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It did not happen.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that 731 people had died of the virus since Monday, the state’s highest one-day total yet by more than 100.
More people have died in New York and New Jersey, by far, than in any other state. The two states together account for more than half of the virus-related deaths in the United States. New York’s toll was 5,489 as of Tuesday; New Jersey’s was 1,232. In Connecticut, where the virus appears to have been slower to spread, 277 people have died.
Mr. Cuomo described death as a lagging indicator in the fight against the virus: People are often ill with it for a long time before they die, he said. By other measures, he said, the curve of infection was flattening in New York, even as the number of critically ill patients kept rising.
The number of virus patients in hospitals increased 4 percent since Monday, the fourth straight day that it had grown 7 percent or less after growing at least 20 percent a day for weeks. The number of patients on ventilators in intensive-care units increased, too, but at the smallest one-day rate in weeks, up 2 percent since Monday.
As of Tuesday, there were nearly 4,600 patients on ventilators in New York, far fewer than pessimistic projections in recent weeks had said there might be. That has helped keep the state from exhausting its supply of ventilators.
And as in New York, New Jersey officials noted that the numbers of people in critical care and on ventilators were far below their worst-case scenarios.
For the number of people in hospitals to stop increasing, he said, New Yorkers must continue to vigilantly practice social distancing and other behavior that reduce the virus’s spread. “To the extent that we see a flattening or a possible plateau, that’s because of what we are doing and we have to keep doing it,” the governor said.
Virus deaths may be undercounted as more people die at home.
The official death figures, awful as they are, may not actually reflect the virus’s true toll Around the country, according to experts and officials, virus-related deaths are being undercounted because of inconsistent protocols and limited resources.
In New York City, the leader of the City Council’s health committee, Mark Levine, wrote on Twitter that people were dying at home at about 10 times the normal rate, presumably in large part because of the virus, but that many deaths were not being counted as virus deaths.
According to the news site Gothamist, the city medical examiner’s office has not been testing dead bodies for the virus and has instead referred what it considers “probable” virus deaths to the city’s health department.
But the health department counts only confirmed virus cases in its official death tally, Gothamist reported, suggesting that many virus deaths were being missed.
In N.Y.C., the coronavirus is killing men twice as often as women.
In its inexorable spread across New York City, the coronavirus is exacting a greater toll on men than women. Not only are men infected in greater numbers, new data show, but they are also dying at nearly twice the rate of women.
To date, there have been nearly 43 Covid-19 deaths for every 100,000 men in the city, compared with 23 such deaths for every 100,000 women, according to figures reported by the city’s health department. And men are being hospitalized with severe disease at higher rates.
Possible explanations for the disparity have ranged from differences in behavior — smoking rates among men exceed those among women in much of the world, for example — to biological differences.
Women have more robust immune systems, some scientists have noted, that provide an edge in fighting off infections — although it also makes them more susceptible to autoimmune disorders.
“I’m in the emergency room, and it’s remarkable — I’d estimate that 80 percent of the patients being brought in are men,” said Dr. Hani Sbitany, a reconstructive surgeon at Mount Sinai Health Systems who has been treating Covid-19 patients in Brooklyn. “It’s four out of five patients.”
New York says it has enough ventilators for now.
It had been a constant refrain through the weeks of the outbreak.
Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Bill de Blasio had both repeated daily that the city and state faced a desperate need for ventilators to help virus patients in intensive care keep breathing. But on Monday, both said that, for the moment, that need had been met.
Mr. de Blasio said Monday night on NY1 that after receiving another 500 ventilators from the state, “The situation related to the number of I.C.U. beds and ventilators has appeared to change meaningfully.” He said the city now had enough ventilators to last through the end of the week.
Mr. Cuomo said earlier on Monday that the state had received ventilators from California, Oregon and elsewhere, adding, “We don’t need any additional ventilators right now.”
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Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday that, along with struggling to halt the virus’s spread, New York City was increasingly focused on helping the growing number of people who were unemployed and unsure of where their next meal would come from.“There’s a new front opening up and we have to be there for people who need food,” the mayor said.
According to a Siena College Research Institute poll published on Monday, 49 percent of city residents worry about putting food on the table.
A separate survey by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, published on Tuesday, found that for more than half of New Yorkers, the virus and its effects had hurt their households’ ability to get the food they need. Around one in five said their ability to procure food had been reduced “a lot.” Mr. de Blasio said that in the past three weeks, city programs had served 2.6 million meals to New Yorkers who needed food “and that is just the beginning.”
He cited a projection that showed at least 500,000 New Yorkers had either lost their jobs or soon would.
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John Prine, the raspy-voiced country-folk singer whose ingenious lyrics to songs by turns poignant, angry and comic made him a favorite of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and others, died Tuesday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. He was 73.
The cause was complications from Covid-19, his family said.
Mr. Prine underwent cancer surgery in 1998 to remove a tumor in his neck identified as squamous cell cancer, which had damaged his vocal cords. In 2013, he had part of one lung removed to treat lung cancer.
Mr. Prine was a relative unknown in 1970 when Mr. Kristofferson heard him play one night at a small Chicago club called the Fifth Peg, dragged there by the singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. Mr. Kristofferson was performing in Chicago at the time at the Quiet Knight. At the Fifth Peg, Mr. Prine treated him to a brief after-hours performance of material that, Mr. Kristofferson later wrote, “was unlike anything I’d heard before.”
His debut album, called simply “John Prine” and released in 1971, included songs that became his signatures. Some gained wider fame after being recorded by other artists.
Mr. Dylan, listing his favorite songwriters for The Huffington Post in 2009, put Mr. Prine front and center. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” he said. “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”
U.S. reports highest daily coronavirus death toll
The daily death toll from coronavirus in the United States surpassed 1,800 on Tuesday, marking a new global high for the number of deaths linked to the virus in one country in a single day. The grim figure emerged as Wuhan, the Chinese city where the outbreak was first recorded late last year, reopened after nearly 11 weeks of lockdown. Outbound traffic was permitted beginning at midnight local time, although schools and many businesses remain closed.
Combative in public, Trump administration and congressional leaders negotiate behind the scenes on coronavirus relief.
The core five leaders in Washington — President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — and their interactions with one another have come under scrutiny amid the coronavirus outbreak, as the pandemic continues to swamp the nation, killing thousands of Americans and plunging the U.S. economy into crisis.
Yet for all the public signs of discord, communications and coordination between congressional leaders and the Trump administration have hummed along, compensating for the dysfunctional relationship — or the outright lack of one — between Trump himself and the top two Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Since the massive $2 trillion rescue package was signed into law March 27, Schumer has spoken on the phone with Trump about a half-dozen times, but also directly with Vice President Pence and with newly minted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows several times, according to an official familiar with the calls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss them. And already this week, the official said, Pelosi has spoken to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin multiple times to discuss the rocky implementation of the stimulus bill and what Washington will need to do in the next phase of coronavirus legislation.
Who gets a shot at life if hospitals run short of ventilators?
States, hospitals scramble to set guidelines that could prioritize pregnant women, health-care workers — and even some politicians
Pregnant women would get extra priority “points” in most if not all plans, U.S. hospital officials and ethicists say. This is not controversial. There also has been some discussion about whether high-ranking politicians, police and other leaders should be considered critical workers at a time when the country is facing an unprecedented threat.
Pennsylvania officials recently adopted new guidelines giving doctors, nurses and others fighting covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, preferential access to scarce ventilators in a shortage.
Some bioethicists have called for a national plan for rationing that would resolve disagreements and prevent “hospital shopping” by patients seeking care in a place that might favor their survival. But others believe a single standard is an impossible ask, given the nation’s deep ideological and religious divisions on life-or-death issues.
Bioethicist Brendan Parent, who worked for a New York state task force that developed a highly regarded framework for rationing, sees hospitals and states following two paths.
One group takes a utilitarian view of doing “the greatest good for the greatest number,” giving preference to those with the best chance of surviving the longest. Others are more focused on ensuring social justice and ensuring vulnerable groups have an equal chance.
Parent said there may be acrimony over various plans but that the alternative of treating everyone exactly the same — for instance, by using a lottery system — is not compatible with saving the most lives. At Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, patients with a life expectancy of one year or less — such as some with advanced cancer, or severe heart failure combined with other conditions — would be assigned a lower priority than those with a longer life expectancy, according to the documents.
Robert Cherry, chief medical and quality officer for UCLA Health, said that while the plan doesn’t list a specific age as a benchmark, age is “an indirect marker for chronic illness. The older you get, the more you are likely to have heart disease and other things that impact your survival.”
To protect Trump, White House among first to use rapid coronavirus tests sought by communities
As communities across the country desperately seek access to emerging rapid-turnaround covid-19 tests, one place already using them is the White House, where guests visiting President Trump and Vice President Pence have been required to undergo the exams since last week.
The procedure is the latest of new safeguards aimed at protecting the health of the nation’s top elected officials from the novel coronavirus, which has sickened some prominent global leaders. Among them is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Trump ally, who was moved to intensive care this week in a London hospital due to complications of the illness.
White House visitors said they have been administered the test developed by Abbott Laboratories at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the complex across the street from the West Wing where Pence has an office and the staff of the National Security Council is based.
Abbott, which is producing 50,000 tests per day, began shipping supplies to the White House last week, though a spokesman for the company declined to say how many of the kits were sent.
One recent visitor to the White House described his experience, saying a nurse swabbed both of his nostrils in less than a minute and inserted them into the Abbott machine for an assessment. This person noticed administration officials, including a couple Cabinet members, waiting to get tested, and he was told that every visitor meeting the president would get a test, even if they felt healthy.