N.Y.C. Death Toll Tops 1,500 as Cuomo Warns on Ventilators – The New York Times

New York has only six days’ worth of ventilators left.

The warning from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday was ominous: At the rate the state was using ventilators for coronavirus patients, it would run out in just six days.

The remarks imposed an urgent timeline on the guidance the governor has been giving for weeks — that if New York did not get a major infusion of the potentially lifesaving machines, and quickly, the number of virus-related deaths in the state would spike drastically.

“If a person comes in and needs a ventilator and you don’t have a ventilator, the person dies,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily briefing in Albany. “That’s the blunt equation here. And right now we have a burn rate that would suggest we have about six days in the stockpile.”

The comments came as doctors in New York City, where hospitals’ supplies are dwindling amid a flood of virus patients, cautioned that medical workers might soon need to make difficult choices about rationing care.

Across the United States, hospitals and public health officials have been working on plans for what might happen if the number of virus patients were to exceed the available space in intensive care units.

The governor said that there were 2,200 ventilators in the state’s stockpile and that about 350 new patients a day need them. At that pace, he said, “2,200 disappears very quickly.”

On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that New York City alone would need 2,500 to 3,000 new ventilators next week to cope with an expected surge in patients.

Mr. Cuomo said that he had spoken to President Trump on Thursday and that while he was sure “the federal government would do anything they can do to help,” he did not think New York could count on the White House to address the shortfall in time.

“I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” he said. “Assume you are on your own in life.”

Mr. Cuomo said, however, that the state had been making contingency plans. It is trying to buy ventilators on the open market and converting so-called BiPAP machines — another kind of respiratory device — for use as ventilators. Unused ventilators from hospitals in upstate New York could also be trucked to New York City and the surrounding area as needed, he said.

“We have all these extraordinary measures that I believe if push comes to shove will put us in fairly good shape,” he said.

Other daily statistics:

• Deaths in New York State: 2,373, up 432 from 1,941 on Wednesday. New York now accounts for 42 percent of the 5,708 virus-related deaths in the United States.

• Deaths in New York City: 1,562, up 188 from 1,374 on Wednesday.

• Confirmed cases: 92,381 in New York State, up from 83,712. New York City has nearly 52,000.

• Hospitalized in New York State: 13,383, up from 12,226.

• In intensive care in New York State: 3,396, up from 3,022.

Javits center beds will be used for virus patients, Cuomo says.

An emergency hospital set up at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan will now be used to treat virus patients, Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday.

The facility, which was set up by the Army Corps of Engineers, was originally intended to treat non-virus patients to free up beds at other hospitals that are being overwhelmed by the outbreak.

But with the number of virus cases continuing to surge — and only a small number of the Javits bed in use as of Wednesday — Mr. Cuomo asked that people infected with the virus be treated at the convention hall.

“I asked President Trump this morning to consider the request and the urgency of the matter,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “And the president has just informed me that he granted New York’s request.”

The Javits facility is one of several temporary hospitals being built to increase the capacity of the city’s health care system.

On Tuesday, city officials announced that the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, would be converted to an emergency hospital as the number of virus patients in the borough soared. A tented hospital has also gone up in Central Park.

Mr. Cuomo also said on Thursday that temporary hospitals would be set up at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and at a state Office of Mental Health center on Staten Island.

N.Y.C. officials said residents should cover their faces outside.

New York City officials on Thursday advised residents to shield their faces with a scarf, bandanna or other protective covering when leaving their homes, although they reiterated that people should continue to stay at home as much as possible during the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. de Blasio urged city residents not to use the surgical or N-95 masks that are desperately needed by emergency services workers, doctors, nurses and other hospital staff employees who are treating infected patients.

“You can create your own version,” Mr. de Blasio said. “You can be creative and put whatever decoration you want on it. It can be as homemade as you want. But that’s what we want you to do: something homemade.”

The mayor and the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, repeatedly said that the city and state’s social distancing guidelines continued to apply.

“These face coverings shouldn’t be seen as an invitation to come closer,” Dr. Barbot said.

Mr. de Blasio said that city officials were offering the new guidance because they were increasingly concerned that apparently healthy people who did not have virus symptoms could be spreading infection regardless.

The Trump administration is expected to announce that all Americans should wear cloth masks or other face coverings if they go out in public, based on a forthcoming recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The announcement would be a shift in federal guidance amid new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who show no symptoms.

Until now, the C.D.C., like the World Health Organization, has advised that ordinary people need not wear masks unless they are sick and coughing, partly to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them.

The virus takes its toll on New York’s budget.

With the virus racing through the state, sickening thousands of New Yorkers each day and draining the state economy, Mr. Cuomo on Thursday announced an agreement with the Legislature on a $177 billion budget that was laden with uncertainties.

The state is expecting at least $10 billion less in tax revenue, a steep gap that officials are already hoping to bridge with federal aid, short-term loans and cuts. Reserves may also be tapped.

The budget agreement, as it often does in New York, included an array of nonfiscal measures. They included modifications to last year’s bail reform law, which had eliminated bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, and an end to a ban on gestational surrogacy.

But little about the budget — from the raw numbers to the negotiations leading to the agreement — was typical.

With many businesses shut down and the state bracing for a cash flow crunch, lawmakers agreed to approve billions of dollars in borrowing to pay off future expenses, necessitating a temporary waiver to a legal debt cap meant to control levels of borrowing.

“We can’t spend what we don’t have,” said Mr. Cuomo, who called the spending plan “a tough, tough budget” for everyone involved.

Four N.J. cities enact strict lockdown measures.

Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark announced Thursday that his city and three neighboring New Jersey communities were enacting aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus.

In “Operation Lockdown,” as the effort is called, police will patrol the borders between Newark, Orange, East Orange and Irvington, and other areas, to reduce traffic between the four cities.

Other patrols are focused on breaking up gatherings outside stores, in parks and on corners. Violators will face summonses and legal action, Mr. Baraka said. The crackdown will last seven days and could be extended.

Mr. Baraka said in a statement that people traveling back and forth between the cities, which are all in Essex County, were “making all of our neighborhoods unsafe, so we are going to have the police from our individual communities patrolling the borders to keep them from entering.”

There were 2,617 confirmed cases of the virus and 99 deaths in Essex County as of Thursday. Only Bergen County, the state’s most populous county, had more.

New Jersey’s death toll doubled in two days.

With 182 new deaths since Wednesday, New Jersey’s death toll from the virus more than doubled, to 537, in two days, Gov. Phil Murphy said on Thursday.

“I know these numbers are stark,” he said. “They are certainly sobering.”

With 432 more deaths in New York State and 27 deaths in Connecticut reported on Thursday, the toll for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut stood at 3,022.

New Jersey now has over 25,000 confirmed virus cases, with 3,500 people testing positive since Wednesday, the governor said.

Mr. Murphy spoke after touring a 250-bed field hospital at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus that is to open on Monday. The state is building similar hospitals in Edison and Atlantic City.

Mr. Murphy also said he had signed an executive order authorizing the State Police to commandeer medical supplies.

And he noted that six people in the state had been criminally charged with assaulting law enforcement officers by spitting or coughing on them and claiming to have the virus. Offenders face fines of up to $10,000 and up to 18 months in jail.

N.Y.C. public schools report the first virus death of a teacher.

New York City recorded its first coronavirus-related death of a public-school teacher this week after a third-grade teacher at Public School 9 in Brooklyn died late Tuesday, officials said.

“This is a tragedy for the P.S. 9 students, staff and the entire school community,” the school’s principal, Fatimah Ali, wrote in a message to parents and students about the death of the teacher, Sandra Santos-Vizcaino.

Ms. Santos-Vizcaino’s current and former students and colleagues shared memories of her on a tribute page.

“No one could make me happy the way you did,” one student wrote. “I can’t imagine passing her room and not seeing her there or not even being able to ask her a question. This is all too surreal,” wrote Deirdre Levy, a fellow teacher at the school.

Ms. Santos-Vizcaino’s death was not the Department of Education’s first virus-related fatality. Dez-Ann Romain, the principal of the Brooklyn Democracy Academy, died last month after becoming infected with the virus.

With 1.1 million students and over 75,000 teachers, the city’s public school system is the largest in the United States. Mayor Bill de Blasio closed the schools on March 15 under mounting pressure from parents and educators.

A hospital uses Yankees rain ponchos as last resort to protect doctors.

When a doctor at one of New York City’s top hospitals arrived for work on Tuesday, she received a bag of protective equipment that held, in place of the usual medical gown, a plastic white-and-navy New York Yankees poncho, the kind available for purchase on rainy game days.

Outraged, the doctor, an obstetrician-gynecologist resident at the hospital, part of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, took a picture of the poncho and posted it on Twitter.

“I’m a physician at a hospital in NYC and THIS IS THE ‘PPE’ I WAS JUST HANDED for my shift,” she wrote, using the acronym for “personal protective equipment.”

The post was retweeted tens of thousands of times, emerging as a viral illustration of the equipment shortages that have plagued hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a statement, Montefiore Medical Center said the ponchos were not intended as protective gear but instead were a gift to weary staffers.

But a Yankees executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that someone at the hospital had contacted the team recently, asking specifically for ponchos. And four hospital employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said they had received bags containing ponchos and were told to use the items as protective equipment.

All said they refused to wear the ponchos and instead reused old gowns or dipped into the hospital’s dwindling emergency supplies.

“If it was a gift, it was a terrible gift,” one employee said.

A Sing Sing inmate is the first state prisoner to die after getting the virus.

An inmate at the Sing Sing Correctional facility north of New York City died this week after contracting the coronavirus, the first-virus-related death in the state prison system, officials confirmed on Thursday.

The inmate, Juan R. Mosquero, 58, tested positive for the virus and did not appear to have any pre-existing health conditions, according to an employee at the Westchester County Medical Examiner’s Office, which conducted an autopsy.

He was not hospitalized when he died, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Mr. Mosquero was serving a sentence of up to 35 years in prison after being convicted in Queens in 2012 on charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and first-degree sexual conduct against a child, according to the state corrections department.

He is one of 24 inmates in New York’s prison system to have been infected with the virus, officials said. There about 43,000 prisoners in the state’s 52 prisons. As of Thursday, 176 staff members had tested positive for the virus.

Mr. Mosquero’s death will be reviewed by the State Commission on Correction, which oversees the state’s prisons.

Anthony Annucci, the state’s acting corrections commissioner declined an interview request on Thursday.

He said in a statement that because of the outbreak, the department had suspended “visitation early on, eliminated intake and transfers of individuals throughout the system, distributed hand sanitizer in common areas, and have been dogged in our identification of symptomatic staff and incarcerated individuals.”

A prisoners’ advocacy group on Thursday called for Mr. Cuomo to release prisoners who are at increased risk of becoming infected with the virus because they older or have compromised immune systems.

“We knew people were going to die,” Dave George, associate director of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign and Parole Preparation Project said in a statement. “We knew people were going to die. The governor must immediately grant clemencies to thousands of incarcerated New Yorkers before more deaths occur in his state prisons.”

Trump tells Schumer to “stop complaining” about lack of supplies and praises Cuomo.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, tweeted on Thursday that Mr. Trump should “quickly produce more medical supplies and equipment under the Defense Production Act NOW.”

“He needs to appoint a czar like a military or logistics expert to lead the effort to make and get the supplies where they’re needed,” Mr. Schumer wrote.

About 10 minutes later, the president targeted the senator in his own message, writing “Somebody please explain to Cryin’ Chuck Schumer that we do have a military man in charge of distributing goods, a very talented Admiral, in fact.”

seemed to be referring to Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, a senior navy officer who is leading FEMA’s supply chain task force.

The president sent a follow-up tweet contrasting Mr. Schumer with Governor Cuomo, whom he said was “working hard”:

Senator Schumer, in his post, did not specify that he had been tweeting on behalf of his home state of New York.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have been in continual contact with the president, alternately pleading for and demanding supplies. The federal government has sent at least 4,400 ventilators to the state.

Three state hospitals in N.Y.C. will handle only virus patients.

At SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, the operating rooms have been freed up and the cafeteria has been turned into a medical ward. On Mr. Cuomo’s orders, the hospital is to begin treating virus patients exclusively, and officials have been told to make way for hundreds of such patients.

“We’re really scrubbing the deck,” said Dr. Wayne J. Riley, the president of the hospital, which is part of the State University of New York system and among Brooklyn’s largest employers.

The number of virus patients at the hospital is already nearing 200, Dr. Riley said, and the SUNY Downstate expects up to 150 more. Patients with other ailments will be transferred to either the Navy hospital ship Comfort or to makeshift wards at the Javits Convention Center.

The governor has designated two other state facilities, South Beach Psychiatric Facility in Staten Island and Westchester Square in the Bronx, for virus patients specifically.

As at other hospitals in New York City, the virus has taken a toll on SUNY Downstate, where resources are running low and doctors and nurses continue to get sick.

Even in normal times, the hospital has struggled. It is chronically underfunded and has not had serious capital improvements since it was built in 1963.

SUNY Downstate serves a population that is among the city’s poorest, with high rates of the conditions that can increase the risk of dying of the virus, including obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

“I’m concerned that this pandemic will exacerbate health care disparities for the patients we serve,” said Dr. Riley, who is in his third year as the hospital’s president. “The pandemic has a particular predilection for patients like ours.”

Law schools want new graduates to practice without passing the bar.

The deans of New York State’s 15 law schools issued an extraordinary plea, asking the state’s highest court to allow students graduating this year to practice law without taking the bar examination.

The court, the Court of Appeals, announced last week that it was canceling the bar exam that had been scheduled for July because of the virus pandemic. On Tuesday, the court said the exam would be rescheduled for September.

In the meantime, the court said, it would consider letting lower courts authorize law school graduates working under licensed lawyers to practice law in limited circumstances.

The law school deans, in a letter sent Wednesday, asked the court to do more.

“Delay in the admission of our 2020 graduates to the New York bar,” they wrote, “is likely to cause our students profound harm in a time already marked by suffering, intensifying financial hardship and exacerbating the unfairness of their plight.”

The deans asked the court, at a minimum, to grant all students graduating this year provisional authorization to practice law for 18 months. If they do not pass the bar exam by then, the permission would be rescinded.

The deans also made a more ambitious request: that the court consider letting graduates working under licensed lawyers “seek admission to the bar without sitting for the bar examination.”

More N.Y.C. inmates are being quarantined.

Three weeks after the virus was first detected in New York City’s jails, including Rikers Island, four in 10 inmates were being held in quarantine as the number of cases continued to rise.

The latest quarantine figures were released late Wednesday by the city’s Board of Correction, which monitors the city’s jails.

Correction officials said separately that as of Thursday morning, 223 staff members, 231 inmates and 38 health care workers assigned to the jails had tested positive for the virus.

Inmates were now being screened for symptoms before being arraigned, board officials said.

Officials have moved to release about 900 detainees from the jails in the past two weeks to stem the virus’s spread. But inmates and correction staff members have said that conditions at the jails were still unsanitary.

Inmates have found inventive ways to protect themselves, using diluted shampoo as a disinfectant and alcohol pads from a jail barber to sanitize phones.

Jail workers have complained about not having access to protective gear like masks and gloves, and about what they said was a failure to notify them when they had come into contact with a someone who had been infected.

Reporting was contributed by Kevin Armstrong, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Maria Cramer, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Alan Feuer, Michael Gold, Corey Kilgannon, Adam Liptak, Jesse McKinley, Andy Newman, Jan Ransom, Brian M. Rosenthal, Andrea Salcedo, Michael Schwirtz, Eliza Shapiro, Matt Stevens, James Wagner and Michael Wilson.