New York state, which has been desperately searching for ventilators, will receive 140 ventilators from Oregon, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday in a news conference.
“This was unsolicited, but the 140 ventilators will make a difference,” Cuomo said, adding the gesture was both “kind” and “smart.”
“We’re all in the same battle here,” the governor said. “And the battle is stopping the spread of the virus.”
China is donating another 1,000 ventilators, Cuomo said. Those are expected to arrive Saturday.
At least 297,575 people in the United States have become infected and 8,098 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University’s running case count.
New York is not the only state struggling with adequate equipment and supplies. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said his state doesn’t even have enough tests to get a clear idea of the scale of the outbreak.
“Everything about the tests are very difficult to come by, and there’s no federal plan for this, so every state is on their own,” Pritzker said. “As I’ve said, it’s the Wild West out here.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said the federal government must ramp up efforts for more personal protective equipment, or PPE, for health care workers, saying the state had received some but not all it had requested.
“We’re grateful for these supplies. But to be clear, we’ve gotten just 33% of what we’ve asked for, and they’ve told us not to expect more anytime soon,” he said.
“This pandemic is a war,” he said. “And we need the armor to fight it.”
“Governments at all levels, hospitals, law enforcement and others are competing against each other for a scarce amount of personal protective equipment,” Cooper said.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said officials in his state have tried to boost hospital bed capacity and buy more personal protective equipment.
“We try to buy (PPE),” he said. “It’s really hard. The federal government buys most all of it.”
Beshear called on residents to donate equipment they may have, saying there’s a great need for gloves.
“We believe this is the next area where there’s going to be another big run in the United States,” he said in a statement.
White House announces new face cloth guidelines
“It’s really going to be a voluntary thing,” Trump said. “I’m not choosing to do it.”
The President’s announcement came days after a panel of experts advised the White House on new research that suggests coronavirus could be spread by talking and possibly even just breathing.
“The CDC would not have gone this direction if not for the White House,” the official told CNN. “We would have tried more to understand about asymptomatic transmission. We would have done more studies if we had more time.”
CDC experts were under “intense pressure” to draft the new guidelines quickly, the official said.
New York has yet to reach apex, governor says
New York state has more than 113,000 cases, with more than 10,000 reported on Friday — a “new high” — Cuomo said Saturday. At least 3,565 people had died.
The state has yet to reach the peak of its curve, Cuomo told reporters, saying projections forecast the apex is between four and eight days away. At that point, New York’s health care system will face its “ultimate challenge,” Cuomo said.
“But there’s part of me that says it’s good we’re not at the apex because we’re not yet ready for the apex either,” he said. “We’re not yet ready for the high point. We’re still working on the capacity of the system. The more time we have to improve the capacity of the system, the better.”
To achieve that, the governor said he will sign an executive order to allow medical students who have yet to graduate to begin practicing. In all, the state has 85,000 medical volunteers, he said, including 22,000 from out of state.
Meantime, an emergency hospital facility at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan will provide 2,500 beds, treat Covid-19 patients and be staffed by the federal government, Cuomo said.
The US Navy said Saturday that a “few patients” brought to the USNS Comfort tested positive for Covid-19, though the ship is not meant to treat coronavirus patients.
They were isolated upon their arrival to the Comfort, which is docked in New York City, while they awaited test results. When those results came back positive, the patients were transferred to the Javits Center.
Here’s what else happened this week:
• The next two weeks will be “very, very rough” for the US, the President also said. White House experts cited a model this week that showed more than 2,000 Americans could die each day by mid-April.
NY nurse: Patients appear sicker than last week
A New York hospital intensive care unit nurse says the patients she and her colleagues are treating this week appear sicker compared with last week. And it’s not just the lungs, Kelley Bradshaw said. Patients’ heart and kidneys are being affected as well.
“There’s just a lot of unpredictability with these patients and it just feels like the longer someone battles this virus and the more critically ill they become, the harder our job gets,” she said.
The ICU has expanded to handle more patients, Bradshaw said, and while health workers still have all the protective equipment they need, they’re careful not to exhaust it in case they still have a lot of coronavirus patients three weeks from now.
“They do have to keep it very — it is very regulated, meaning that we can’t just blow through it, because we don’t know what’s coming next,” she said.
Cuomo is asking upstate hospitals to loan up to 20% of their unused ventilators.
“Moreover, when the pandemic wave hits upstate New York, the governor will ask downstate hospitals for similar help,” Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor, said in a statement. “We are not upstate or downstate we are one state and we act that way.”
CNN’s Chris Boyette and Athena Jones contributed to this report.