Coronavirus Updates: De Blasio Says NYC Has Enough Ventilators For The Next 2-3 Days

This is our daily update of breaking COVID-19 news for Sunday, April 5th, 2020. Previous daily updates can be found here, and up-to-date statistics are here.

Read our guide to understanding New York on PAUSE, NY's stay-at-home order; a look at preparing for the spread of coronavirus is here, and if you have lingering questions about the virus, here is our regularly updated coronavirus FAQ. Here are some local and state hotlines for more information: NYC: 311; NY State Hotline: 888-364-3065; NJ State Hotline: 800-222-1222.

Are you a healthcare worker? Are you another kind of essential worker? Email us what you're seeing at [email protected].

4:42 p.m.: Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a detailed update on New York City's COVID-19 response needs on Sunday, a day which he had previously anticipated city hospitals would run out of ventilators. Thankfully, de Blasio said that his pleas for more equipment were heard. "The ventilators we've gotten will stretch farther than we earlier projected," he said.

So far, the city has distributed 2,865 ventilators and 1,780 BiPAP machines to hospitals, plus there's also a reserve of 135 ventilators to be deployed to hospitals as needed. About 4,000 coronavirus patients are currently being kept alive on ventilators across the city now, de Blasio said. On average, each day about 200 to 300 patients are being intubated and need ventilators. Coronavirus patients who are intubated are generally hooked up to ventilators for at least a week, if not two to three weeks.

Based on the city's calculations, there will be enough ventilators for the next 48-72 hours. De Blasio pleaded for machines from the two places he knows there are ventilators, the federal stockpile, which is currently about 10,000, and the New York state supply, which is around 2,800. "We need them in place before that new patient comes in," de Blasio said. "That vent has to be up and ready in time for that one next patient," and not sitting in a warehouse.

Therefore, he said, NYC will need another 1,000-1,500 ventilators to get through to next Sunday, April 12th. (Overall, de Blasio expects the city will need 15,000 ventilators to provide life support to coronavirus patients who need it during the apex of the pandemic in NYC.)

De Blasio also stressed that that more medical personnel is needed, to help the overwhelmed hospitals and their overworked staffs, some of whom are also falling ill. The city asked the federal government for 1,450 medical professionals—1,000 nurses; 300 respiratory therapists; and 150 doctors—to assist at the public hospitals, like Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and Bellevue in Manhattan. "We are the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, and our public hospitals are bearing the brunt," he said.

291 federal medical personnel are arriving in NYC today, de Blasio said. That includes 174 nurses, 104 doctors, and 13 respiratory therapists. "It's a very good start... but it's nowhere near what I requested," de Blasio said, directing his message to Washington, D.C.

The mayor acknowledged that the COVID-19 cases and deaths "track very, very sadly with where we've seen historic health disparities, where we've seen historic problems with communities whose health profile really suggest really tough situations even in peace time. In this crisis, that's only amplified the reality."

However, the city's Health Department has not been releasing any racial demographic information of COVID-19 cases and deaths, unlike other cities such as Milwaukee. When WNYC's Brigid Bergin asked the mayor about this gap in information, de Blasio said that the crisis escalated too quickly, and the city's first priority was to save lives, "This thing went from 0 to 60 very fast."

"When we started to put out data," he explained, "we were concerned to make sure it was accurate and not a constantly moving target." He said that the city Health Department was working to put out more data in coming weeks. "We want to put out more fine-tuned data, more per capita data, showing the real specific impact on communities, certainly demographic breakdowns to the extent we can."

There's a "striking overlap where this virus is doing the most damage and where we've had historic health inequities," he said, noting it's where public hospitals are located.

After agreeing that reporting the racial breakdowns was important, Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said, "The reality of the matter is our ability to report accurate and consistent data is only as good as the data we get coming in." She cited challenges in getting that information from hospital partners and testing sites, but the Health Department is looking at other ways of getting the data.

"I'm hopeful that we can get to a place where we can consistently report the demographics," she said. "We're concerned about the inequities that are getting magnified with the severity of COVID-19 and we want to make sure to address that in its totality."

Known COVID-19 Deaths In NY Decline For The First Time In More Than A Week

1:30 p.m.: New York State saw a decline in confirmed COVID-19 deaths for the first time in more than a week, Governor Andrew Cuomo said a briefing in Albany on Sunday.

Hospitalizations and intubations also decreased slightly, though Cuomo emphasized it would not be clear for several days whether it was a "blip" or if the state had reached its "apex" or at least a plateau.

"Again, you can’t do this day-to-day. You have to look at three or four days to see a pattern," Cuomo said.

The statisticians “want the future data to determine if this was a plateau."

4,159 people have died from the coronavirus in New York State, up by 594 from yesterday. The previous one day COVID-19 death toll in New York State was 630. (There was a decrease in the number of daily new deaths between March 26th and March 27th, but this weekend was the first drop in the number of new fatalities since then.) There are now 122,031 confirmed cases statewide.

The Trump administration will deploy 1,000 healthcare personnel—doctors, nurses, and technicians—to New York to boost hospital staff. 325 of them will be deployed to public hospitals on Sunday, according to the governor.

“We’re literally going day-to-day with our supplies, with our staff, et cetera, which is counter-intuitive and counter-operational for the entire healthcare system,” Cuomo said. Typically supplies would be managed on a 60- or 90-day basis, the governor said.

Cuomo reiterated that he's working to centralize the hospital systems—private and public—to share resources and transfer patients when one hospital becomes overwhelmed.

“We have to balance the patient load among all of these hospitals,” Cuomo said. “That means some patients who show up at their neighborhood hospital may be asked, can we transport you to another hospital which is not in your neighborhood but actually has more capacity."

Some 2,500 beds soon to be available at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center would be helpful, but ventilators and staff are critical for hospital beds to be useful.

“At a time when we desperately need a relief valve for the system, the Javits could do that," Cuomo said.

During This Week on ABC News Sunday morning, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said the 2,500-bed facility would be the "largest hospital in the United States."

"And it will be run by the United States military," Esper said.

Esper described the government's efforts to help coronavirus-stricken states, including deploying medical personnel. He added that the hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, could potentially accept COVID-19 patients, but, at present, "We just don’t want trauma patients to become coronavirus patients, too."

The USNS Comfort, which has 1,000 beds, is "mobile," Esper stressed, and could be deployed to other parts of the nation as needed. As for ventilators, the secretary said on CNN, "Many of those ventilators deployed with the USNS Comfort and Mercy in New York and (Los Angeles), respectively. They are with our field hospitals. We have several field hospitals deployed in New York, in Seattle, in New Orleans and Dallas. And then we provided several hundred more that are pre-positioned and ready to go, particularly with regard to New York City when they're needed."

On CBS's Face the Nation, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that as possible encouraging signs of mitigation appear, Americans should still be prepared to see deaths rise.

While new cases of coronavirus might start to flatten out, Fauci said, "the deaths will lag by, you know, one or two weeks or more. So we need to be prepared that even though it's clear that mitigation is working, we're still going to see that tail off of deaths."

As for the "apex" that Governor Cuomo keeps referring to, Fauci agreed, "This next week is going to look bad because we're still not yet at that apex. And I think within a week, eight days or nine days or so, we -- hopefully you're going to see that turnaround."

He urged the American public—including those in states that have yet to issue stay-at-home orders—to take physical separation as seriously as possible. "Avoid any interaction like movies and sports events and theaters and things like that, even in areas where you're not having a big explosion of cases. To the best of your ability, do that because this virus doesn't discriminate, whether you're in a small town, in a relatively secluded area of the country versus whether you're in a big city. And sooner or later, you're going to see a surge of cases," Fauci said.

Cuomo Says He Hasn't Heard From Local Officials About City Residents Fleeing To Second Homes

Local officials and residents of eastern Long Island have been increasingly troubled by the surge in NYC residents relocating to their second homes during the COVID-19 "PAUSE," and near the end of March they begged Governor Andrew Cuomo to order non-locals to keep out. Cuomo, however, appears not to have gotten the memo.

Speaking to reporters at his daily COVID-19 press briefing in Albany on Sunday, Cuomo was asked if he would consider urging affluent NYC residents not to flee to their second homes in Long Island, like New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has done.

Cuomo said during the press briefing on Sunday that he would take a look at Murphy’s guidance on the matter but had not yet considered implementing such a policy in New York, adding that he had not heard from any local officials in New York requesting such an order.

But on March 27th, 10 local leaders from Southampton, New York sent a letter to Cuomo asking him to place “temporary limitations on non-essential travel from New York City to our area.”

“[W]e are growing increasingly concerned with our local ability to manage the added strain to our local healthcare system, food markets and other essential businesses needed to maintain the health and safety of our residents,” the town supervisors, mayors, and Shinnecock Nation leaders wrote.

As non-essential workers are required to go on PAUSE, local leaders in Long Island have said there has been an unexpected population increase as people flee to summer homes.

“We are used to a surge of population,” Jay Schneiderman, the supervisor of Southampton Town on Long Island, told Gothamist in late March. “But we have to kind to gear up for it, prepare for it. What we've seen is a sudden surge in population. Very, very rapid. In March where most of the summer homes are empty, now most of these homes are occupied.”

On Saturday, Nassau county became the county with the most COVID-19 cases in the nation aside from NYC counties. Cuomo compared the increase in coranavirus cases on Long Island to "a fire spreading." As of Sunday, there were 12,405 confirmed cases in Suffolk county and 14,398 in Nassau county.

"We Could Have 5,000 People On Ventilators" Next Week, De Blasio Says

Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio referred to Sunday, April 5th, as "D-Day," the day New York City could run out of ventilators to treat patients with COVID-19. Now, with Governor Andrew Cuomo's announcement that 1,000 ventilators, donated by Chinese business leaders (and facilitated by the Chinese government), were arriving at JFK Airport on Saturday, plus another 140 ventilators loaned from Oregon on the way, de Blasio says we have enough ventilators -- but not for long.

"It's going to be very tight going into next week," de Blasio told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Saturday night. Acknowledging Oregon governor Kate Brown's assistance, de Blasio said, "[T]hat was an extraordinarily kind, decent thing. One American state helping another. So that's a step forward. The additional ones from China, that'll get us into next week for sure. How far into the next week? We're still not sure. We think at some point next week, we could have 5,000 people on ventilators, that's a real potential, horrible milestone we might meet. So, it's going to be touch-and-go on the question of ventilators next week."

Prior to the 1,140 ventilators announced on Saturday, New York City had only received 2,500 ventilators. De Blasio and other health officials have said that 15,000 will be needed when COVID-19 cases reach their apex in NYC; during his Friday briefing, the mayor said, "To save every life that can be saved, we will need 15,000 total ventilators.

According to the latest city numbers, there are 60,850 NYC coronavirus cases, with 20,371 in Queens; 16,488 in Brooklyn; 11,820 in the Bronx; 8,871 in Manhattan; and 660 in Staten Island. (The citywide number of cases differs from state data, which puts NYC's current confirmed case total at 63,306.) Queens and the Bronx have higher infection rates, on a per capita basis, than the other boroughs.

The city's data also says that during a 24-hour period between April 3rd, 5 p.m., and April 4th, 5 p.m., there were 387 new deaths, totaling 2,254. (Note: During Cuomo's Saturday briefing, his top aide Melissa DeRosa said the NYC death toll was 2,624; we are awaiting comment from the NYC Department of Health to explain the discrepancy.)

The new data also shows that, when calculating the case fatality rate [CFR] per borough, the CFR for the Bronx is 62% higher than Manhattan's. As we noted in our statistics page, "This could be an overstatement because of a paucity of testing in the borough, or it could reflect a real difference in case outcomes, reflecting differences in demographics and health between the different parts of the city."

Here's a snapshot, using data from April 1st, April 3rd, and April 4th (April 2nd was not available), of the increase in rate of infection across the city:

De Blasio has also been using his recent press appearances to reiterate his call for the federal government to draft healthcare workers, citing the need for medical personnel during the pandemic. Noting that many frontline healthcare workers are exhausted and falling ill in New York City, the mayor said on CNN, "My projection for New York City over the next month or two is we're going to need 45,000 doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, et cetera, to get through this full crisis."

The mayor also repeated that NYC will need 60,000 more beds—a few thousand are addressed by the pop-up hospitals, including at the Javits Center—"because there's going to be explosion of cases and then people are going to need treatment for weeks and weeks."