New York registers 731 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hrs

April 7 (PTI): New York governor Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday that the COVID-19 deaths in the state hit a new one-day peak, with 731 people dead in the largest single-day increase in fatalities since the coronavirus crisis engulfed the state, the epicentre of the pandemic in the United States.

'The bad news is 5,489 New Yorkers have lost their lives to this virus. That is up from 4,758, the largest single day increase. That's 731 people who we lost. Behind every one of those numbers is an individual, is a family, is a mother, is a father," Cuomo said.

The state has a total of 138,836 coronavirus cases and as of Tuesday 5,489 people have died, up by 731 from Monday morning.

Cuomo said the number of newly hospitalized patients is also up from Monday. In what he described as "good news", Cuomo said daily ICU admissions and daily intubations numbers are down.

And right now we're projecting that we are reaching a plateau in the total number of hospitalizations and you can see the growth is starting to flatten. Again this is a projection. It still depends on what we do and what we do will affect those numbers. This is not an act of God that we're looking at. It's an act of what society actually does, he said in his daily media briefing.

The governor said he is coordinating with governors of New Jersey and Connecticut on plans to restart the economy and daily life.

We're not there yet. But this is not a light switch that we can just flick one day, and everything goes back to normal. We're going to have to restart that economy, we're going to have to restart a lot of systems that we shut down abruptly. And we need to start to plan for that, he said.

He said that he has spoken to New Jersey governor Phil Murphy and Connecticut governor Ned Lamont about coming up with a regional metropolitan tri-state approach to restart the economy and get everything up and running as quickly as possible.