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New York City woke up Monday to a critical week for the medical supplies needed to fight the coronavirus, which has already inundated hospitals in the city’s outer boroughs and left public officials hunting the globe for ventilators.
“April 5 is a day I am very worried about in terms of equipment and personnel,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a briefing on Monday in front of the newly arrived medical warship the USNS Comfort.
“The thing I am worried about is ventilators, overwhelmingly,” he said.
More than 36,000 people in New York City have tested positive for the disease and 790 have died, including one person under the age of 17 who had an underlying health condition, the city reported Monday morning. The city is racing against time to assemble enough medical equipment, hospital beds and personnel to care safely for the thousands of patients who will need hospitalization in the next week. More than one in five COVID-19 patients in the city have been hospitalized at some point.
De Blasio said the city as of Monday had enough protective gear, such as masks, gloves and gowns, to get through the week, but worried about having enough for next week.
“Our first milestone is this coming Sunday,” de Blasio said at a briefing Sunday night. “We must shore up to get ahead of the challenges we will start to face that following week.”
As of Monday, every patient who needed a ventilator had one. But the mayor pressed that the city needs to collect an additional 400 ventilators in a matter of days to meet the surge in hospitalizations and is still far short of the total 15,000 machines New York City could need at the apex. As of Monday, projections showed the disease is on track to peak in the city at the beginning of May, de Blasio said.
The federal government has supplied New York City with approximately 2,500 of these machines, and on Friday, Tesla founder Elon Musk pledged to give the city hundreds more that he had procured privately. Musk also said he would reopen a factory in Buffalo, N.Y., to help build more ventilators. Musk said he would send machine’s he secured immediately, but there was no timetable yet on when Tesla-made machines would be ready.
The price of a single ventilator has skyrocketed since the outbreak began to spread in the U.S. What was once a $20,000 machine now costs more than $50,000 in the open market, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a briefing on Monday afternoon.
New York state will need a total of 30,000 ventilators — approximately half of which have been secured — when cases hit their apex statewide, Cuomo has said. Cuomo said last week that the crisis would peak across the state in about 21 days, slightly sooner than de Blasio’s estimate for the city.
Besides equipment, however, both De Blasio and Cuomo expressed concern over the medical staff that will be needed in the hospitals and across eight makeshift medical centers being constructed across Downstate New York, including at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which opened to patients on Monday. By and large, these sites will be used to house non-intensive care patients, including those without coronavirus and those with mild coronavirus symptoms, while the city’s hospitals are converted mainly for intensive care treatment.
“In this battle, the troops are the health care professionals. We need more,” Cuomo said at a briefing Monday afternoon, as he called for doctors, nurses and assistants from other parts of the country and less affected parts of New York state to pitch in where they’re needed.
So far, 76,000 medical professionals, including retired doctors and nurses, have volunteered to help in New York state, the governor said on Sunday.
“If you’re not busy, come help us, please,” the governor said.
Cuomo also took on criticism that the state and city were asking for more ventilators when such equipment was still available in the state’s stockpile in Edison, N.J.
“If you are not preparing for the apex and for the high point, you are missing the entire point of the operation,” he said. “It is a fundamental blunder to only prepare for today.”
