Weeks after ordering a shutdown across the state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Saturday said the efforts were beginning to pay off and the curve of new coronavirus cases was continuing to flatten.
But, as the focus began to turn to reopening the state and New York City, Mr. Cuomo emphasized that it would be premature to look too far ahead.
“Reopening is both an economic question and a public health question,” he said. “And I’m unwilling to divorce the two. You can’t ask the people of this state or this country to chose between lives lost and dollars gained.”
A rushed decision, he said, could lead to resurgence of the outbreak. “We don’t know if there’s going to be a second wave or not,” he said, urging caution in the rush to get the economy back off the ground. He cited places around the world that had reopened too quickly and experienced resurgences in the virus.
Although New York may have reached an apex in new cases, Cuomo cautioned against reopening businesses and schools too soon. He quoted Winston Churchill that this is “the end of the beginning.”
“The game isn’t over yet,” the governor said. “Are we in the sixth inning? Are we at halftime? No one knows.”
Cuomo warned against politicizing the timeline of lifting quarantine orders and said the decision should be based on ensuring there is not a second wave. He said he was working “hand-in-glove” with President Trump, who has said he is eager to reopen the country and restart the economy.
Cuomo said saving the economy and saving lives should not come at the expense of one another.
Other updates from Mr. Cuomo’s briefing:
The state death toll rose to more than 8,600, up from 7,844 the day before.
Hospitalizations, including the three-day average of new virus patients being admitted to hospitals, were down, as were intubations — considered a sign of the severity of the health crisis.
Potential hot spots on Long Island and in upstate New York appeared to be under control. “We’ve had hot spots, but we attacked them aggressively and we believe that we have stabilized the situation upstate,” the governor said.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state increased to 180,458, from 170,812. There were 18,654 patients in hospitals, up from 18,569 on Friday, and there were 5,009 patients in intensive care, up from 4,908.
N.Y.C. will move hundreds of homeless people into hotels as deaths in shelters surge.New York City will begin placing hundreds of single adults, regardless of age and health conditions, into hotel rooms instead of dormitory-style shelters where coronavirus has continued to spread.
About 2,500 people, including those 70 and older, those who are symptomatic or have tested positive for the virus, and those in crowded shelters, will be moved out of shelters and into hotel rooms by April 20.
A coalition of advocacy groups, including the Urban Justice Center and VOCAL-NY, has called on Mr. de Blasio to use 30,000 empty hotel rooms to house not only people living in shelters, but people living on the street and in other congregate settings. The Urban Justice Center began a GoFundMe campaign to begin moving people into hotels independently.
There have been at least 20 deaths among the homeless, including 12 men and one woman from shelters for single adults. About 100 out of the city’s 450 traditional shelters and private apartment buildings and hotels used as shelters are designated for single adults.
An estimated 79,000 people are homeless in the city, and about 5 percent normally live on the street.
New York has so far avoided the surge at hospitals that some models predicted.
On March 24, Governor Cuomo offered the public a dire assessment: To stave off a catastrophe, New York might need up to 140,000 hospital beds and as many as 40,000 intensive care units with ventilators.
Two weeks later, however, with a lockdown across the state, New York has managed to avoid the apocalyptic vision that some forecasters predicted.
The daily death toll has still been staggering: Mr. Cuomo announced on Saturday that an additional 783 people had died of the coronavirus in New York on Friday — the national epicenter of the pandemic — pushing the state’s total to 8,627.
But the number of intensive care beds being used in New York — one of the main measures to track the progress of sick patients — declined for the first time in the crisis on Friday, to 4,908. And the total number hospitalized with the virus, 18,569, was far lower than the darkest expectations.
Nearly 2,000 Dead as Coronavirus Ravages Nursing Homes in N.Y. Region
The facilities knew that frail and aging residents were especially vulnerable to the outbreak, but they were unable to stop it.
The virus has perhaps been cruelest at nursing homes and other facilities for older people, where a combination of factors — an aging or frail population, chronic understaffing, shortages of protective gear and constant physical contact between workers and residents — has hastened its spread.
In all, nearly 2,000 residents of nursing homes have died in the outbreak in the region, and thousands of other residents are sick.
As of Friday, more than half of New York’s 613 licensed nursing homes had reported coronavirus infections, with 4,630 total positive cases and 1,439 deaths, officials said.The actual infection rate in nursing homes is almost certainly higher than the data indicate because few homes have the capacity to test residents. The assumption among many in the industry is that every nursing home in the region has people with Covid-19.
In New York, nursing home administrators said they had been overwhelmed by an outbreak that quickly spun beyond their control. They were unable, they said, to have residents tested to isolate the virus or to get protective equipment to keep workers from getting sick or transmitting the virus to residents.
“The story is not about whether there’s Covid-19 in the nursing homes,” said Scott LaRue, the chief executive of ArchCare, which operates five nursing homes in New York. “The story is, why aren’t they being treated with the same respect and the same resources that everyone else out there is? It’s ridiculous.”
Advocates for nursing home residents in the New York region lashed out at the homes’ owners, saying they were negligent and had hastened the crisis by cutting staff to a minimum.
“The residents are sitting ducks,” said Richard Mollot, the executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition.
Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s governor, said last month that the pandemic was difficult to stop. “Coronavirus in a nursing home can be like fire through dry grass,” he said.
New York State health officials defended their oversight of nursing homes, saying they had adopted a raft of regulations in recent weeks to protect residents.
The regulations barred visitors from homes and ceased all group meals and activities — difficult choices because loneliness is its own plague in nursing homes — and required that every worker be tested for fever or respiratory symptoms at every shift.
Gary Holmes, a state Health Department spokesman, said, “We’ve said from the start that protecting our most vulnerable populations including people in nursing homes is our top priority, and that’s why the state acted quickly and aggressively to issue guidance specifically for these facilities on testing, infection control, environmental cleaning, staffing, visitation, admission, readmission, and outreach to residents and families.”
White House rejects bailout for Postal Service battered by coronavirus
The Postal Service’s decades-long financial troubles have worsened dramatically as the volume of the kind of mail that pays the bills at that agency ― first-class and marketing mail ― withers during the pandemic.
The USPS needs an infusion of money, and President Trump has blocked potential emergency funding for the agency repeating instead the false claim that higher rates for Internet shipping companies Amazon, FedEx and UPS would right the service’s budget.
U.S. surpasses Italy for most confirmed covid-19 deaths in the world
The United States’ covid-19 death tally is now the highest in the world, eclipsing Italy’s toll on Saturday, despite experts calling the U.S. figure “an underestimation.”
The U.S. toll is now 19,424, with nearly half a million confirmed cases, surpassing Italy’s total of 18,849. Italy has 147,577 infected with the virus.
Despite the country’s large elderly population, experts had previously forecast that Italy’s staggering toll was not an outlier so much as a preview of what other countries could expect. The steady climb of cases has slowed, and the Mediterranean country is now preparing to reopen.
Friday marked the highest single-day total yet with at least 2,056 people reported dead from complications related to covid-19 in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a Washington Post tally. The virus claimed about 1,900 lives in the United States each of the past three days.