New York State surpasses 200K in confirmed cases of Covid-19
Photo by Tom Rivers: The American flag is lowered outside the Veterans Service Agency on Route 31 in Albion on Monday. The flags are at half-mast while the state is declared on “pause” by the governor until at least April 29.
New York State has passed 200,000 cases of confirmed cases of Covid-19, by far the most of any state in the country.
New York had 7,177 new positives on Monday, pushing the state’s total to 202,208. That is about three times the number of cases in New Jersey, 68,824, the state with the second most cases. No other state has more than 30,000 cases.
New York also suffered 778 more deaths from Covid-19 on Monday, bringing the state total to 10,834.
“To me that’s the most painful number and it has been the most painful number every day, and those New Yorkers are in our thoughts and prayers,” Giov. Andrew Cuomo today during a news conference in Albany. “You look at the past few days and the number of lives lost, it’s basically flat at a devastating level of pain and grief but evidence is, everything else we’re seeing is basically a flattening at this level.”
New Jersey has the second most deaths at 2,805. Michigan has the third most deaths at 1,768, followed by Louisiana at 1,013.
The state also is reporting that 17,089 people have recovered from Covid-19.
Throughout the United States, there are 610,097 confirmed cases of Covid-19, which have resulted in 25,649 deaths. About twice that, 45,414, have recovered from Covid-19.
The confirmed cases in WNY counties include:
• Allegany – 28
• Cattaraugus – 32
• Chautauqua – 23
• Erie – 1,668
• Genesee – 76
• Livingston – 31
• Monroe – 850
• Niagara – 197
• Orleans – 31
• Wyoming – 32
Source: NYS Department of Health
Gov. Cuomo is hopeful the state has hit the apex and will start seeing a decline in daily hospitalizations, intubations and deaths from Covid-19.
For the state to reduce those numbers it needs continued vigilance from the public with frequent hand washing, social distancing and staying home as much as possible.
If those numbers go down the state can also push to incrementally reopen businesses, he said.
“We should take some comfort in the fact that we have demonstrated that we can actually control the spread of the virus,” Cuomo said about the initial much higher projections for hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. “Tremendous, dramatic pain to do it, shut down everything but thank God we can control the spread. Can you imagine how bad a situation it would be if we did all of this and you still saw those numbers going up. You lock up with your family, you protect them, but somehow the virus still infiltrated the house. That would have been frightening. So there is good news in this.”
Cuomo said he knows people are eager to return to work and their normal lives. He cautioned the state won’t be hasty to charge back to life as normal.
“People need to get back to work,” he said. “The state needs an economy. We cannot sustain this for a prolonged period of time. Everybody agrees. Everybody will also say how you reopen is everything because of the first point which is we are now keeping down that rate of infection. If you start acting differently you will see a corresponding increase in that rate of infection. The worst scenario would be if we did all of this, we got that number down, everybody went to extraordinary means and then we go to reopen and we reopen too fast or we reopen and there’s unanticipated consequences and we see that number go up again.”
