1 in 3 New Yorkers is put on ventilator, toll crosses 39,000
- 19 Apr 2020
A large study of hospitalised COVID-19 patients in New York City found 1 in 3 were put on breathing machines. That’s a rate more than 10 times higher than seen in China.
The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases on Sunday, with more than 732,197. The US tally of lives lost to COVID-19 has also soared to more than 39,090. New York state accounts for nearly half those deaths.
“People are frustrated, we’re anxious, we’re scared, we’re angry,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said. “This is a terrible experience, it’s disorienting, it threatens you to your core.”
The study’s authors say that of the patients studied, 36 per cent were obese, which may have contributed to severe breathing problems and the need for ventilators.
Published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, the report involves 393 patients admitted to two unidentified hospitals from March 5-27. Patients were aged 62 on average and 60 per cent were men. Almost 40 per cent were white but the report had no other racial breakdown. Overall, 6 per cent were health care workers.
Cough, fever and shortness of breath were the main symptoms, but diarrohea, nausea and vomiting were also common.
Dr Parag Goyal of Weill Cornell Medicine and the report authors say that compared with China, hospitalisation for COVID-19 in the US is generally limited to more severely ill patients, another likely reason for the greater use of ventilators. The authors say 40 patients or 10 per cent died and 260 were discharged from hospitals.
Meanwhile, New York, epicentre of the US epidemic, on Saturday reported another 540 coronavirus-related deaths for April 17, the lowest daily tally since April 1. While that was down from 630 a day earlier, it still represented hundreds more families who lost a loved one to COVID-19, the highly contagious illness caused by the virus, in a single day in one state.
Thirty-six of the deaths occurred at nursing homes, which have been ravaged by the pandemic nationwide.
“It is the feeding frenzy for this virus,” Cuomo said during his daily coronavirus briefing.
“You are not seeing a total overload of the emergency rooms. That doesn’t mean happy days are here again,” the Democrat said. “We are not at a point when we are going to be reopening anything immediately.”
Nearly 13,000 New Yorkers in all have died since the state’s first coronavirus case was reported March 1, the governor said. The state total doesn’t include more than 4,000 New York City deaths that were blamed on the virus on death certificates but weren’t confirmed by a lab test.
More than 2,700 people in New York nursing homes have lost their lives, more by far than in any other state.
Nursing homes are “the feeding frenzy for this virus,” Cuomo said, noting that the facilities are under pressure from staff shortages and illness and residents’ fragility.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with underlying health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.
Better-than-expected social distancing practices have led an influential research model to lower its projected US coronavirus death toll by 12 per cent, while predicting some states may be able to safely begin easing restrictions as early as May 4.
The University of Washington’s predictive model, regularly updated and often cited by state public health authorities and White House officials, projected on Friday that the virus will take 60,308 US lives by Aug.4, down from 68,841 deaths forecast earlier in the week.
Strict adherence to stay-at-home orders and business closures imposed by governors in 42 of the 50 US states over the past four weeks to curb the spread of the virus was cited as a key factor in the improved outlook.
“We are seeing the numbers decline because some state and local governments, and, equally important, individuals around the country, have stepped up to protect their families, their neighbors, and friends and co-workers by reducing physical contact,” said Christopher Murray, director of the university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
The institute said states with low death rates, including Vermont, West Virginia, Montana and Hawaii, could safely relax some restrictions on May 4, so long as they continued to limit social gatherings. States moving to ease stay-at-home measures also are urged to institute widespread testing for infections and to isolate anyone testing positive, while tracing their close contacts and quarantining them.
Other largely rural or sparsely populated states, including Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, may need to wait until late June or early July, the institute said. It also recommended that states reopen only if they have infection rates of less than one in 1 million people.
Agencies