N.Y. Virus Deaths Double in Three Days to Almost 3,000: Live Updates

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April 4, 2020 1:03 AM

NEW YORK — The coronavirus is taking lives at a devastating pace in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, with deaths nearly doubling in just three days, from 1,550 on Tuesday to 2,935 on Friday.

N.Y. Virus Deaths Double in Three Days to Almost 3,000: Live Updates

More people in New York were reported to have died of the virus in the last 24 hours — 562 — than in the first 27 days of March.

“It’s hard to go through this all day, and then it’s hard to stay up all night, watching those numbers come in and the number of deaths tick up,” the governor said at his daily briefing in Albany.

On Friday, for the first time, the state recorded more than 10,000 positive tests for the virus in one day: There are now 102,863 confirmed cases in New York state, up from 92,381 on Thursday. New York City has 57,159 cases — nearly a quarter of the confirmed cases in the country.

The number of cases in the state has almost doubled since last Friday. The number of people hospitalized and the number of patients on ventilators have both more than doubled since then.

With hospitals still in dire need of medical equipment, including ventilators, Cuomo said he was signing an executive order authorizing the state to seize and redistribute equipment and supplies from hospitals and private-sector companies that did not immediately need them.

“I’m not going to let people die because we didn’t redistribute ventilators,” he said.

He said that any equipment commandeered would be returned after the crisis. When a reporter asked whether private hospitals might raise legal objections, Cuomo answered, “If they want to sue me for borrowing their excess ventilators to save lives, let them sue me.”

Searching for a bright spot, Cuomo said that emergency hospital admissions unrelated to COVID-19 have fallen because the virus, and the restrictions associated with it, have caused traffic and crime to drop sharply. This has made the crisis slightly less overwhelming for the health care system.

“You don’t have the same crime rate, so you don’t have the same number of trauma cases coming into the hospital,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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