Cuomo Says 21% of Those Tested in N.Y.C. Had Virus Antibodies: Live Updates

The results were from a state program that tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State. Nearly 14 percent of the tests came back positive, Mr. Cuomo said.

It was unclear just how telling the preliminary data was, as Mr. Cuomo acknowledged. And the accuracy of the antibody testing available in the United States in general has been called into question.

Antibody tests are intended to signal whether a person may have built immunity to virus. They do not test for the virus itself.

But if the state’s numbers indicated the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.6 million people statewide, have already been infected.

That is far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus itself that the state has recorded.

It would also mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent, Mr. Cuomo said.

The city’s top disease control official, Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, wrote in an email alert on Wednesday that the tests “may produce false negative or false positive results,” pointing to “significant voids” in using the science to pinpoint immunity.

Mr. Cuomo declined to speculate on what the preliminary data might mean. He said its main use would be to provide a baseline for tracking changes in the infection rate.

Supermarket customers do not constitute a random sample of the population. On one hand, they are out in public and spending time in stores, which could increase their exposure to the virus.

On the other hand, they are presumably not actively sick, or living in nursing homes, where the virus has taken a heavy toll. And, of course, no one who was killed by the virus was tested for antibodies.

“What does it mean? I don’t know,” Mr. Cuomo said. “These are people who were out and about shopping. They were not people who were in their homes, they were not people who were isolated, they were not people who were quarantined.”

The overall toll rose on Wednesday when officials learned of the deaths of three men who had been living in shelters meant for single adults and who died after being hospitalized with the virus, officials said.

Nearly three of every four homeless people who have died of the virus and were being tracked by the homeless services agency were adults living in shelters where multiple people share rooms and bathrooms.

At a meeting on Thursday, the City Council’s general welfare committee took up legislation that, among other things, would require that single homeless adults be provided with private rooms.

Advocates for homeless people have pushed the city to move people out of shelters into empty hotel rooms, where they would be in a better position to isolate themselves.

Before the pandemic hit New York, about 3,500 single adults were living in double hotel rooms because there were not enough shelters to accommodate them.

To protect the most vulnerable shelter residents from the virus, the city began to move older people, those with underlying health conditions and others out of 10 most densely populated shelters. As many as eight to 12 people can live in one room in some shelters, making it difficult to practice social distancing. The city expects to move about 2,500 homeless people.

Advocates have argued that all homeless people should have access to empty hotel rooms, as health care workers and people who have homes but cannot safely stay in them have had under separate programs.

The programs drew scrutiny this week after three men were found dead at a Hilton Garden Inn in Manhattan last Saturday.

The virus had infected 587 correction staff members and 323 inmates in the city’s jails as of Thursday, according to data from the officers union. Nine staff members and at least two inmates have died.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the union accused the city of putting correction officers at further risk by requiring them to work overtime to fill staffing shortages. Some officers, the suit says, have been forced to work three straight shifts of at least eight hours each.

The union, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said the 24-hour shifts were damaging the officers’ physical and mental health and forcing them into a “cesspool of illness.”

Adding to the officers’ exposure, the suit says, was the city’s failure to require that those who missed work after showing signs of illness test negative for the virus before letting them return.

A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said officials would review the issues raised in the suit carefully. He said the city had been working to keep the jails safe by following guidelines established by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while “addressing challenging staffing issues.”

In an earlier suit, the union accused the city of failing to provide adequate testing, masks and other protective gear to its members. The union said it had to get 25,000 N95 masks for officers from its own supplier.

The two sides settled that suit this month, with the city agreeing to provide, among other things, free testing for any correction employee who exhibited virus symptoms or who had been exposed to someone with the virus.

A new study of thousands of people who were hospitalized in New York City after contracting the coronavirus found that more than nine in 10 had at least one chronic health condition and that most had at least two.

The findings were included in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that describes the characteristics of thousands of Covid-19 patients admitted from March 1 to April 4 at a dozen hospitals in New York City and Westchester County and on Long Island that are operated by Northwell Health.

The paper was written by scientists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell’s research arm. The senior author cautioned that the study was observational in nature, and that there was no comparison group with which to contrast frailties or outcomes.

The researchers found that dozens of children and teenagers were hospitalized with the virus, but survived it, and that women had a clear edge in beating the virus. Fewer of them were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive.

One in five hospital stays ended in death. The mortality rate for those who were placed on ventilators and were no longer in the hospital was 88 percent. That was higher than some other early case reports, which found death rates of 50 percent to almost 70 percent, have shown.

Given that the length of hospital stays in the Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it is possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that any treatment was unlikely to help them.

Like several other reports on smaller patient groups at area hospitals, the Northwell research indicated that obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes were common risk factors for severe Covid-19 disease requiring hospitalization. One of the most striking findings: only 6 percent of hospitalized patients had no underlying health conditions at all.

In the 11 days he spent fighting off the coronavirus as a patient at Montefiore Nyack Hospital, there was one thing Mark Schwarz couldn’t figure out.

Many hospitals around New York have adopted semiofficial songs to celebrate the release of virus patients. “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Every Breath You Take” are among the popular ones.

At some hospitals, the music starts playing long before discharge. At Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, nurses call for a “Code Sun” when a patient is removed from a ventilator and successfully breathing on their own; Montefiore Nyack plays it when patients move out of intensive care.

“Honestly,” said Devjit Roy, Mr. Schwarz’s doctor at Montefiore Nyack, “I guess it’s just the sound of hope.”

Mr. Murphy noted the cruel milestone while reporting that the state had recorded 307 new virus-related deaths, pushing the toll in the past four days to more than 1,100 and overall total to 5,368.

Mr. Murphy reported 4,247 new cases at his daily briefing on Thursday, bringing the total to 99,989. He noted that 46,000 of those involved people who had cleared the virus’s two-week incubation period.

“Let’s remember that there are tens of thousands of residents who received a positive result who have now likely defeated the virus,” he said.

The number of hospitalizations rose slightly to 7,240 but the number of people on ventilators fell to 1,462, the lowest it has been in nearly three weeks, Mr. Murphy said.

As he regularly does, Mr. Murphy memorialized some of the state residents who have died of the virus.

They included Carolyn Martins-Reitz, a 55-year-old graphic designer who died at the end of March, and her son, Thomas Martins, who died a week later around his 30th birthday. Ms. Martins-Reitz doted on her son, who had Down syndrome, Mr. Murphy said.

He also mentioned Dave Clark, 47, a firefighter from Bay Head who died over the weekend, and Rick Vanderclock, 71, who was a state trooper for 29 years.

Mr. Murphy said Rutgers University had developed a saliva test that would be given to 1,200 patients and 4,300 employees of the state’s five developmental centers, which treat residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The test relies on saliva to show the presence of the coronavirus and university officials have said it would allow for broader virus screening than the current method of using nose and throat swabs.

“With this new testing we can test 10,000 people a day,” said Dr. Brian L. Strom, the chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.