Mayor Says Trump Ignores ‘Facts’ of Coronavirus in N.Y.: Live Updates

Mayor Says Trump Ignores ‘Facts’ of Coronavirus in N.Y.: Live Updates 1
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Credit…Juan Arredondo for The New York Times

New York City’s death toll reaches 365.

Health officials reported late Thursday that New York City had added 3,101 new confirmed coronavirus cases since the same time on Wednesday, bringing the total to 23,112. By comparison, more than 4,400 new cases were added from Tuesday to Wednesday.

The total number of virus-related deaths climbed to 365 on Thursday, up from 280 the day before.

Of the latest death total, the Bronx accounted for 80 deaths (22 percent); Brooklyn, 81 (22 percent); Manhattan, 55 (15 percent); Queens, 123 (34 percent); and Staten Island, 26 (7 percent). An overwhelming majority of the dead had underlying illnesses, officials said.

So far, 20 percent of the people who tested positive in New York City have required hospitalization, including more than half of those 75 years of age or older.

Statewide, there were nearly 39,000 positive cases as of Thursday night, with well over 400 deaths.

Trump says New York overstates the need for ventilators, and de Blasio bristles.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday sharply rebutted comments by President Trump that New York State was overstating its need for ventilators to treat the growing number of coronavirus patients and said the president failed to grasp the severity of the outbreak.

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“With all due respect to him, he’s not looking at the facts of the astronomical growth of this crisis,” Mr. de Blasio said on “Good Morning America.”

A ventilator, Mr. de Blasio added, “means someone lives or dies.”

On Thursday night, Mr. Trump had said he doubted that the state would ever need the 30,000 ventilators that officials in New York have repeatedly asked Washington for.

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News.

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” the president added. “You know you go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators and now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

As of Thursday morning, nearly 1,300 Covid-19 patients in New York State were in intensive care units, most of them on ventilators, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said. That number had jumped by 45 percent from the day before, and the state has projected that the growth of coronavirus cases will continue to accelerate for several more weeks.

“The only way we can obtain these ventilators is from the federal government,” Mr. Cuomo said earlier in the week. “Period.”

Mr. de Blasio said that the city, which has about 60 percent of the state’s virus cases, would need 15,000 ventilators to fight the crisis. He urged the president to strike an agreement with companies that could make the lifesaving devices. “Not just for New York State,” the mayor said, “but for the whole country.

More states target travelers from New York over virus.

More governors on Thursday targeted travelers from the New York area, the center of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, in an effort to limit the spread in their own states.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas ordered anyone flying into the state from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the city of New Orleans to self-isolate for 14 days. Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island said she was requiring that anyone traveling from New York do the same.

And in Connecticut, where many wealthy New Yorkers own second homes, Gov. Ned Lamont urged all travelers from New York City to self-quarantine for 14 days upon entering the state.

The new orders came after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland imposed similar restrictions and after White House officials said that anyone who had recently been in New York, which had more than 37,000 cases and nearly 400 deaths as of Thursday, should self-quarantine for two weeks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio questioned the wisdom of such directives at a news briefing on Wednesday.

“I think there’s a little bit of a lack of recognition right now of just how much this disease has already spread around the country,” he said.

Mr. Abbott’s executive order applies only to those traveling into Texas by air. He said it would be enforced by the state’s Department of Public Safety, and that violations would be considered a criminal offense punishable by a fine, jail time or both. State troopers will conduct visits to travelers’ isolation locations to verify compliance.

Ms. Raimondo said that to enforce her order, National Guard troops would be stationed at bus and train stations, and that the State Police would help check cars with New York plates.

The number of patients hospitalized in the state rises 40 percent.

From Wednesday morning to Thursday morning, 100 people died of the coronavirus in New York State, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday at a news briefing where the message was notably less hopeful than it had been the previous day.

Mr. Cuomo said the number of patients hospitalized in New York had shot up 40 percent in a day, the sharpest increase in days.

One factor in the rising death toll, he said, was that older and weaker patients were staying on ventilators 20 days or longer before succumbing to respiratory failure.

“The longer you are on a ventilator, the more probability of a bad outcome,” he said.

More updates from the Thursday briefing:

  • The number of virus patients hospitalized on Thursday was 5,327. Of those, 1,290 were in intensive care, up 45 percent from the 888 in intensive care on Wednesday.

  • New York hopes to build at least one medical center with more than 1,000 beds in each of New York City’s five boroughs and surrounding counties to manage an imminent overflow of patients.

Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Manny Fernandez, Michael Gold, Nicole Hong, Jesse McKinley, Andy Newman, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Ed Shanahan.

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