New York sees early signs that social distancing could be working.
As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in New York continued to grow — reaching more than 30,000 — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Wednesday that there were early signs that the state's stringent restrictions on social gatherings could be slowing the virus's spread.
The scale of the epidemic in New York City has led White House officials to advise people who have passed through or left the area to quarantine themselves for 14 days.
In a briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo said there were indications that social distancing measures put in place in New York appeared to be helping — but that more needed to be done. "The evidence suggests that the density control measures may be working," he said.
On Sunday, for example, the state's projections showed hospitalizations doubling every two days. By Tuesday, the estimates showed hospitalizations doubling every 4.7 days, he said — adding the caveat that such a projection was "almost too good to be true."
He cited encouraging news from Westchester County, where the rate of infection has slowed. "We have dramatically slowed what was an exponential rate of increase," Mr. Cuomo said. "That was the hottest cluster in the United States of America. We closed the schools, we closed gatherings, we brought in testing, and we have dramatically slowed the increase."
New York State, which has tested more people than any other state, now has 30,811 confirmed cases, an increase of more than 5,000 since Tuesday morning. New York City has 17,856 confirmed cases.
But Mr. Cuomo said that more needed to be done, particularly to make it easier to maintain social distancing in New York City, the most densely populated major city in the United States.
Mr. Cuomo said that the city would begin a limited pilot program to begin closing some streets to automobile traffic to give pedestrians more space outside, and to institute new rules to limit density in the city's playgrounds.
"No basketball," he said.
The outbreak already led Broadway theaters to go dark, and on Wednesday the Tony Awards, which had been scheduled for June 7, were postponed until an undecided date.
Even as the crisis deepened in New York, which does not have enough hospital beds or equipment to handle the cases it expects, President Trump pressed to reopen the country for business by Easter, on April 12. The president issued his goal despite widespread warnings from public health experts that the worst effects of the outbreak were still to come and that lifting the restrictions now in place would result in unnecessary deaths.
The number of new coronavirus cases in the United States has rapidly increased in recent days, with more than 20,000 new cases diagnosed on Monday and Tuesday alone, in part because of expanded testing. That spike brings the country's total cases to nearly 60,000.
Mr. Cuomo has said that with cases doubling every three days in New York City, as many as 140,000 people might need urgent care in the next few weeks. In New York City, the 1.8-million-square-foot Jacob K. Javits Convention Center — which was scheduled to hold an expo for exotic flowers this week — looked more like a front-line military depot as workers rushed to transform the complex into a hospital to handle an imminent surge of patients.
And the state was still in dire need of critical equipment, particularly the ventilators needed to keep critically ill patients alive long enough for them to fight off the virus. The Trump administration promised to send 4,000 from the national stockpile, but Mr. Cuomo said the state needed tens of thousands more.
More than 200 people have already died statewide.
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