“Right now, we are projecting we are reaching a plateau in the number of hospitalizations,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters Tuesday.
“We have to stay disciplined. We have to be smart. We have to be safe. … We do that by staying at home.”
Cuomo offered mixed news: New York on Monday had its largest one-day increase in deaths for the state. But he said this was a lagging indicator, because often those who have died were hospitalized the longest.
And the state’s three-day average for Covid-19 hospitalizations, and the daily intensive-care admissions, are down, he said.
“I know (social distancing) feels like a lifetime,” Cuomo said, but “it is working.”
“That’s why you see those numbers coming down. If we had the same rate of interaction (from before stay-at-home orders) those rates would be going up.”
In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh warned cases in his city were just starting to spike — 33% of the city’s 2,035 cases were diagnosed in the last three days, he told CNN Tuesday.
“This is not the time to lax on any rules, as far as stay at home orders,” Walsh said. “We’re in this for the long haul.”
The majority of people in the US are “doing the right thing” by staying home and following other mitigation measures to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.
“I’m seeing mitigation work,” Adams said. “I know I’ve said it a couple times with Washington and with California. Their public health officials there should be applauded because they’ve given us the blueprint for how we deal with this and the rest of the country.”
Recent developments
• Major League Baseball says it is trying to work through plans to get back to playing, including possibly having games at a central location, once the coronavirus pandemic has improved.
• Adams, the surgeon general, told NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday that Wisconsin voters should maintain distances of 6 feet from others and wear face coverings as they go to the polls.
Model predicts fewer people will die, compared to previous estimates
But it assumes social distancing measures — like closing schools and business — will continue until August.
The model predicts the virus may kill more than 81,000 people in the United States over the next four months, with just under 141,000 hospital beds being needed. That’s about 12,000 fewer deaths — and 121,000 fewer hospital beds — than the model estimated on Thursday, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine says.
Both Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading health official and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said Monday that with continued mitigation efforts, there is potential to lower a projected US death toll from 100,000.
States helping each other with supplies
To help states like hard-hit New York, California announced it was sending 500 ventilators to the US Strategic National Stockpile, which Trump previously said is nearly depleted.
“We still have a long road ahead of us in the Golden State — and we’re aggressively preparing for a surge — but we can’t turn our back on Americans whose lives depend on having a ventilator now,” Newsom said in a statement.
The 500 machines were scheduled to leave California on a military aircraft Monday to be shipped to FEMA, which will then redistribute to other states based on need, Brian Ferguson with the California Office of Emergency Services told CNN.
“These ventilators are going to New York and other states hardest hit by this virus,” Inslee said in a statement Sunday. The governor released 400 ventilators to the national stockpile.
Virus hits African-American communities
In Chicago, 72% of the people who have died from coronavirus are black, though they make up 30% of the population, officials said.
In Louisiana, where nearly 33% of the population is African American, those residents account for 70% of the state’s coronavirus deaths.
Dr. Celine Gounder, a CNN medical analyst and clinical assistant professor of infectious diseases, on Tuesday offered possible reasons for this, including:
• African Americans may be disproportionately likely to work in essential jobs that can’t be done at home, such as grocery jobs.
• African Americans are disproportionately likely to have underlying health conditions that would make someone more likely to have severe Covid-19 illnesses.
Adams, the surgeon general, made similar arguments to “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday.
“When you look at being black in America, No. 1, people unfortunately are more likely to be of low socioeconomic status, which makes it harder to social distance. No. 2, we know that blacks are more likely to have diabetes, heart disease, lung disease,” Adams told CBS.
“I and many black Americans are at higher risk for Covid. It’s why we need everyone to do their part to slow the spread.”
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard, Arman Azad, Ryan Young, Gisela Crespo, Jake Carpenter, Schimon Prokupecz, Wayne Sterling, Chandelis Duster and Steve Almasy contributed to this report.