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Cuomo Says Worst Is to Come as Coronavirus Deaths Top 1,200: Live Updates - The New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the worst of the coronavirus outbreak was yet to come, even as another 253 people died in the state in a 24-hour period. He said he remained focused on preparing for the virus to hit at full strength in New York.

“If you wait to prepare for a storm to hit, it is too late,” he said. “You have to prepare before the storm hits. And in this case the storm is when you hit that high point, when you hit that apex. How do you know when you’re going to get there? You don’t.”

Here are other takeaways from the governor’s Monday briefing at the Javits Center, a convention center in Manhattan that has been quickly turned into a 1,000-bed emergency hospital:

  • New York reported almost 7,000 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to nearly 66,500. Most of the cases are in New York City, where 36,221 people have tested positive, the city says.

  • The number of people hospitalized was 9,517, up 12 percent from yesterday. Of those, 2,352 are in ventilator-equipped intensive care rooms.

  • In a hopeful note, Mr. Cuomo said that while the number of hospitalizations continues to grow, the rate which it is growing was tapering off. “We had a doubling of cases every two days, then a doubling every three days and a doubling every four days, then every five,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We now have a doubling of cases every six days. So while the overall number is going up, the rate of doubling is actually down.”

  • More than 4,200 people have been discharged from hospitals.

  • New York has tested more than 186,000 people in March, about one percent of the state’s population. But while New York’s testing capacity far outpaces that of other states, it has not reached the critical-mass level public health experts say is necessary to more precisely identify the spread of the virus.

A Navy hospital ship that docked in Manhattan this morning is expected to provide relief to the city’s overwhelmed hospitals by freeing up beds so that they can treat more coronavirus patients.

The 1,000-bed ship, the Comfort, with 12 operating rooms, a medical laboratory and more than 1,000 Navy officers, arrived at Pier 90 off West 50th Street in Manhattan just before 11 a.m., and Mayor Bill de Blasio said that 750 of its beds will be put to use “immediately.”

The Comfort will treat patients who do not have the virus. The city’s hospitals are now so full that paramedics in the field are being forced to make on-the-spot judgments about who gets to go to the hospital and who is left behind, perhaps to die.

“This is like adding another hospital here in New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s such a boost to see the military arrive to help us out.”

Still, he acknowledged that the city’s health care system would need far more support.

“We started with around 20,000 working beds in New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We have to get over 60,000 by the beginning of May according to what we know now — like adding 40 U.S. Comforts. And that’s the magnitude of what we’re talking about.”

Along the Hudson, people gathered in bunches to watch the ship arrive — in apparent violation of social distancing rules.

The Comfort, a converted supertanker, was used as a floating base for rescue workers in New York after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

In sending the ship, Navy officials acknowledge that they have taken a risk. They insist that they are doing everything short of Saran-wrapping the ship to try to keep it virus-free, aware that all it would take is one positive case to turn the Comfort from rescue ship to floating petri dish.

“We will establish a bubble around this ship to make sure we’re doing everything to keep it out,” said Capt. Joseph O’Brien, commodore of the military’s Task Force New York City.

Separately, officials have been transforming the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a 1,000-bed hospital. Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers have said the hospital should be ready to open today.

Credit...Mount Sinai Health System and NetJets

Private jets donated by Warren Buffett’s company. Special approvals from two governments. And a frenzied trip to China.

That’s how far the Mount Sinai Health System had to go last week to obtain N95 respirators, the heavy-duty face masks that are most effective at blocking particles carrying coronavirus.

The effort, which was not publicly disclosed, illustrates the scarcity of protective equipment for health care workers in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.

It began last Monday, when Mount Sinai got a call from Taikang Nanjing International Medical Center saying that the hospital had hundreds of thousands of extra masks and other supplies because the outbreak in China had peaked. Mount Sinai could have them if it picked them up.

After China said it did not have room for the cargo plane Mount Sinai wanted to send, the health system got a Goldman Sachs executive to convince a Buffett-owned company called NetJets to send two small 13-seat jets.

At a landing strip in Nanjing, a city of 8 million northwest of Shanghai, the pilots squeezed 5.5 tons of N95 masks — about 130,000 masks in all — into the jets.

The gambit required special approval from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration and the Chinese government. But it worked. At 3 a.m. Friday, the jets landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and workers began taking masks to Mount Sinai’s eight hospitals.

The supplies will alleviate shortages for now — and more masks will be coming next week, the hospital said. But for some, the fact that even a wealthy private institution like Mount Sinai had to go through this ordeal showed how unprepared the U.S. was for the pandemic. “The masks coming in from China is welcome but is not nearly enough,” said Pat Kane of the New York State Nurses Association.

Day after day, doctors and nurses keep going to work, earning cheers on the streets for fighting on the front lines.

But inside New York’s hospitals, medical workers face scenes that are incredibly grim. Their colleagues are falling sick.

Two nurses in city hospitals have died. Protective gear for those who are relatively healthy remains scarce.

Across New York, anxiety is growing among even the most even-keeled health care workers. “I feel like we’re all just being sent to slaughter,” said Thomas Riley, a nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, who has contracted the virus, along with his husband.

Governor Cuomo’s approval rating surged over the last month, fueled by overwhelming support for his handling of the coronavirus crisis, according to a Siena College poll released Monday.

Mr. Cuomo is viewed favorably by 71 percent of voters, up from 44 percent in February. Just 23 percent saw him unfavorably, his best negative rating since 2012.

The third-term Democrat stands as the state’s most popular politician, far outpacing President Trump, the Queens native who is seen favorably by only 35 percent of New Yorkers.

The governor’s popularity seems directly related his handling of the outbreak: 87 percent of those polled approved of his performance as the virus has spread.

The disease itself has the state’s residents deeply worried, Siena reported, with 92 percent of respondents either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about it.

Mr. Cuomo, who has long denied presidential ambitions, polled 20 points higher than former Vice President Joseph Biden, who was seen favorably by 51 percent, and unfavorably by 40 percent.

The telephone poll of 566 New York State registered voters was conducted between March 22 and 26, with an error margin of 4.5 percentage points.

Subway ridership in New York City has plummeted in recent weeks. But in poorer areas, many people have jobs that do not allow them the luxury of working from home. So they keep riding.

In the Bronx, two stations that have had relatively low drops in ridership serve neighborhoods with some of the highest poverty rates in the city, a Times analysis found.

The 170th Street station in the University Heights neighborhood and Burnside station in Mount Eden are surrounded by large Latin American and African immigrant communities where the median household income is about $22,000 — one-third the median household income in New York State, according to census data.

It is a striking change on a system that has long been the great equalizer among New Yorkers, where hourly workers crowded in with financial executives. Now the subway is more like a symbol of the city’s inequality.

Many residents say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Even worse, a reduction in service in response to plunging ridership has sometimes caused crowding making it impossible to maintain the social distancing public health experts recommend.

“This virus is very dangerous. I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want my family to get sick, but I still need to get to my job,” said Yolanda Encanción, a home health aide who works in Lower Manhattan.

As The New York Times follows the spread of the coronavirus across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we need your help. We want to talk to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, emergency services workers, nursing home managers — anyone who can share what they are seeing in the region’s hospitals and other health care centers. Even if you haven’t seen anything yet, we want to connect now so we can stay in touch in the future.

A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.

Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Jesse McKinley, Andy Newman, Aaron Randle, Sam Roberts, Brian M. Rosenthal, Michael Schwirtz, Matt Stevens and Katie Van Syckle.

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