WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Americans must persevere with social distancing now that their efforts are showing signs of slowing the spread of coronavirus, U.S. medical and state officials said on Thursday, as New York posted another spike in deaths while hospitalizations ebbed.
In a sign that the disease’s curve was flattening in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said new hospitalizations fell to a fresh low of 200. But at the same time, the state recorded a record-high 799 deaths on Wednesday, for a total of 7,067.
“We are flattening the curve by what we’re doing and we’re flattening the curve so far,” Cuomo said, referring to the shape of a graph showing the number of new cases. “You can’t relax. The flattening of the curve last night happened because of what we did yesterday.”
Several officials have hailed the apparent success of mitigation efforts as reflected in death projections that have been scaled down to 60,000 from more than 100,000. Still, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top U.S. infectious disease expert, said it was important that people continue to stay home.
“We’ve got to continue to redouble our efforts at the mitigation of physical separation in order to keep those numbers down and hopefully even get them lower than what you’ve heard recently,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CBS “This Morning.”
Stay-at-home orders that have closed non-essential workplaces in 42 states have drastically slowed the once-humming U.S. economy and thrown millions of people out of work.
With several state unemployment in