Health Commissioner Dr. Tom Farley said his staff has been matching up death certificates with cases data to find fatalities that were not previously reported. This week, they found 103, bringing the total number to 1,152, with a total of 20,359 positive cases.
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“If you look at the deaths we have per day, it definitely has a rise, a peak and a fall, so we’re clearly declining. So there’s still signs of progress against the epidemic, but it does say the peak of the epidemic is worse than we estimated before and the total number of deaths from the epidemics is higher than we estimated before,” he explained.
More than half the deaths have been in nursing homes, and Farley called for changes to those facilities to prevent such high death tolls.
“They don’t have the kind of resources hospitals do to prevent infection spreading from one resident to another, so reform may not be too strong a word to talk about how we solve this problem,” he said.
Officials also said they continue to have challenges getting enough personal protective equipment for hospitals, with N95 masks and surgical gowns still in short supply.
For the third day, city officials warned against large gatherings for Memorial Day.
They also asked residents to be more careful with trash, since the city has had a hard time making all collections on time.