New Yorkers can heave a sigh of relief, for now. Based on latest data, the city's average death toll from the coronavirus has slipped below 400 for the first time this month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo disclosed.
Speaking at a media briefing on Sunday, Cuomo stated that 367 New Yorkers perished the day before from the highly contagious disease - less than 50 percent of where the figure was at the peak of the outbreak. Even on Saturday, new hospitalizations fell to around 1,000.
Cuomo described the latest numbers as only "not a terrible news compared to where we were." He referred to the death toll of the illness on Saturday as "horrific."
Cuomo continued to express cautious optimism that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the state, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, was heading on the right course.
Cuomo, aided by a chart indicating the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations across the state, said during his regular briefing that New York is "back to where we were 21 days ago."
New York has a way of knowing when the epidemic has run its course. If a population has immunity or social distancing steps applied, virologists look at a metric called the "effective number of reproduction", which reflects the total number of people who are likely to be infected by a single Covid-19 patient.
Efficient reproduction at a specific point in time, called the R(t), indicates how quickly the virus is circulating within a population. It provides a real-time guide for states seeking to relax limits on social distancing or stay-at-home mandates.
New York's R(t) is currently pegged at 0.8, Cuomo revealed during Sunday's media conference. This indicates, every person is infecting on average less than any other person at the moment. Taken alone, this figure shows that the outbreak in the city is contained temporarily.
Cuomo largely attributed the decline to New Yorkers' attempts to adhere to social distancing, saying his job was to provide the people who were able to behave responsibly with "facts."
According to the governor, the government "just can't act unless people completely support the action. Government couldn't do what they have done in the city, it was a result of what people did," he said.
With the figures of new regular infections falling in New York, Cuomo has proposed a rough roadmap for reopening the state economy.
Cuomo said that the state will comply with the CDC's proposal to conduct major reopening until state and regional hospitalization rates see a drop for two weeks.
Upstate and downstate part of the city face different obstacles, Cuomo said, with downstate having more cases of coronavirus. Reopening downstate, he said, would "require multi-state and regional cooperation."
