Emergency rooms in New York City hospitals are starting to see fewer patients, but more of them are testing positive for the CCP virus, and many need hospitalization.
Fewer than 3,500 people have come to emergency rooms with breathing issues on each of the five days ending April 1, on average. That compares with almost 3,900 on average for the prior five days. For patients coming with flu-like symptoms, such as a sore throat and fever, the numbers have dropped from nearly 1,500 to about 1,000.
In February, before the epidemic gripped the city, ERs saw about 1,300 patients with respiratory symptoms and 400 with flu-like symptoms.
Also, massive numbers of the incoming patients are testing positive for the virus—around 4,000 a day. Every day on average, close to 900 of them require hospitalization. These numbers haven’t changed significantly for a week.
New York City daily emergency room visits with respiratory, flu-like symptoms as well as daily new CCP virus cases and hospitalizations. (The Epoch Times)The CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan around November 2019 and was allowed to spread across China and the world due to a coverup and mismanagement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The United States has now more than 200,000 cases, the most of all countries that release transparent data publicly. In China, information submitted by locals and leaked government documents show the regime has falsified its data. Available evidence also indicates Iran’s numbers are unreliable.
New York City has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, with more than 47,000 cases. Other hardest hit areas in the state are the nearby counties of Westchester (more than 10,000 cases), Nassau (nearly 10,000), Suffolk (more than 7,000), and Rockland (more than 3,000).
The city’s hospitals are reportedly groaning under patient load with overworked staff concerned about being infected.
“We’re going to have a couple of weeks, starting pretty much now, but especially a few days from now, that are going to be horrific,” President Donald Trump said during his April 1 press briefing.
The city has about 22,000 hospital beds, plus 1,000 from the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort and another 1,000 at the field hospital built at the Javits Convention Center by the Army Corps of Engineers, which should boost capacity to 3,000 next week. The city will still need a large part of its bed capacity to serve patients with ailments other than the CCP virus. The Javits Center hospital will dedicate itself to serving those regular patients.
The most pressing bottleneck of the system has so far been the number of ventilators needed for patients with severe respiratory issues. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on April 2 that the state will use up its ventilator stockpile in six days.
Hospitals have been recommended to use anesthesia machines as ventilators and convert BiPAP machines into ventilators, as well as using a single ventilator to serve two patients.
Companies including GM and Ford have set up ventilator production. On March 27, GM announced that the first units, produced in partnership with Ventec Life Systems, will start to ship “as soon as next month.”
The federal government has in recent weeks sent 4,400 ventilators to New York and may not be in a position to send the number needed by states across the nation, Cuomo said.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
