New York State, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, recorded a new daily death record, with 799 dead, but the number of new hospitalizations has never been lower, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. .
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“We’re flattening the curve, we’ve had a net increase in hospitalizations of 200” over the last 24 hours, “the lowest number we’ve had since this nightmare began,” the governor during his daily update on the epidemic.
The past few days have all marked daily death records. This state of nearly 20 million people now has more than 7,000 dead, almost half of the total of 16,000 deaths recorded in the country by Johns Hopkins University.
But while qualifying as “shocking” this new record, the governor, for the third consecutive day, pointed out the “good news” that is the drop in the number of new hospitalizations as the drop in intensive care admissions.
He also stressed that the worst scenarios of the different projection models did not seem to materialize, thanks to the containment and distancing measures, and the measures taken to increase the number of beds available in the hospital system.
Thanks to the internal reorganization of hospitals and the addition of temporary care centers, notably with the arrival of a military hospital ship or the conversion of a conference center, New York now has a capacity of around 90,000 beds – against 53,000 initially – compared to 18,000 people “currently hospitalized”, said the governor.
In this context, plans to transform the great cathedral of St John The Divine in Manhattan into a hospital have been canceled, a spokeswoman for the cathedral said Thursday, without giving a specific reason.
The governor nevertheless called again to “not relax” the containment measures which he extended until April 29, despite their dramatic consequences for the economy.
“We cannot assume that, because we are seeing positive signals, all of this will end soon or that we will not be affected by new waves.”
While the toll of the epidemic in New York greatly exceeds that of the attacks of September 11, 2001, he stressed that the economic consequences would be much more serious.
9/11 was “an emotional, physical and cultural disaster, it gave us a sense of vulnerability that we never had,” he said. “But for the economy, (the pandemic) is more devastating.”
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