NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- City health officials announced Wednesday evening that the number of coronavirus cases in New York City surpassed 80,000.
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There have now been a total of 80,204 cases reported citywide.
The death toll rose to 4,260 deaths on Wednesday evening, up from the 3,544 reported the previous day.
At least 20,474 patients are hospitalized, health officials reported.
Cases by borough:
- Queens: 26,204
- Brooklyn: 21,580
- The Bronx: 16,419
- Manhattan: 10,862
- Staten Island: 5,102
At a briefing Wednesday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio praised New Yorkers for staying home and practicing social distancing, saying there were new signs their efforts were working.
"The real heroes here are everyday New Yorkers who had to change their lives," the mayor said. "All of you had to do something very, very different in very little time. A month ago, this city was in a very different reality. And a month ago feels like a year ago now. I think a lot of us are having that kind of feeling—so much has happened so quickly."
He said he had "hope" after hospitalizations began to stabilize in recent days and the city needed less ventilators than anticipated.
"We expected really deep intensification of this struggle. We expected the number of ventilators needed to be more and more going into this week," de Blasio said. "We've seen actually much fewer needed than we expected. Now to be clear: we still need more, meaning that there's still each day more people who need them, but much less than expected. That's a good sign. The hospitalizations have stabilized. For a long time that kept going up and up. We're now seeing some leveling off. Again, based off only a few days."
He cautioned that residents should continue to stay home and social distance or cases of coronavirus could begin to increase.
"We know we're not out of the woods, it's too early, it's too preliminary. But we'll keep telling you each day what the evidence is saying. So far so good, but a long way to go," de Blasio said.
"It would be dangerous to take a small amount of information and decide too many things based off of it," he said. "That could actually create new problems and new dangers."
He said the new data "tells us we actually have to double down, stick to the strategies that are working."
"This gives me hope—more hope than ever that we can get through this really tough moment and come out together, save a lot of lives and get onto recovery at some point," he said.
"But we have to beat it back, not open the door too early for it to resurge," he said. "What I'm telling you today is something has started to move."
At a news briefing at P.S.1 in Manhattan on Tuesday, where school food services workers were providing free "Grab and Go" meals to families in need, de Blasio said he was hopeful that New York has seen "a little improvement" with slowing down the spread of coronavirus.
He said the number of people who need ventilators has decreased, "buying a few more days" of supply.
"I am hopeful but I am not drawing conclusions until we are 100 percent sure," de Blasio said.
He added that right now it is critical that people continue to follow social distancing regulations in order to buy health care workers and officials more time to prepare and stockpile medical equipment.
De Blasio said the that "half a million New Yorkers are either out of work or will be" and vowed to not let any New Yorker go hungry.
The city has given out 2.6 million meals to New Yorkers over the last three weeks.
435 sites across the city are providing three meals a day to families in need.
The mayor asked families to go earlier in the day and adults without children after 11:30 a.m.
On Monday, de Blasio announced that he will be suspending the "safe streets" pilot. The pilot banned cars on specific streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn Queens and the Bronx to create more public open space for New Yorkers during the coronavirus crisis.
The mayor said that there were not enough people utilizing those closures and with NYPD personnel down, there are not enough officers to enforce social distancing recommendations.
"We do not want to be seen like we're solving one problem by creating a new one," de Blasio said.
The mayor also reported that New York City's ventilator supply should last until mid-week as officials anticipate especially hard days ahead at hospitals across the five boroughs.
De Blasio announced that there will be delays in burials and spoke about "temporary burials," saying that he wants to give families respect and religious accommodations but did not go into further detail on how the city will go about handling it.
"We thought as early as tonight there was the possibility of running out of crucial equipment like ventilators," de Blasio said at a news briefing. "I can tell you, and this is certainly good news, we have bought a few more days here. We believe we can get to Tuesday or Wednesday with the supplies we have. We're going to update the numbers constantly."
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