The number of new daily hospitalizations due to coronavirus in New York are at the lowest level since the lockdown began on March 20, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Saturday.
There were just 572 new hospitalizations on Friday but total hospitalizations remain over 7,000.
New daily hospitalizations, intubations and cases continued on their downward trend, Cuomo added, but new deaths remain at a ‘infuriatingly constant’ level.
There were 226 deaths from COVID-19 in New York on Friday, up from 216 a day earlier, and at the same number that was recorded five days ago.
Daily deaths are now less than half the levels recorded two weeks ago but Friday’s increase added to concerns after it was reported that the coronavirus outbreak in the state is slowing at half the speed it spiked.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a Saturday press briefing that he number of new daily hospitalizations due to coronavirus in New York are at the lowest level since the lockdown began on March 20. There were 572 new hospitalizations reported on Friday
There were 572 new hospitalizations reported on Friday, the lowest number since March 20
Total hospitalizations in New York state still remain more than 7,000, Gov. Cuomo said
‘You see it hasn’t been that level since we started back on March 20, March 21, so that is welcome new,’ Cuomo said of the hospitalization numbers.
‘This is not welcome news, this has been heartbreaking every day,’ he added of the new deaths.
‘We could like to see that number dropping at a fare faster rate than it has been dropping.’
The governor also announced a new ‘priority’ for the outbreak response in New York after the death of three children in the past 48 hours from a rare inflammatory disease that is potentially linked to coronavirus.
Cuomo said health authorities are investigating 73 similar cases reported across the state, where children have become symptoms to Kawasaki disease or toxic shock-like syndrome.
‘The priority for us today is dealing with a new issue that has come up which is truly disturbing and that is the issue that the coronavirus may effect young people. Very young people, that is infants, children in elementary school,’ he said
‘One of the few rays of good news was young people were not affected [by coronavirus]. We’re not so sure that is the fact anymore.
‘This is the last thing that we need at this time,’ he added.
The rising number of cases of the syndrome is now challenging previous beliefs that children are less susceptible to complications from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus as Cuomo revealed that the Centers for Disease Control has asked New York to develop a national criteria that can be used on other states and hospital systems.
‘These are children who come in and who don’t present the symptoms that we normally find familiar with COVID-19,’ Cuomo told the briefing.
‘It’s not a respiratory illness, they not in respiratory distress. I think that’s one of the reasons why this is getting discovered so far into the process, it’s more of an inflammation of the blood vessels which can then cause problems with the heart.’
He said that the New York Department of Health will also be working with the NY Genome Center and the Rockerfeller University to conduct a genome and RNA sequencing study on the reported cases to look for a cause for the illness.
‘These children happen to have the COVID-19 antibodies or be positive for COVID-19 but these were not the symptoms they showed when they came into the hospital system,’ he said.
Later in the briefing, Cuomo noted that a new system implemented to track coronavirus cases by neighborhood was showing a much higher number of cases among minority communities.
‘Part of the new system that we’ve implemented through this is hospitals report nightly how many cases they have, where they come from, and we can now literally map the number of people and where they’re coming from throughout the state,’ he said.
‘And then when you look into that information, especially in Brooklyn, and in the Bronx, it’s clear that the communities are heavier minority population and heavier year low-income population.
‘And when you compare that with the overall city rate, it makes the same point that hospitalization rate, infection rate among the minority community, among lower-income communities is higher than the average.’
He added that a recent testing on New York transit workers was showing they were being infected at a lower rate than the average rate in New York City.
‘We recently tested the transit workers writ large who have been doing the operations of the transit system. We tested 1,300 so that’s that a large size sample. 14 percent was the infection rate among transit workers and that’s actually good news,’ Cuomo said.
‘We’d like to see 0 but 14 percent is below the average infection rate for New Yorkers so it means that the transit workers’ infection rate is below the norm for New York City.
‘The New York City norm was 19.9 so that is that is good news and that also affirms the news we’ve heard on the other essential workers, frontline workers.’
In all three of the major indicators of virus spread, the peak happened at almost double the speed as the slowdown, figures reviewed by DailyMail.com reveals. Shown above is how all three indicators rose quickly and how they are now slowing, plus the length of time it will take them to reach pre-lockdown numbers (shown in green). Total hospitalizations continued to rise after new hospitalizations peaked because patients were staying in the hospital for longer
It was reported Friday that the coronavirus outbreak in New York state slowed at half the speed it spiked and is app
In the three major indicators of spread – daily new hospitalizations, daily deaths and total hospitalizations – the rate of the increase between March 20 – the date the full lockdown was put in place – and the peak was around twice the rate of the decrease from the peak until May 6.
City officials have not given daily updates on new hospitalizations from the beginning of the pandemic. The number of daily deaths in New York City though rose by 43 per day on average between March 20 and the peak.
They have recently been decreasing by around 17 per day, meaning it will take another 30 days to get where they were before the lockdown was implemented.
Epidemiologists say the slow decline is the result of the quarantine not being strict enough and on there not being testing and tracing fast enough. Now that the number of new daily cases is lower, they say the decline will pick up.
A second wave of infection is inevitable when the state reopens, they say, but the key is getting the numbers as low as possible before then to ensure that the second wave won’t cripple the hospital system.
In order to reopen, the state’s various regions each need to have a steady 14 day decline in deaths, new hospitalizations and having fewer than two per 100,000 residents being admitted to the hospital every day among other requirements like having enough free hospital beds, testing and tracing.
Statewide, those numbers have been reached already but the reopening hinges on how regions perform individually.
New York is the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States with 333,122 cases and 21,271 deaths.
