[This briefing has ended. For the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak in the New York area, read Thursday’s live coverage.]
Here’s what you need to know:
- Case counts continue to climb.
- City seeks to free inmates held on ‘minor’ charges or with certain health problems.
- A naval hospital ship is coming to New York, but it may not arrive for weeks.
- New Rochelle man, one of state’s first cases, is improving, his wife says.
- Legislators, like those they serve, change the way they work.
Case counts continue to climb.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York provided new numbers on Wednesday that showed 2,382 people in the state had tested positive for the coronavirus, an increase of more than 1,000 since Tuesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio said later in the day that 1,871 people in New York City had tested positive, compared with 814 on Tuesday.
Mr. Cuomo attributed much of the jump to an increase in testing. Of the 14,597 people to be tested so far, nearly 5,000 were tested on Tuesday.
In New Jersey, officials said on Wednesday that another 162 people had tested positive for the virus, raising the state’s total of confirmed cases to 427. Officials also said there had been three more deaths linked to the virus, bringing New Jersey’s total to five.
Officials in Connecticut said on Wednesday that a man in his 80s who had been hospitalized at Danbury Hospital had died from the virus, the state’s first known death linked to the virus.
In the past week, as testing has expanded and more people have gotten sick, the number of people to test positive for the virus in New York State has increased 42 percent a day on average.
“You are at a point of deciding: How many people are going to live, how many people are going to die?” Mr. Cuomo said.
One of the confirmed cases was an inmate at New York City’s sprawling Rikers Island jail complex, the Department of Correction said on Wednesday. That came hours after the correction officers’ union said that one of its members had the virus. There are about 5,400 inmates in the city’s jails, many of them at Rikers.
Mr. Cuomo emphasized throughout the day that his priority remained halting the virus’s spread, not the economic fallout from the mandatory closings businesses and other restrictions imposed as a result of the outbreak.
“The crisis at hand is a public health crisis,” he said. “Once we get past that we’ll deal with the economic crisis.”
Mr. Cuomo also issued a statewide order that no business have more than half its employees leave their homes to come to work.
“We’ll see if that reduces the spread,” he said. “If it doesn’t slow the spread, then we will reduce the numbers even further.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Wednesday that more than 1,000 retired medical workers in New York City had answered his appeal the day before for volunteers to help in the city’s response.
“We need their help more than ever,” Mr. de Blasio said on Twitter.
City seeks to free inmates held on ‘minor’ charges or with certain health problems.
Inmates in New York City’s jail system with underlying medical issues, including those with pre-existing conditions, could be released in the coming days in a bid to stem the coronavirus from spreading in its correction facilities, Mr. de Blasio said late Wednesday.
In an interview on the radio station WCBS, Mr. de Blasio said that inmates who were being held on “minor” charges might also be released. The city has about 5,400 inmates in custody.
The push to identify inmates who could be released came as city officials announced that a person in custody at the sprawling Rikers Island jail complex was infected, raising fears that the virus could circulate in its close quarters.
The mayor’s office is working with the city’s five district attorneys on the plan, which could involve the release of inmates who are over 50 and have health problems, according to city officials.
Officials with the district attorneys’ offices are trying to identify inmates considered safe to be released and those who are not, according to the two people briefed on the plan.
The city could release inmates who are being held on parole violations, the people said, although doing so would require the state Board of Parole’s approval. Judges might also have to sign off on the release of some inmates.
“Defense attorneys are free to make whatever applications they like to the court,” a spokesman for the state court system said. “Judges will rule on those individual judicial determinations, on a case-by-case basis, as they do in any other circumstance.”
In the radio interview, Mr. de Blasio said that “we’ve got to balance here public safety with the very real concern about health in the jails.”
“That’s something we’re going to be looking at every single day,” he said.
A naval hospital ship is coming to New York, but it may not arrive for weeks.
Mr. Cuomo also said on Wednesday that President Trump had agreed to dispatch a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York Harbor as the state struggles to deal with a stark jump in coronavirus cases. The governor’s office later clarified was not expected to arrive until April.
The ship, the U.S.N.S. Comfort, has previously been deployed to natural disaster zones, including to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“It has operating rooms,” Mr. Cuomo said. Drawing further on the U.S. military, Mr. Cuomo said he would meet with the Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday as he seeks to rapidly add hospital beds.
transcript
Cuomo Calls Hospital Ship ‘Extraordinary Step’
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo discussed a floating hospital ship and other precautionary measures for New York.
The president — I spoke to this morning — he’s going to be making arrangements to send up this hospital ship, which is called the U.S. Comfort. It has about 1,000 rooms on it, it has operating rooms, and the president is going to dispatch the Comfort to us. It will be in New York City harbor. This will be — it’s an extraordinary step, obviously. But it will — it’s literally a floating hospital, which will add capacity, and the president said that he would dispatch that. Today we are announcing a mandatory statewide requirement that no business can have more than 50 percent of their work force report to work outside of their home, no more than 50 percent of the work force.
Although Mr. Cuomo said the president had said he would dispatch the 894-foot ship “immediately,” Jonathan Hoffman, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday that the vessel was undergoing repairs in Norfolk, Va., and that it would be weeks before it sailed for New York.
New Rochelle man, one of state’s first cases, is improving, his wife says.
A New Rochelle lawyer who was New York State’s second confirmed coronavirus patient and who had been in critical condition is recovering, his wife said in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
The lawyer, Lawrence Garbuz, 50, was one of the first people in New York known to have the virus. The discovery on March 2 that he was infected alerted the authorities that the virus was circulating in New York through so-called community spread.
“Lawrence is awake and alert and seems to be on the road to full recovery,” his wife, Adina Lewis Garbuz, wrote. “He still has healing to do but is on a very good trajectory.”
Mr. Garbuz, who, with his wife, owns a small law firm in Midtown Manhattan, went to a hospital in Bronxville on Feb. 29. As his illness worsened, he was transferred to a hospital in New York City, intubated and put on a ventilator to help him breathe.
While he was being treated, the number of cases of the virus in the state ballooned, with many of them clustered in Westchester County and connected to a synagogue in New Rochelle that Mr. Garbuz and his family attend.
Ms. Garbuz said that when he husband awoke and learned how the outbreak had widened, he struggled to understand it.
“He is trying to comprehend a world where no one goes out, no social gatherings, no religious services, no Purim!!” she wrote. “But he seems to be quickly adding it all up.”
Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday that 108 people who had tested positive for the virus in New York had recovered and were no longer hospitalized. Because he was still in the hospital, Mr. Garbuz was not included in that count.
Legislators, like those they serve, change the way they work.
State lawmakers in New York and across the United States are trying to balance their official duties with concern about getting the coronavirus as the outbreak spreads and tens of millions of Americans drastically alter their everyday activities.
In Albany, N.Y., where two State Assembly members have the virus, state senators have been voting either one at a time or in small groups in nearly empty chambers. In Boston, public hearings have been postponed, while legislators in California and Mississippi, among other states, are not expected to return to work until the crisis concludes.
After the two Assembly members, Helene Weinstein and Charles Barron, both Brooklyn Democrats, tested positive for the virus, legislative sessions were canceled, other lawmakers and staff members sought tests and lawmakers’ priorities shifted.
Past debates about criminal justice reform and climate change have faded, overtaken by financial concerns as states grapple with swelling unemployment figures and the possibility that tax receipts will plummet.
“There’s got to be a 21st-century way to deal with this,” said Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, 59, a Manhattan Democrat, who drove to Albany in a car full of sanitary wipes and rubber gloves “to push a button.”
“I’m not a hypochondriac,” he said. “But I’m very anxious about this.”
The number of cases in Brooklyn’s Hasidic neighborhoods spikes.
On Wednesday, local health officials expressed alarm that the virus was spreading quickly in two of Brooklyn’s tightly knit Hasidic neighborhoods, citing what they said was a spike in confirmed cases in recent days.
More than 100 people tested positive for the virus at urgent care centers in the Borough Park and Williamsburg sections.
The state’s health commissioner, Howard Zucker, said his office was aware of the high number of cases in Borough Park and was investigating it as a possible cluster, or interconnected group of cases that can be traced to the same source. Such a group emerged in New Rochelle this month.
“There’s two possibilities,” Dr. Zucker said. “There’s a lot of testing that’s going on or potentially one or more individuals that have been infected. So that’s something that’s new on the radar and we’re investigating that.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said late Wednesday that the city’s health commissioner had reviewed the Borough Park cases and did not find a common link among them.
“At this time, she does NOT believe there is any cluster,” the spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, said on Twitter.
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Correction officers and T.S.A. agents at Kennedy Airport test positive.
The State Department of Correction confirmed on Wednesday that a correction officer at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and a civilian staff member in Albany had tested positive for the virus.
Additionally, a correction officer at a checkpoint leading to New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex tested positive for the virus, a union official said on Wednesday.
Two female officers with the Transportation Security Administration at Kennedy International Airport left work on Wednesday after learning that they had the virus, according to Hydrick Thomas, the president of AFGE TSA Council 100, the union that represents transportation security officers at airports. The officers are sisters, he said.
One of the officers works at Terminal 4, which handles international flights; the other works at Terminal 5, which is mainly used by JetBlue. The agency said that both officers worked in checked baggage rooms, where they did not have direct contact with travelers.
“The officers are receiving medical care and are quarantined at home,” the agency said.
Jonah Engel Bromwich, Alan Feuer, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Michael Gold, Christina Goldbaum, Matthew Haag, Tim Herrera, Patrick McGeehan, Sarah Maslin Nir, Andy Newman, Jan Ransom, Liam Stack and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.