Burr received frequent briefings and reports on the threat of the virus. He also sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which received briefings on the pandemic.

In mid-February, Burr sold 33 stocks held by him and his spouse, estimated to be worth between $628,033 and $1.7 million, Senate financial disclosures show. It was the largest number of stocks he had sold in one day since at least 2016, records show.

A law called the Stock Act prohibits members of Congress, their staffers and other federal officials from trading on insider information obtained from their government work. No one has been charged under the Stock Act since its passage in 2012, and some legal experts consider it a difficult statute under which to file criminal charges.

The investigation is in its early stages, according to the person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. It was not immediately clear how many stock trades, or lawmakers, would come under scrutiny in the probe.