New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is holding his daily news conference on the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 122,000 people in the state as of Monday morning.
The governor is expected to speak at 12 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. You can watch his remarks via the live stream below, courtesy of CBS News.
New York City is the region that has been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Sunday afternoon, there were more than 67,500 confirmed cases. At least 4,159 people have died in the state due to the disease, which is roughly 40 percent of the total death toll in the entire country.
But the one-day death toll fell slightly for the first time on Sunday. There were 594 deaths reported in New York on Sunday, which was a slight decrease from the 630 deaths reported on Saturday.
“You could argue that you’re seeing a slight plateauing in the data, which obviously would be good news,” Cuomo said Sunday at his daily press briefing in Albany, New York. He added that “the interesting blip” could be the start of a plateau in cases but that “we won’t know until we see the next few days—does it go up, does it go down—but that is what the statisticians will tell you today.”
The United States has surpassed every other country in confirmed COVID-19 cases. There were more than 337,000 cases in the U.S. as of Monday morning, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
One of the people infected includes the governor’s brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo. The news anchor announced his diagnosis last week and has continued to broadcast his 9 p.m. show from his basement.
“We have to do everything we can to avoid getting sick,” Chris Cuomo said during his first broadcast after the diagnosis. “We have to do it for ourselves, for those in the front lines that are saving the lives of people like me and many of you. Together as ever as one. That is our remedy.”
The head of surgery at one of New York’s top hospitals likened the coming weeks of the coronavirus pandemic to war, saying doctors were about to fight “our Gettysburg, our Somme, our Iwo Jima, our Khe Sanh, our Fallujah.”
“We yearn to find our invincible spring, but we are hurtling into weeks predicted to be our worst,” Dr. Craig Smith from New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center said in a memo sent to staff Sunday. “The steadily positive slope we’ve watched for a month is grinding and relentless.”
