9th April, 2020
The coronavirus death toll in New York City is expected to surge in the coming days as officials begin including people who died at home, suspiciously of the virus.
Stephanie Buhle, a spokeswoman for New York City’s Health Department, said the city would no longer report only those cases confirmed by a laboratory test.
“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and the NYC Health Department are working together to include into their reports deaths that may be linked to COVID but not lab confirmed that occur at home,” she said, in a report by Gothamist.
Emergency Medical Service data suggests a massive number of people are dying at home, more than happened a year ago.
On Tuesday, 256 people were pronounced dead at home across the five boroughs.
Before the pandemic, about 25 people typically died at home.
This suggests that most of Tuesday’s fatalities were related to the outbreak, which has taken a grave toll on the city.
About 4,755 people have died by Wednesday in the City, out of 6,235 in the entire state.
New York City Fire Department data also shows that first responders have reported 2,192 “dead-on-arrival” calls over the last two weeks.
On average, the department handled about 453 of those calls over the same period last year.
That data also showed that the number of cardiac or respiratory arrest calls has exploded, from 20 to 30 a day at the end of March and the beginning of April in 2019.
It jumped to 322 on one day in April in 2020—with more than 100 calls every day since March 28.
While 30 to 50 percent of those calls ended in a death in 2019, more than 50 percent of those calls have ended in a death every day since March 22 this year.
The percentage has steadily risen to 75 percent as of April 5.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday agreed the city should include home deaths to give an accurate account of the tragedy ravaging the city.
He acknowledged that a “vast majority” of deaths at home are “coronavirus related.”
“The blunt truth is coronavirus is driving these very tragic deaths,” de Blasio said on CNN.
“We’re talking about something like 100, 200 people per day. Don’t take this disease ever lightly because the real death toll is even higher.”