Coronavirus is accelerating its spread in New York, with potentially disastrous consequences, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday.
The case count is doubling every three days, and the peak of infection in New York could come as soon as two to three weeks, Mr. Cuomo said, outrunning earlier projections and threatening to put even bigger strain on the health care system than officials had feared.
“We haven’t flattened the curve. And the curve is actually increasing,” Mr. Cuomo said from the Javits Center in Manhattan, a convention complex that the Army Corps of Engineers is turning into a 1,000-bed emergency hospital.
“The apex is higher than we thought and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.”
Mr. Cuomo, who last week adopted a friendly tone toward President Trump, got as close as he has to chastising the federal government, which has so far sent 400 ventilators to New York City.
“You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators,” Mr. Cuomo said. “What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.”
The governor said the state now projects that it may need as many as 140,000 hospital beds to house virus patients, up from the 110,000 projected a few days ago. As of now, only 53,000 are available.
Up to 40,000 intensive-care beds could be needed.
“Those are troubling and astronomical numbers,” Mr. Cuomo said.
As of Tuesday morning, New York State had 25,665 cases, with at least 157 deaths. The state now accounts for nearly 7 percent of global cases tallied by The New York Times.
Some 13 percent of people who have tested positive were hospitalized as of Tuesday with nearly a quarter of those hospitalized in intensive care.
“That’s the problem,” Mr. Cuomo said. “As the number of cases go up, the number of people in hospital beds goes up, the number of people who need an I.C.U. bed and a ventilator goes up, and we cannot address that increasing curve.”
In New York City alone, there have been around 15,000 cases.
Mr. Cuomo said that New York was a harbinger for the rest of the country.
“Look at us today,” he warned. “Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”
White House: Anyone who has left New York should self-quarantine.
Experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force expressed alarm on Tuesday over infection rates in New York City, and advised people who have passed through or left the city to place themselves into 14-day quarantine.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, said new infection hot spots on Long Island indicate that people leaving the city are already spreading the virus.
“Everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure the virus doesn’t spread to others no matter where they have gone, whether it’s Florida, North Carolina or out to far reaches of Long Island,” she said.
New York City is now being treated the way parts of China and Europe have been viewed, as an epidemiological hot zone. On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida expanded his efforts to quarantine visitors from New York, saying he would sign an order extending a self-isolation requirement to anyone who had traveled from the New York area in the last three weeks. Dr. Birx said that about 60 percent of all the new cases in the country were coming out of the metro New York area.
Trump expresses outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.
Even as nations from Britain to India declare nationwide economic lockdowns, President Trump said he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” less than three weeks away, a goal that top health professionals have called far too quick.
“I think it’s possible, why not?” he said with a shrug.
Participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News on Tuesday, he expressed outrage about having to “close the country” to curb the spread of the coronavirus and indicated that his guidelines on business shutdowns and social distancing would soon be lifted.
“I gave it two weeks,” he said, adding, “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”
But at a late afternoon news conference, he softened his tone, saying his priority is the health and safety of the American people.
At the news conference, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sought to refine Mr. Trump’s Easter timeline, saying it would not pertain to hot spots like New York. There could be “flexibility in different areas” based on data, he said.
”We need to know what’s going on in those areas in the country where there isn’t an obvious outbreak,” Dr. Fauci said. “It’s a flexible situation.”
Other health experts, however, have warned that a patchwork state-by-state approach alone could not contain a virus that doesn’t respect state borders.
Both Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence said that a lockdown had never been under consideration for the United States. Mr. Pence told Fox News viewers that talk of it was misinformation that has circulated online.
“I can tell you that at no point has the White House coronavirus task force discussed a nationwide lockdown,” he said, answering a question from a viewer on the phone.
Mr. Trump fell back on his comparison of the coronavirus to the flu, saying that despite losing thousands of people to the flu, “We don’t turn the country off.”
States including California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington have declared stay-at-home or shutdown orders, but other states have been looking for directives from the Trump administration. And countries in Asia are beginning to see a resurgence of coronavirus after easing up on restrictions.
Democrats near a deal with the White House on the stimulus package.
Top Democrats and Trump administration officials said they were optimistic about finalizing an agreement on Tuesday on a roughly $2 trillion economic stabilization plan to respond to the pandemic, after striking a tentative deal to add oversight requirements for a $500 billion government bailout fund for distressed companies.
“We’re looking forward to closing a bipartisan deal today,” Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told reporters as he arrived on Capitol Hill for a round of meetings on Tuesday morning.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said there was “real optimism that we could get something done in the next few hours” after Democrats won crucial concessions from the Trump administration.
In an interview on CNBC, she said the emerging deal would include strict oversight over the bailout fund, including installing an inspector general to monitor it, as well as what Ms. Pelosi described as a congressional panel “appointed by us to provide constraint.” The measures are similar to those put in place as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the centerpiece of the Wall Street bailout enacted in 2008 to respond to the financial meltdown.
The New York City police have begun to enforce social distancing rules.
The New York City police have begun a new series of patrols to ensure that residents are practicing appropriate social distancing.
On Sunday, in the span of three hours, the patrols issued at least 50 warnings to restaurants, bars, supermarkets and salons, as well as people crowding in public spaces, the department said.
“We have to keep people separated,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning. “So our men and women of the N.Y.P.D. will be out there spreading the message, telling people to break it up, move along, no lines tight together in a grocery store, no grocery stores full up,”
A White House official is troubled by the ‘attack rate’ in New York.
NY TIMES
The White House’s coronavirus response coordinator offered a grim assessment of the virus’s assault on the New York metropolitan area Monday evening: She said that nearly one in 1,000 people in the region had contracted the virus, an “attack rate” five times that of other areas of the country.
The coordinator, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, said at a White House briefing that the rate of infection showed that the virus must have been spreading for weeks “to have this level of penetrance into the general community.”
She added that 28 percent of tests for the coronavirus in the region were coming up positive, while the rate was less than 8 percent in the rest of the country.
“To all of my friends and colleagues in New York, this is the group that needs to absolutely social distance and self-isolate at this time,” Dr. Birx said.
In epidemiology, the attack rate is the percentage of a population that has a disease. New York State now has an attack rate similar to Italy’s. In New York City itself, the attack rate works out to about one case for every 650 residents.
Losing sense of smell may be a hidden symptom of coronavirus, doctors warn
WASHINGTON POST
While every case is different, the telltale symptoms of the novel coronavirus have been widely agreed upon — a high fever, persistent cough or shortness of breath. In the most severe instances, those afflicted have reported confusion or difficulty breathing, and sometimes, anxiety is the most prevailing symptom of all.
But a team of British ear, nose and throat doctors on Friday raised the possibility of a new indicator of the coronavirus, one they say has been observed globally, even in patients who are otherwise asymptomatic: anosmia, a condition that causes the loss of sense of smell. In a statement, they warned that adults experiencing recent anosmia could be unknown carriers of covid-19, and urged them to consider self-isolation.
“All of this evidence is accumulating very rapidly, but there’s nothing yet robustly in print,” Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, said in an interview. “Since then, I’ve had colleagues from around the world saying: ‘That’s exactly what we’re seeing.’ They’ve been trying [to raise awareness], but it hasn’t been picked up.”
Experts at the World Health Organization say they have not yet confirmed the loss of smell or taste as a symptom of the coronavirus but haven’t ruled it out.
Hopkins, who published the statement along with Nirmal Kumar, the president of ENT UK, a body that represents ear, nose and throat specialists in Britain, said she was driven by recent discussions on rhinological discussion boards related to the coronavirus pandemic. There, she observed ENTs reporting a surge of reported anosmia across their patients, and even among themselves.
In their statement, Hopkins and Kumar cited reports from South Korea, China, Iran and Italy, where, they wrote, “significant numbers of patients with proven covid-19 infection have developed anosmia/hyposmia,” the latter of which signals a reduced ability to detect smells. In Germany, they wrote, more than two-thirds of confirmed coronavirus cases included anosmia. And in South Korea, a country that has seen ample covid-19 testing, “30 percent of patients testing positive have had anosmia as their major presenting symptom in otherwise mild cases.”
India’s prime minister decreed a 21-day lockdown for the country of 1.3 billion.
India, the world’s second-most populous country, will order its 1.3 billion people to stay inside their homes for three weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Tuesday.
The extensive lockdown order was declared a day after the authorities there grounded all domestic flights.
Mr. Modi said the decree would take effect at midnight.
“There will be a total ban of coming out of your homes,” Mr. Modi said.
“Every district, every lane, every village will be under lockdown,” he said. “If you can’t handle these 21 days, this country will go back 21 years.”
“The only option is social distancing, to remain away from each other,” he said. “There is no way out to escape from coronavirus besides this.”
Left unclear was how Indians would be able to get food and other needed supplies. Mr. Modi alluded vaguely to the government and civil society groups stepping in to help, but offered no details.
Though India’s number of reported coronavirus cases remains relatively low, around 500, the fear is that if the virus hits as it has in the United States, Europe or China, it could be a disaster far bigger than anywhere else.