It has become a bleak morning ritual that gets worse each day: New York reached yet another peak in coronavirus deaths in 24 hours, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday. This time it was 799.
That brought the state's COVID-19 death toll to 7,067, by far America's highest.
"That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don't even have the words for it," Cuomo said, describing the outbreak as "a silent explosion that just ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11."
Fatalities nationwide surpassed 15,000 on Thursday, with especially deadly outbreaks raging around Detroit and New Orleans and health authorities on the East Coast watching an alarming rise in cases in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
Not all the news in New York was grim. The number of new hospitalizations continued to drop, affirming earlier signs that stay-at-home orders were slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
"You can't relax," Cuomo said. "The flattening of the curve last night happened because of what we did yesterday and the day before and the day before that."
In Philadelphia, 26 new fatalities brought the death toll Thursday to 104, many of them nursing home residents, officials said. Like other communities around the country, the city's jail is another center of contagion, with 61 inmates testing positive for the coronavirus.
All told, more than 5,000 people in Philadelphia have confirmed COVID-19 infections.
"Let this milestone of 5,000 confirmed cases be a reminder that we are not at all out of the woods," Mayor Jim Kenney said.
As pain from the nation's economic shutdown deepened _ more than 16 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks _ Cuomo and others warned that reopening businesses too soon risks a second wave of infections and renewed lockdowns.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio described three phases for society's return to normal. In the current phase, transmission of the virus is widespread and testing is rationed, with health care workers and hospital patients the top priority.
In the second phase, possibly as soon as May or June, some stay-at-home restrictions could be relaxed and "you can start to make life a little more normal" with less social distancing and minimal transmission of the virus, de Blasio said.
But that depends on widespread testing for the virus, with "disease detectives" tracking down the contacts of those whose result is positive so they can be isolated, De Blasio said. He criticized the Trump administration for not making widespread testing available, saying that "there's clearly a lot more our federal government could be doing."
"We need the federal government to step up," he said. "We need them to do it quickly."
Warning of a resurgence of casualties if stay-at-home restrictions were lifted too soon, the mayor said, "The one thing I can guarantee you is we won't jump the gun."
The third phase, he said, would be a final conquering of the virus, with few or no cases and a return to normal.
