‘Excellent’ progress on key health indicators in NYC; COVID-19 continues deadly destruction: de Blasio

Coronavirus continued its devastating toll on New York City through the weekend, but with a recent batch of technical indicators showing signs of improvement, Mayor de Blasio deemed Monday an “excellent day.”

“There’s a little more hope in the air because we’ve seen some real progress,” he said at a press conference. “This is the kind of day we have been waiting for and it is a beautiful thing and let’s put together more like it and that’s our pathway to something better.”

He was referring to three metrics — new hospital admissions, the number of patients in intensive care units and the percentage of COVID-19 tests that come back positive — that are serving as benchmarks for when the city can start to return to normal life.

All three categories went down from Friday to Saturday, according to de Blasio. He previously said the city needs to see 10 straight days of declines or a steady downward trend over two weeks before some restrictions can be eased.

A major reality check to the seemingly good news came in the form of the latest death toll — 18,909 New Yorkers as of Sunday, up by 203 from Saturday, according to the city Health Department.

The total number of COVID-19 positive New Yorkers was 170,534, with 43,045 of them hospitalized.

As dreadful as the numbers were, they represented a continued downward trend of peaks from last month, when 572 new deaths were reported April 7 and 6,206 new cases were reported the day before.

De Blasio credited the actions from ordinary New Yorkers like observing social distancing for the change in the three indicators.

“An excellent day,” he said. “Let’s do it again. Thank you. Well done, New York City.”