New York leaders look at harrowing week ahead

NEW YORK — Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday painted a grim picture of the coming week as the state’s death toll from Covid-19 approached 1,000, but at the same time they dismissed calls to impose tighter restrictions on people’s movements in a region that has become the nation’s largest concentration of coronavirus infections.

“The virus continues its march across the state of New York,” Cuomo said at a news conference on Sunday. “I don’t see how you look at those numbers and conclude anything less than thousands of people will pass away.”

There were 59,513 confirmed coronavirus cases in the state on Sunday, with 965 deaths — an increase of more than 200 from the day before. With de Blasio warning that the city would run out of supplies by next Sunday without an infusion of new equipment, and the nation’s top infectious diseases expert saying that as many as 200,000 Americans could die in the pandemic, the comments from officials on Sunday increased the urgency for an aggressive and coordinated U.S. response to the health emergency.

President Donald Trump sparked anxiety throughout the region on Saturday when he suggested that the greater New York area could be subject to quarantine. He walked back the comments later in the day, saying he would not, in fact, quarantine the metro area.

Soon after Trump’s statement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel advisory for residents of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, instructing them to “refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately.”

“I know we feel under attack,” Cuomo said on Sunday. He had denounced the possibility of a mandatory quarantine, which he said “really panicked people,” but said he supported the advisory action.

“This is not a lockdown. It is a travel advisory,” the governor said of the CDC’s directive. “It’s totally consistent with everything we’re doing, and I support what the president did.”

A statewide shutdown order, requiring all non-essential businesses to close, has been extended until at least April 15.

Rhode Island also backed off its own travel restrictions on New Yorkers, repealing an executive order targeting the state and replacing it with one imposing a quarantine on visitors from the other 49 states.

The state’s governor, Gina Raimondo, announced on Friday that Rhode Island police would pull over drivers with New York license plates and force them to self-quarantine for 14 days. Cuomo quickly denounced the policy and threatened to sue.

“I don’t think the order was called for, I don’t believe it was legal, I don’t believe it was neighborly,” Cuomo said on Sunday, after speaking to his Rhode Island counterpart and receiving assurance that the order would be repealed.

Rhode Island’s new order does not single out any state. “Any person coming to Rhode Island from another state for a non-work-related purpose must immediately self-quarantine for 14 days,” it says. “This quarantine restriction shall not apply to public health, public safety, or healthcare workers.”

“As the data has changed,” Raimondo said on Sunday, “the situation has changed. Unfortunately, the rate of infection we’re seeing in New York City — unfortunately, we’re seeing that same rate of infection in other places, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, etc.”

Earlier on Sunday, de Blasio said travel restrictions were not helpful, but added that the issue was not his primary concern.

“We’ve got to be mindful of families that at this crucial moment want to reunite, whether that means families coming back to New York or leaving New York to go to another place where they’re based,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Families have a right to be together and this is going to be a long crisis.”

“A travel advisory isn’t something I’m going to fixate on,” de Blasio said. “I want to know when we’re going to get the ventilators, the [personal protective equipment] and the doctors and the nurses to save lives here in New York.”

On Sunday evening, de Blasio said he had spoken with Trump earlier in the day and stressed the need for supplies and medical personnel.

“I went over with him again the reality in New York City — the fact that we have until next Sunday, April 5, to get the reinforcements we need, particularly when it comes to ventilators,” de Blasio said, adding that he wanted 400 more ventilators by Tuesday. “In the last week we have seen some real support, and I want to see it again.”

New York City alone had 32,308 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Sunday morning, with the death toll at 678.

The Navy ship USNS Comfort is set to arrive on Monday in New York Harbor, where it will provide 1,000 hospital beds. Manhattan’s Javits Center is also in the process of being transformed into a hospital.

As New York’s leaders were bracing for a week of mounting deaths, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, emphasized the importance of limiting travel in the region while also saying the disease could ultimately kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans.

“One of the issues is that the infection rate in New York City, in the New York City area, is about 56 percent of all of the new infections in the country are coming from that area,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “That’s terrible suffering for the people of New York, which I feel myself personally, as a New Yorker. So what was trying to be done is to get people, unless there's necessary travel, so, all nonessential travel, to just hold off, because what you don't want is people traveling from that area to other areas of the country, and inadvertently and innocently infecting other individuals.”

Fauci said he had no “firm idea” of how many Americans would die during the pandemic, and said that worst-case scenarios almost never played out according to their predictions. Still, he said, “I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases” were possible based on statistical models.

“But I don’t want to be held to that, because it’s — excuse me — deaths,” he said on CNN. “I mean, we’re going to have millions of cases. But I — I just don't think that we really need to make a projection, when it’s such a moving target, that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.”

At the White House on Sunday afternoon, Trump announced an extension, through April 30, of national guidelines for social distancing. The president said his health advisers had told him that the peak number of deaths in the U.S. was now likely in two weeks, meaning Americans needed to remain hunkered down through next month.

He said that 1,110 patients in New York were being administered a combination of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azythromycin to test their effectiveness against coronavirus. He also thanked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for their work in building new hospitals, including in New Jersey, and said that “the people of New York are very happy.“

But he also implied that New York City facilities were inflating their need for certain medical equipment and supplies, saying that hospitals that typically use 10,000 to 20,000 face masks were now saying they needed 200,000 to 300,000.

“Something is going on,“ Trump said. “And you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000 and we have that in a lot of different places?”

The Greater New York Hospital Association pushed back against the president on Sunday night.

“New York‘s health care workers are treating exploding numbers of COVID-19 patients around the clock — willingly and without complaint,” the group’s president, Kenneth E. Raske, said in a statement. “My daughter, an ICU nurse at a New York City hospital, is one of them. The only thing they ask for in return is adequate amounts of personal protective equipment. PPE is the single thing that separates them from being COVID-19 patients themselves. They deserve better than their President suggesting that PPE is ‘going out the back door’ of New York hospitals. I urge you to focus on what you — and all of us – can do to help. Thank you.”

Before the briefing, Trump met with leaders of medical-supply and shipping companies.

“We’re waging a war against the invisible enemy,” the president told the executives in the Cabinet Room. “We are grateful for your tremendous partnership.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.