It has become a bleak morning ritual that gets worse each day: New York reached yet another peak in coronavirus deaths in 24 hours, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday. This time it was 799.
That brought the state’s COVID-19 death toll to 7,067, by far America’s highest.
“That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don’t even have the words for it,” Cuomo said, describing the outbreak as “a silent explosion that just ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.”
“It’s gotten to the point, frankly, that we’re going to bring in additional funeral directors to deal with the number of people who have passed,” he said.
Fatalities nationwide surpassed 16,000 on Thursday, with especially deadly outbreaks raging around Detroit and New Orleans and health authorities on the East Coast watching an alarming rise in cases in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
Not all the news in New York was grim. The number of new hospitalizations continued to drop, affirming earlier signs that stay-at-home orders were slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
“You can’t relax,” Cuomo said. “The flattening of the curve last night happened because of what we did yesterday and the day before and the day before that.”
In Michigan, the death toll has risen to 1,076, the third-highest after New York and New Jersey, where 1,590 have died.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she had notified Vice President Mike Pence that Michigan “faced dangerously low levels of medications required to safely place patients on ventilators” with sedation and pain relief. In response, the federal government temporarily lifted restrictions on the import of drugs that were running low, she said.
“We’re grateful, because it’s critically important,” Whitmer said.