Cuomo Warns U.S. as Virus Deaths in N.Y. Region Pass 2,300

As the crisis has grown more dire across the country, Cuomo’s briefings, which have become a daily staple of the national news and raised his political profile, have taken on a broader purview.

On Wednesday, the governor again emphasized the regional coordination between his state, New Jersey and Connecticut, before noting that the virus was spreading more rapidly in other states, including California, Michigan and Florida.

And he urged Americans even in states that had not yet been hit hard by the virus to take it seriously. He cited projections from a group founded by the Gates Foundation that the death toll would reach 16,000 in New York and 93,000 nationwide.

“This is not just New York,” he said. “If you believe these numbers — 16,000 deaths in New York — that means you’re going to get tens of thousands of deaths outside of New York.

“So, to the extent people watch their nightly news in Kansas and say, well, this is a New York problem, that’s not what these numbers say,” he said. “It says it’s a New York problem today. Tomorrow, it’s a Kansas problem and a Texas problem and a New Mexico problem.”

Other highlights from the governor’s morning briefing in Albany:

— Confirmed cases: 83,712, up from 75,795.

— New York City cases : 47,349, up from 43,139.

— Currently hospitalized: 12,226, up from 10,929.

— In intensive care: 3,022, up from 2,710.

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The latest projections for the state put the peak of the outbreak at the end of this month.

Cuomo said that his brother, Chris, who has the virus, had the fever and the chills but was doing “fine enough.” He praised Chris, a CNN anchor, for hosting his show from his basement while sick on Tuesday night and showing people what the virus looked like. And he said that he had sent his brother a book: a beginner’s guide to bass fishing.

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The governor, frustrated by crowds in parks and elsewhere, said all city playgrounds would close.

At his briefing, Cuomo expressed frustration with those who continued to ignore social-distancing guidelines in New York City.

He insisted that the city’s police officers had “to get more aggressive” in enforcing the rules. Cuomo said that he was prepared to legally require social distancing if necessary, but that it was absurd that he would even have to consider that.

“How reckless and irresponsible and selfish for people not to do it on their own,” he said. “I mean what else do you have to know? What else do you have to hear? Who else has to die for you to understand you have a responsibility in this?”

As a start, the governor said, all of the city’s playgrounds would be shut down.

Cuomo said that he had spoken to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, about trying to enforce the social-distancing rules with the help of the police, but that the problem had persisted and more drastic action was necessary.

The governor’s announcement came a day after the mayor closed 10 city’s playgrounds where people had continued to gather in crowds that violated social-distancing rules.

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Around 5 p.m. that day, Sammy Frisz was pushing his giggling 22-month-old son on a swing at Mauro Park in Queens, when a city parks employees put a padlock on a nearby gate and told Frisz he had to leave through a different gate because the playground was being closed.

Frisz, a municipal worker, explained that a family friend who had died of the virus had already exposed Frisz, his wife and his son. They were three days into a 14-day self-quarantine.

Frisz’s wife, who asked that her name not be used because of her job, said in a telephone interview that the closing of the playground would make it difficult for her to do her job.

“This is the last thing holding our sanity and our ability to keep our jobs together,” she said. “If we’re all cooped up in a little, tiny place, those of us with young children will go crazy, go bonkers, how am I supposed to work from home?”

Grim milestones mark the pandemic’s second month.

As the second month of the coronavirus outbreak begins and the nation braces for the worst of it, the virus’ toll in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut is already devastating.

Thirty-one days after the region recorded its first case — a Manhattan woman in her thirties who had traveled to Iran — the number of confirmed cases of the virus passed 100,000 today.

Deaths attributable to the virus, which have been climbing by an average of 30% each day for the past week, passed 2,000 with the reporting Wednesday of another 391 deaths in New York state and 91 in New Jersey. The death toll in the region stands at 1,941 in New York, 355 in New Jersey and 69 in Connecticut.

In New York, the hardest-hit state in the country, the numbers of people hospitalized, on ventilators, testing positive, or dead of the virus have all begun to increase a little more slowly in recent days.

But they are still increasing every day, and officials expect it will be somewhere between a week and three weeks before the virus begins to ebb.

Economic and public life in the region remain mostly shut down: schools are closed, most businesses are shuttered, traffic is scarce and ambulance sirens wail regularly. And there are no clear signs yet of when things might return to normal.

“We’re all in search of the apex and the other side of the mountain,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “But we are still headed up the mountain.”

Rent is due today, but many tenants cannot pay.

The true economic toll of all but shutting down New York City to stem the spread of the coronavirus may become clearer today, when April rent is due.

In just a month’s time, the lives of millions of New Yorkers have been turned upside down, with many losing jobs and worrying about paying their bills.

“It’s gotten to this point where I really cannot pay rent because doing so would jeopardize my ability to buy food or basically survive,” said Henry True, 24, a musician and freelancer who pays $600 a month for a bedroom in a shared apartment in Brooklyn.

There are about 5.4 million renters in the city. If a large share of them cannot make rent, landlords — especially smaller ones that operate on thin margins — will be unable to pay their own bills, property owners said.

The real estate industry is bracing for up to 40% of tenants to miss their April payments.

“I’m trying not to panic,” said Christopher Athineos, whose family owns nine buildings in Brooklyn. “In my lifetime and even my parents’ and grandparents’ lifetime, we have never seen anything like this.”

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The police say an armed man they shot later told them he wanted to die because he had the virus.

New York City officers shot a man early Wednesday who later told them he had tested positive for the coronavirus and wanted them to kill him, police said.

The episode began around 4 a.m., when two officers answered a 911 call about a man with a knife at the corner of Zerega and Westchester avenues in the Bronx, police said.

When the officers arrived, they encountered a man with a knife and what appeared to be a gun, police said. The man menaced the officers and when he did not comply with their orders to drop the weapons, they shot him in the torso, police said.

The man, 55, was taken to Jacobi Medical Center in stable condition, police said. He was in custody there Wednesday.

When officers interviewed the man at the hospital, he told them he had tested positive for the virus and hoped that they would kill him, Terence Monahan, the chief of department said.

“He said that he was looking to commit suicide by a police officer,” Monahan said, adding that the man said he had learned he had the virus Tuesday night.

“He’s overweight, diabetic and he thought that he was going to die anyway,” Monahan said the man told officers. “So he wanted the police officers to take his life.”

The police have not confirmed that the man tested positive for the virus, officials said.

More people in homeless shelters are getting the virus.

Coronavirus continues to spread through New York City’s homeless shelters, where it has now infected over 120 people and killed five men, city officials said Wednesday.

People have tested positive in 68 different shelters. The virus has circulated most quickly in shelters for single adults, where dormitory-style quarters and shared bathrooms leave little room for distancing.

The city has set up four locations to isolate sick people and those exposed to them. As of Tuesday, 190 people were at those locations and a total of 38 people were in the hospital. Another 13 people living on the street or in unstable housing have tested positive.

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How New York has changed — by the numbers.

Businesses are closed. Makeshift hospitals are popping up in parks. Parents are plugging into Zoom meetings as their children, sometimes a few feet away, remotely attend school.

Everyday life in the city has been upended by the coronavirus. To help you understand how, here is some data collected from the city’s toll-free 311 hotline:

— More than 1,000 social distancing complaints in just two days.

Hardly anyone had even heard of social distancing until a few weeks ago. On Saturday, March 28, the city’s 311 system recorded its first complaints about people failing to keep 6 feet from others. Two days later, daily complaints had climbed to 776.

— Bike lanes are clearer.

With car traffic way down, complaints about blocked bike lanes dropped from 1,259 in January to 838 in March and slowed to a trickle in recent days, sometimes fewer than 10 per day.

— Complaints about food workers jumped.

In the first two months of the year, the 311 system logged 251 complaints about food workers, often that a worker was sick or touching food with their bare hands. In March, the number of such complaints jumped to 358.

— More people are home and annoying their neighbors.

The number of people complaining about “loud music” or a “party” at someone’s home jumped from 13,000 in February to nearly 17,000 in March. Complaints about loud televisions are also up, from 494 in February to 598 in March.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .