Saturday, 18 May 2024

Coronavirus in N.Y.C.: Latest Updates

By Corey Kilgannon

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It’s Tuesday.

Weather: A chance of morning showers, then mostly cloudy, with a high in the upper 40s.

Alternate-side parking: Suspended today because of the coronavirus. Meters are in effect.

As a Navy hospital ship arrived in New York City yesterday to help relieve the city’s overwhelmed hospitals, Governor Cuomo announced that more than 1,200 people infected with the coronavirus had died in New York State, up from 965 on Sunday morning.

Officials on the U.S.N.S. Comfort, the 1,000-bed ship, will handle non-virus patients to free up beds at hospitals for those with the coronavirus.

The Comfort, which has 12 operating rooms, a medical laboratory and more than 1,100 medical personnel, docked at Pier 90 off West 50th Street in Manhattan. Mayor de Blasio said 750 of its beds would be put to use “immediately.”

Mr. Cuomo also reiterated that the worst of the coronavirus outbreak was yet to come, even as hundreds of people had died in the state in a 24-hour period.

New York State reported more than 7,000 new cases of the virus yesterday, bringing the total to over 67,000. More than half of the cases were in New York City.

[Get the latest news and updates on the coronavirus in the New York region.]

Here’s what else you should know.

More than 186,000 people have been tested for the coronavirus in New York State in March, about 1 percent of the state’s population. But while New York’s testing 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.

Fears are growing of a public health catastrophe inside New York City’s jail system. As of yesterday, nearly 170 inmates and almost 140 staff members had tested positive at the city’s jails, including the Rikers Island complex.

Inside the jails, inmates, including some waiting to be released, have been struggling to protect themselves, some by diluting shampoo to disinfect cell bars and tabletops.

[‘We’re left for dead’: Fears of a virus catastrophe at Rikers]

At least five more transit workers have died in the city from the virus, including a bus operator based in Brooklyn and a station cleaner based in the Bronx, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the city’s subway and buses and two commuter railroads. The fatalities brought the death toll for the authority to at least seven.

Nearly 100 people living in New York City’s main homeless shelter system have tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said.

Governor Murphy of New Jersey yesterday announced roughly 3,400 new coronavirus cases in the state, bringing the total to more than 16,600. There have been nearly 200 deaths. Governor Lamont of Connecticut announced about 580 new cases, bringing that state’s total to nearly 2,600. There were nearly 40 deaths in Connecticut as of yesterday.

On a hopeful note, Mr. Cuomo said that more than 4,200 people in New York State had been discharged from hospitals, and that while the number of hospitalizations continued to grow, the rate at which it was 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,” he said. “We now have a doubling of cases every six days.”

Another bright spot: A Twitter follower of the Harlem restaurant FieldTrip paid for 170 meals to be delivered to hospital workers in and near Harlem.

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