New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the state saw its deadliest day on Tuesday, with 731 new deaths in the Empire State. The governor reported the new death toll was 5,489, up from 4,758 just 24 hours earlier.
The number of confirmed cases of the virus was close to 139,000 (138,836) across the state, Cuomo said.
The state death toll is now higher than that reached in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda, which snuffed out the lives of 2,752 city residents, and 2,977 people in total. Up to this point, that was the deadliest terror attack on US soil.
The New York City death toll is also higher than that of the 9/11 terror attack – at least 3,202 people have been killed by the COVID-19 coronavirus, according to the latest statistics released Tuesday by the city health department. There were 76,876 cases of the virus in the “city that never sleeps,” up from 72,181 the previous day.
With a deep sigh, Cuomo began listing the statistics at his daily briefing from the state capitol. “Newly hospitalized up from yesterday but three-day averaging is moving down, which is good news,” he said.
“We’re reaching a plateau in the number of hospitalizations … that still depends on what we do, and what we do will affect those numbers,” Cuomo warned. “It’s not an act of God.
“The change in daily ICU admissions is way down and that’s good news; the change in the daily intubation number is down and that’s good news,” he added.
“The discharge rate is just about where it was,” he went on.
And then Cuomo finally got to the not-so-good news.
“The bad news is 5,489 New Yorkers have lost their lives to this virus.. . . . That is the largest single day increase.
“That’s 731 people who we lost,” the governor said. Deep breath.
“Behind every one of those numbers is an individual. There’s a family, there’s a mother, there’s a father, there’s a sister, there’s a brother. So a lot of pain again today for many New Yorkers.”
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Tuesday his state has likewise seen a spike in deaths from the virus, with 232 people losing their lives to COVID-19 in the 24-hour period that led to a new death toll of 1,232.
There were 44,416 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the state, up from 41,255 cases just a day earlier. And of those, 7,017 are hospitalized, with fully 1,651 sedated and on ventilators.
Murphy ordered all state and county parks and state forests closed after saying there were many reports of people gathering too closely while they were outside.
Across the United States, 1,821 people died in the past 24 hours, bringing Tuesday’s death toll up to 12,692 nationwide. There were 26,778 new cases of the virus on Monday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country to 393,782. The good news? At least 21,561 Americans have recovered so far.