New York Will Run Out of Ventilators Soon, Cuomo Warns, as Hospitalizations Spike

A doctor wears a mask as he walks outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan during the outbreak of the CCP virus in New York City, New York on April 1, 2020. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

New York is slated to run out of ventilators in less than a week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a press conference on Thursday.

Fears of ventilator shortages have prompted officials to order hospitals to cancel all elective surgeries, recommend the use of anesthesia machines as ventilators, convert BiPAP machines into ventilators, and advise a “splitting“ method that features a single ventilator serving two patients.

“It’s not easy, it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing,” Cuomo told reporters in Albany. “We have six days of ventilators in our stockpile at the current burn rate.”

Patients can spend weeks on ventilators and the longer they’re on ventilators, the more likely they'll die. Patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, are on ventilators for an average of 11 to 21 days, according to data from New York. The average time for patients without the disease is three to four days.

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. A number of companies have started producing ventilators, including General Motors and Ford. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has over 10,000 ventilators that it will distribute that states that need them, according to information released earlier Thursday.

New York has over 11,000 ventilators from those already in hospitals, those that were in its stockpile, or those that were already on hand, and is working on buying more.

Ventilators are machines that help lungs work. They’re typically used during recovery from some surgeries, for people suffering from serious conditions like a brain injury or lung disease, and for babies with premature lung development. The machines pump oxygen into a person’s body while removing carbon dioxide. Most require electricity while some can function on battery power.

A ventilator is seen at the New York City Emergency Management Warehouse, where 400 ventilators arrived and before being shipped out for distribution, due to concerns over the rapid spread of the CCP virus in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on March 24, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)

Members of the medical staff listen as Montefiore Medical Center nurses call for N95 masks and other critical PPE to handle the CCp virus pandemic in New York on April 1, 2020. (Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images)

Hospitalizations Spike

The number of confirmed cases in New York increased to 92,831, an increase of 8,669, while hospitalizations rose to 13,833, a spike of 1,607 from the day prior.

Three hundred and seventy-four new patients entered intensive care as those in ICUs in New York rose to 3,396.

The number of dead from COVID-19 rose to 2,372, up by 432 over 24 hours. In New York City, 1,374 of the deaths took place, with an estimated 9,775 patients hospitalized.

New York state has the highest number of cases and the most deaths in the United States. It has nearly half of the deaths in the entire nation.

Nearly 52,000 of the cases are in New York City, while surrounding counties, including Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties have seen larger increases in recent days. Nassau and Suffolk authorities both reported over 1,000 new cases overnight.

Officials continued shifting the projected peak of cases after initially saying it would arrive in early to mid-April. Models now show it will arrive between seven and 30 days from now, Cuomo said, though state officials believe it’s closer to the shorter end of the range.

The models are done by outside groups and analyzed by state officials.

The projected number of hospital beds that the state may require at the peak shifted down, from as many 140,000 to between 70,000 and 110,000.

The state has 53,000 beds at the moment, with just 36,000 of them in the downstate area, where most of the cases are.