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Coronavirus Updates: CDC Recommends Americans Wear Non-Medical Masks
By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Apr 3, 2020
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By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Apr 3, 2020
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This is our daily update of breaking COVID-19 news for Friday, April 3rd, 2020. Previous daily updates can be found here, and up-to-date statistics are here. Read our guide to understanding New York on PAUSE, NY's stay-at-home order; a look at preparing for the spread of coronavirus is here, and if you have lingering questions about the virus, here is our regularly updated coronavirus FAQ. Here are some local and state hotlines for more information: NYC: 311; NY State Hotline: 888-364-3065; NJ State Hotline: 800-222-1222.
Are you a healthcare worker? Email us what you're seeing at [email protected].
6:05 p.m. President Trump announced Friday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now recommending that Americans wear "a basic cloth or fabric mask."
The new guidance, which had been expected for days, represents a sharp reversal from the CDC's earlier stance, which said that ordinary citizens did not need to wear face masks and should reserve them for healthcare workers.
In a separate tweet, John Deere, the White House deputy press secretary, said that the mask should be "a non-medical basic cloth or fabric mask that can be either purchased online or simply made at home."
Despite the new advice from the country's leading public health agency, Trump stressed that he himself would not be following the federal government's recommendation.
"This is voluntary," he said. "I don't think I am going to be doing it."
When questioned about it, he added: "I just don't see it for myself. This will pass and hopefully it will pass very quickly."
More than 273,000 people across the U.S. have contracted coronavirus, including more than 7,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University's data map.
In New York, which is the epicenter of the crisis, Governor Cuomo this week said the coronavirus crisis could last through the summer.
The U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that face coverings or masks were particularly recommended in places where there was community spread.
On Thursday, Mayor de Blasio advised residents to wear a face covering when leaving their homes.
Mayor De Blasio Says NYC Needs At Least 2,500 Ventilators To Get Through Next Week
4:50 p.m. Mayor de Blasio on Friday said New York City hospitals crucially need between 2,500 to 3,000 additional ventilators next week to keep critically ill coronavirus patients alive.
In total, he said the city was projecting a need for an additional 15,000 ventilators to get through April and May.
"When a medical professional says they need a vent, they need one right that moment," said de Blasio, who was visibly emotional during a press conference. "Right now we’re struggling to have enough for next week."
The mayor said the city expected to "hit a surge" of coronavirus cases in next few days.
Following up on Governor Cuomo's announcement this morning that he would sign an executive order for the state to seize ventilators and other critical equipment, de Blasio said he would order the city's police department, sheriff's office and fire department to use their authority to acquire supplies from private sector companies.
"Anyone who will not comply, we will make sure they do," he said.
Cuomo on Thursday said that the state has six days before it runs out of its stockpile of ventilators, which number around 2,200.
The mayor also said the city needs an additional 45,000 clinicians to assist and relieve hospital staffers. Currently, there are about 125,000 clinical staff members in both the city's public and private hospitals. The federal government has provided the city with 1,000 nurses, 300 respiratory therapists, and 150 doctors.
He reiterated his plea for the federal government to send in the military to aid the city. He also followed up on his call for the creation of a national draft for healthcare workers to help all impacted states respond to the coronavirus crisis.
"Send them rapidly to where they are needed most and move them to whoever else needs them next," he said.
Former City Council Member Arlene Stringer-Cuevas Dies From Coronavirus
On Friday afternoon, City Comptroller Scott Stringer announced that his mother, Arlene Stringer-Cuevas, a former City Council member, died as a result of complications from coronavirus. She was 86.
"The loss I feel today is incalculable," he wrote in a statement that he shared on Twitter.
Besides representing Washington Heights in the City Council, Stringer-Cuevas was a Democratic district leader and also worked in the city's Human Resources Administration as well as a court-appointed evaluator and conservator, as profiled by Wayne Barrett.
She once gave an hour-long interview for the New York Public LIbrary's Community Oral History Project.
During his press conference, Mayor de Blasio said of her passing, "We lost a vibrant true New Yorker to the coronavirus. We are all feeling this in City Hall." He added that it's "a reminder of how personal this crisis is."
With Jen Chung
NYC Morgues Have More Than Quadrupled In Capacity
A hospital employee transfers a body on a forklift to a temporary mobile morgue, put in place due to lack of space at the hospital, outside of the Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn.
JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
3:55 p.m City morgues have more than quadrupled in capacity in response to the mounting death toll from COVID-19.
Before the pandemic, city morgues could hold between 800 and 900 bodies on a given day according to Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the New York City Medical Examiner's office. Now, the morgues can hold between 3,500 and 3,600.
As of late Thursday, there have been 1,562 deaths linked to COVID-19.
Worthy-Davis declined to give an estimate on how many bodies the morgues were currently holding.
To rapidly make space, the city bought 45 refrigerated trucks, dubbed “body collection points,” where 40-45 bodies can fit, when hospitals run out of space. FEMA sent the city another 31 of these trucks, four of which have now been deployed, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
Worthy-Davis said a main tented area outside the city’s Medical Examiner’s office in Manhattan is providing additional morgue space. Usually families have as many as 90 days to claim a loved one’s body, but officials are trying to reduce that to around 45 days.
Funerals are experiencing unprecedented demand as a result of the casualties from coronavirus.
“This is beyond anything that anyone ever imagines,” said Patrick Kearns, owner of the 120-year-old Leo F. Kearns, Inc. funeral home service, which largely serves Queens.
According to the city, there is normally a death in New York City every 9.1 minutes, which comes out to 158 people dying in a day. Last Saturday, more than 200 people died in a 24-hour period from coronavirus.
Additional reporting by Gwynne Hogan
State Hospital Task Force Head Criticizes 1,000-Bed Comfort Ship For Taking Only 20 "Relatively Healthy Patients"
2:40 p.m. Despite fanfare over its arrival earlier this week, the 1,000-bed hospital ship Comfort has received criticism for failing to relieve the pressure facing New York City hospitals overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. On Friday, the New York Times reported that the ship, which is docked in New York harbor, has only 20 patients. The ship is not taking individuals with coronavirus due to the Navy's fear of infection on a contained vessel.
"If you’re going to provide a rescue then you need to be prepared to accept the patients we need the most help with," said Michael Dowling, the CEO of Northwell Health who is also leading the state’s hospital task force on coronavirus, during an interview on WNYC's Morning Edition. "And those are COVID patients."
The number of non-coronavirus patients, and in particular trauma patients, has dropped dramatically in New York City over the last few weeks, a byproduct of the shutdowns, which had resulted in fewer car accidents and less crime.
Across the more than 20 Northwell hospitals in the New York City area, including Long Island and Westchester, there are currently 3,100 coronavirus patients.
Further complicating the matter is the fact that Navy officials have been very selective about which patients they are willing to take. Dowling described them as "relatively healthy patients."
"The people they were taking were people we would send home," he said.
Their response has also been slow, Dowling said, saying that it has taken hours to transfer patients. "When you are on the frontlines, minutes matter," he said.
During her show on Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked Governor Cuomo why the ship could not accept cardiac arrest patients following reports that EMS workers were no longer taking them to emergency rooms because they are too backed up with coronavirus patients.
"Well, theoretically, they can," he said. "This is all new. You have protocols that aren't really established, that have to be set up. Theoretically, the U.S. Navy ship comfort could take a non-COVID trauma case. So I don't know how that protocol works on that."
After lobbying President Trump, Cuomo said he was able to secure permission to have the Javits Center, which has 2,500 beds, accept coronavirus patients.
Additional reporting by Fred Mogul
12:00 p.m. Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday said he would sign an executive order allowing the state to seize unused ventilators and personal protective equipment needed by hospitals to respond to the onslaught of coronavirus cases.
During a press conference, the governor suggested that some hospitals as well as private sector companies in upstate New York, which have fewer cases, may be hoarding ventilators as well as other equipment.
"They don’t want to give up their ventilators," Cuomo said. "They don’t want to see them go out the door."
He estimated that "several hundred ventilators" could result from the order, which would be carried out by the National Guard. The state has been drawing on about 300 ventilators per day from its stockpile.
He pushed back on describing the measure as a seizure, saying that the state would return or reimburse institutions for the equipment.
"We’re going to shift resources to whatever place has need at that time," he said.
Cuomo has said the state has only a matter of days before it runs out of life-saving ventilators, which are used by coronavirus patients in the critical condition.
The daily number of those who have died in the state from coronavirus has been climbing at an alarming rate. Since Thursday, the state reported 562 deaths linked to COVID-19, the highest single-day casualty toll to date. To date, nearly 3,000 people statewide have died from the disease.
As of Friday morning, there were 102,863 confirmed coronavirus cases, an increase of 10,482 since Thursday.
Cuomo revealed that the state is working with Jack Ma of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, to buy ventilators from China. The governor has previously said that the state ordered 17,000 ventilators from that country, but they have been yet to materialize. He has since said that he believes that New York had wound up being outbid by other countries and states that are also trying to purchase the equipment.
Friday's order reflects the sense of desperation and pressure felt by state and local officials as New York nears the apex of the crisis. In what appeared to be support of Mayor de Blasio's idea to draft healthcare workers to help the city's hospitals, Cuomo noted that 20,000 people outside of the state had signed up so far to help in the effort. He added that there should some way to "systemize that voluntarism."
It is not clear what the legal precedent is for the state in taking private property for a public health use. Cuomo brushed off a question about whether he was concerned the state could be sued.
"If they want to sue me for borrowing ventilators to save lives. Let them sue me," he said.
Echoing Georgia Governor, De Blasio Says City Health Officials Recently Learned Of Asymptomatic Transmission
Explaining his new recommendation that New Yorkers wear a face covering when they go outside, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that city health experts had become increasingly aware of the possibility of asymptomatic transmission.
"There’s not been much evidence of that before," he said, speaking on MSNBC Friday morning.
But in fact, health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of lead spokespersons for the White House coronavirus task force, have talked about evidence of asymptomatic transmission for months.
“You know that in the beginning, we were not sure if there were asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak than what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there are,” Fauci said at a January 31 task force briefing. “It was not clear whether an asymptomatic person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic. Now we know from a recent report from Germany that that is absolutely the case.”
Similarly, in February, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, also acknowledged that people without symptoms could pass along the virus.
De Blasio's comments mirror those of Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who was criticized on Thursday for saying that he had only recently learned “that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.”
But unlike Georgia, New York City is the epicenter for the coronavirus cases in the country. As of Thursday evening, the city had 49,707 confirmed cases and 1,562 deaths linked to COVID-19.
On March 5th, during one of the mayor's press conference, Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot described how the city was monitoring people returning from countries with outbreaks. "For example, individuals who may be returning from one of the affected countries where they are perfectly asymptomatic. We are asking them to be on home isolation," she said. "That doesn't mean they can't go out if they are asymptomatic. It does mean that we want them to minimize outdoor exposure. And the minute they have any kind of symptoms, cough, no matter how mild it is, a temperature, or feeling unwell, we want them to call us or their provider to get them to treatment as early as possible and get them tested." (The city has since shifted to a policy of recommending tests only if people need hospitalization.)
The mayor has long trumpeted the advice of city health officials over those of global experts. The latest guidance on face coverings represents a reversal from months of national experts telling Americans that face masks were not necessary.
In March, de Blasio said that his advisers had concluded that the virus lasts only minutes on hard surfaces despite studies in other countries suggesting it could persist for days. Most recently, a study by U.S. scientists found that the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can live in the air for several hours and persist on some surfaces for as long as two to three days.
"I want to emphasize again, there are studies, there are academic studies, there are global and national organizations providing the information they have," he said, when asked about the research earlier this month. "But you know, the old saying, God bless the child who's got his own or her own. This is the New York City Health Department, which is widely regarded as one of the best, strongest health organizations in America actually working with real patients here in real conditions in New York City."
Tagged
covid-19 updates
coronavirus
Elizabeth Kim
Elizabeth Kim is a reporter on the People and Power desk who covers mayoral power. She previously covered the pandemic, housing, redevelopment and public spaces. A native of Queens, she speaks fluent Mandarin. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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