New York City published new statistics Monday that Mayor Bill de Blasio has said will better help guide understanding of how the COVID-19 outbreak is sweeping the city and sickening residents across the five boroughs, but the new measurements still fail to account for suspected deaths caused by COVID-19, where tests were not conducted.
The city is now releasing new information called public health milestones on how many New York City residents are hospitalized with suspected COVID-19 cases each day; how many people are in intensive care units in the city’s public hospitals; and the percentage of positive tests conducted by public health laboratories and other locations.
Those metrics show new hospitalizations have gradually declined over the last two weeks, while the number of New Yorkers in city hospitals stayed flat at around 830 people over the last three days.
No part of the new metrics account for suspected COVID-19 deaths occurring outside of hospital settings, which Fire Department data show have skyrocketed over the last three weeks.
“We don’t have a firm estimate but we’re working as quickly as we can,” said Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the City’s Health Department, when asked when these numbers would be included as part of the information the city is releasing on the outbreak. City officials promised to do so last Tuesday, following WNYC and Gothamist’s report.
Meanwhile, surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention details deaths from coronavirus, pneumonia, and influenza paint an alarming picture. Across the five boroughs, 14,535 New Yorkers died between February 1st and April 4th, 133 percent more than expected based on averages of the number of deaths that occurred during the same period over the last three years. (As of Monday, the city’s statistics say that 6,182 New York City residents died of the virus who had been tested for it.)
For New York State, the number of actual deaths was 103 percent higher than expected. New Jersey also saw twice as many more deaths than expected at 15,644.
Overall, the number of 911 calls have been leveling off from a record peak on March 30th of more than 6,500 calls, according to the FDNY. Currently, the department is down to less than 5,000 calls per day. But the number of people dying before they can be hospitalized has hovered above 200 people each day, ten times pre-pandemic averages, according to FDNY data.
FDNY cardiac calls remain well above the previous year's average
FDNY cardiac calls ending in death of the victim are running at twice their 2019 levels
That number peaked a week ago on April 6, when the FDNY says 362 calls came into 911 for a person in cardiac arrest, and of those calls, 280 died at the scene before they could make it to a hospital. Since then there’s been a slight decline each day, with 204 such deaths on Sunday, according to the FDNY.
“It’s one of the hardest things that we have to do on this job, is to tell the family that we’ve done everything we can,” said Joshua Rodriguez, 28, a paramedic with the FDNY. “We can only help them so much before we have to go into service, and do it all over again.”
With additional reporting by George Joseph
