Coronavirus in NY: Cuomo Declares State of Emergency

Moving on multiple fronts to curb the spread of the virus, the governor said the state of emergency would allow New York’s government to respond faster by lifting regulations.

The governor’s announcement came as concerns about the outbreak grew in New York City, which has 11 confirmed cases, up from five that were disclosed as of Friday. The epicenter in New York state continues to be just north of the city, in Westchester County, where there are 57 cases in total.

These cases were mostly, if not all, related to a cluster in Westchester that first came to authorities’ attention after a New Rochelle resident, a 50-year-old lawyer, was confirmed as New York’s second coronavirus patient.

State officials said they were testing dozens of mouth and nasal swabs from people who may have been exposed to the lawyer, who has been hospitalized but whose condition is said to be improving. Technicians are working around the clock at private and public laboratories, including a major facility near the state Capitol.

Despite the spread in the state and the mounting global toll of the virus, which has killed more than 3,500 people worldwide, Cuomo sought to try to calm the public during a news conference in Albany.

“You know what’s worse than the virus? The anxiety,” Cuomo said, noting that most patients would suffer mild or no symptoms.

The declaration of emergency will allow the state to speed up the purchasing of supplies and the hiring of workers to assist local health departments that have been handling the monitoring of thousands of self-quarantined patients, Cuomo said.

“Somebody has to go knock on their door, once a day,” he said. “This is labor intensive.”

The declaration would also allow officials to skirt purchasing regulations, if necessary, he said.

Still, there were signs that the outbreak was spreading, including a pair of patients in Saratoga County, north of Albany — the first such confirmed cases outside of the New York City region. Investigators were trying to determine how the two patients were infected.

On Friday night, the driver in Queens tested positive, and the case prompted more than 40 doctors, nurses and other workers at a hospital there to go into voluntary self-isolation over fears that they might have been exposed to the coronavirus, officials said on Saturday.

The man, 33, walked into St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in the Far Rockaway section of Queens on Tuesday and reported flulike symptoms. He went home and returned later when his symptoms worsened, an official said.

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Dozens of workers at the hospital are now being tested, officials said.

“Obviously, 40 people are out,” Richards said. “The hospital will need to replace those people temporarily. They will need money to do that. They need supplies. We need to keep the health care up and running.”

Tom Melillo, a hospital spokesman, said the patient remained in quarantine at the hospital on Saturday, and that hospital officials were monitoring everyone who may have been exposed to the patient.

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A city official said the man drives for Uber. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Health officials said they were also seeking to determine whether the driver may have exposed passengers to the virus.

Also on Saturday, the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, said a New York doctor who commutes to work at Bridgeport Hospital tested positive for the illness. Lamont said the physician did not show visible symptoms while treating patients and isolated himself.

New Jersey officials said that four people in the state had tested positive for the virus: a 32-year-old man, a man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s, all from Bergen County near New York; and a man in his 60s from Camden County, in the southern part of the state.

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In tracing people who had contact with the New Rochelle man, a partner at a small Midtown Manhattan law firm, disease detectives in New York learned that he had attended synagogue services before becoming symptomatic.

Public health officials closed the synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, and asked that anyone who had attended services, a bat mitzvah or a funeral there recently isolate themselves as a precaution.

New York City officials have asked the federal government to send more diagnostic kits for the coronavirus, saying in a letter on Friday that the city’s limited capacity to test had “impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic.”

On Saturday, Cuomo did not say how many New Yorkers were now isolating themselves at home over fears they might have been exposed to the virus. But as of Friday, New York officials said they had asked about 4,000 people in the state to self-quarantine.

About 2,700 of that quarantined group were in New York City, and most of them had recently returned from five countries where the outbreak has been most severe: China, Iran, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

In his remarks on Saturday, Cuomo said the state was aggressively testing as many people as possible. “We want to find positives,” the governor said, adding that while some people might be disconcerted by the rising number of patients, it showed that the solid medical detective work was underway. “We say, ‘That’s good news,’ that we know who the people are.”

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As of Saturday afternoon, the coronavirus outbreak had sickened more than 105,400 people, killed over 3,500 and been detected in at least 92 countries. In the United States, more than 350 cases of the virus had been confirmed, and at least 19 people had died, according to a New York Times database.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .