Health & Fitness
NYC Coronavirus Deaths Near 1K As Mayor Says Sick Undercounted
The mayor said tests were being administered to only the most sick New Yorkers.
NEW YORK CITY — The death toll from the new coronavirus neared 1,000 people in New York City Tuesday as the mayor told how the staggering number of diagnoses is only a fraction of the actual amount of people sickened.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on NBC's Today Show that only New Yorkers critically ill could get tested. That means people who show only mild or moderate symptoms usually do not get positively diagnosed and are not part of the city's figures.
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Operators for city's 311 line, which handles thousands of calls a day from people who think they are infected, are instructed to tell most people that tests aren't available, a source said.
"Everybody who calls wants a test, and we have to tell them they're not sick enough to get one," the source said.
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The mayor and medical experts have, in the past, estimated that 80 percent of the people sickened suffer mild or moderate symptoms.
The mayor was respoding to a question from Today host Savannah Gurthrie who asked, "The last I heard in New York, you cannot get a COVID-19 test unless you are so sick you have to be in the hospital. ...Doesn't that dramatically undercount the number of people who are sick?"
The mayor responded, "Absolutely."
He continued, "Testing at this point — you know, if testing had come earlier, ...If we had gotten it in January, in February, beginning of February, we could have gotten ahead of this.
"... What it means now is, it's the way we determine who needs the most immediate, urgent care. It's a way we help to protect our first responders and decide a course who needs to go and be isolated."
Latest city figures show there were 38,087 cases that had tested positive in the city as of Monday evening. Of them, 914 had died. Both the mayor and Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect those numbers to worsen over the next couple of weeks.
Coronavirus In NYC: What's Happened And What You Need To Know
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