GOVERNOR’S BRIEFING, WEDNESDAY, 4/8

At Last, Trends

Show COVID-19

May Be On Wane

To Keep Decline Going, Governor

Urges Citizens Not To Back-Slide

ALBANY – At last, good news.

Despite a record daily death toll. Governor Cuomo told New Yorkers at today’s briefing: “What we are doing is actually working and it’s making a difference … It is flattening the curve and we see that again today so far.”

While New Yorkers must continue to be “rigorous” with social-distancing, hand-washing and other measures to keep the trend going in the the number of patients hospitalized is down, he said:  “You look at the three-day trend but that number is down. The three-day average trend is also down.”

Some hospitals, he’s been told, are “actually releasing more people than are coming in. They’re net down.”

“We have more capacity in the hospital system than ever before. We’ve had more capacity in that system to absorb more people. The sharing of equipment, which has been really one of the beautiful cooperative, generous acts among different partners in the health care system has worked,” he said.

“If the hospitalization rate keeps the decreasing the way it is now, then the system should stabilize over these next couple of weeks, which will minimize the need for overflow on the system that we have built in at Javits and at the USNS Comfort,” he said.

Still, he underscored, “It’s not a time to get complacent. It’s not a time to do anything different than we’ve been doing. Remember what happened in Italy when the entire health care system became overrun. So we have to remain diligent, we have to remain disciplined going forward. There’s no doubt that we are now bending the curve and there’s no doubt that we can’t stop doing what we’re doing.