BY IVAN PENTCHOUKOV
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on March 29 extended by two weeks a mandatory stay-at-home order for New York workers and reported 243 new CCP virus deaths, the most in a 24-hour period, as the state continued to bear the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
The stay-at-home order is in effect through April 15.
The state’s COVID-19 cases grew 14 percent to 59,513 on March 28, with New York City accounting for more than half of the infections. The pandemic claimed the lives of 965 people in the state since the first case was reported on March 1. Only two counties in the state have not reported any Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus infection.
[Editor’s note: Read why The Epoch Times has adopted the term CCP virus, instead of novel coronavirus.]
More than 8,503 people were hospitalized with the virus in the state. In the 24-hour span from March 27 to 28, 846 patients recovered from the disease.
Cuomo announced the new numbers during his daily briefing on the state’s mass-scale response to the spread of the disease. The governor, who has long been concerned about hospitals becoming overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, discussed plans to have private and public hospitals in New York City and the state at large to work together to ease the burden on individual hot spots. He noted that the Elmhurst neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City is particularly under stress.
The state is stockpiling medical supplies and working with the federal government to retrofit existing spaces as temporary hospitals. The 1,000-bed U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort is scheduled to arrive in New York harbor on Monday.
New York state has reached out to retirees and other healthcare workers to volunteer to staff the additional beds. More than 76,000 healthcare volunteers have already volunteered to tackle the pandemic in the state, according to Cuomo.
The surge in new confirmed CCP virus cases has coincided with a rapid increase in testing. The state tested more than 16,000 people on March 28 and 172,000 to date, the highest total in the nation.
Of the hospitalized patients, 2,037 are in intensive care. The state has no current shortage of ventilators or hospital beds.
In mid-March, the number of total hospitalization was doubling in the state every two days. Cuomo pointed out that the trend has slow to hospitalizations doubling every six days as of March 28.
“The doubling rate is slowing and that is good news, but the number of cases is still going up,” Cuomo said. “So you’re still going up toward the apex, but the rate of the doubling is slowing.”
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