The spread of the coronavirus appears to be slowing in New York state, the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, thanks to containment and social distancing measures, the state governor said on Wednesday.
“The arrows are pointing in the right direction,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said during a press briefing.
“Social distancing, no restaurants, no non-essential employees” are “burdensome requirements” but “effective and necessary” and “the facts suggest at this stage that they are slowing down hospitalizations”, he added. .
The nearly 20 million residents of the state have been confined to their homes since Sunday evening. Only businesses deemed essential remain open.
While experts still projected on Sunday that the number of hospitalizations in New York would double every two days, they have predicted since Tuesday that they will double every 4.7 days only.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” Cuomo said.
New York State had some 30,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday afternoon – including 17,800 in New York City – or 5,146 more than the day before.
On Tuesday, the governor had cited projections expecting a doubling of the number of cases every three days.
After the mayor of New York had deplored in recent days a cruel lack of protective equipment for health workers, the governor estimated that “the hospitals of the state have had enough” for the moment.
“Today, no hospital, no nurse, no doctor can legitimately say ‘I have no protective equipment’. For the foreseeable future, we have the equipment. We don’t have the material for the next three, four, five weeks yet. But we continue to buy them ”.
Respirators are still lacking. The state estimates that at the peak of the epidemic, expected in 14 to 21 days, it will need 30,000.
Even with the 4,000 sent by the federal government, New York only has about 14,000 so far.
As New York is the US state most affected by the epidemic, and other regions of the country will not be hit hard until later, he said he proposed to the White House to organize a “rotation”: all available respirators would first be sent to New York and then transported, once the worst of the crisis has passed, to other regions which will then need them.
“I personally guarantee that we will send the equipment to the next epicenter,” he said.
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