The city of New York has taken a grassy meadow in Central Park and turned it into a makeshift hospital to help with the overflow of coronavirus patients in the city’s hospitals.
Central Park’s East Meadow on the Upper East Side, which is normally an ideal spot for picnics and sunbathing, was converted Sunday into a 68-bed field hospital designed as a respiratory care unit, according to CNN,
The Central Park “unit” is just another space for additional hospital beds like that of the USNS Comfort, which we reported on earlier
“This is like an additional hospital just floated right up to our shores, and now it’s going to help to save lives,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said about the ship’s ability to provide 1,000 additional beds for patients.
As of Monday, 1,218 people have died from coronavirus in New York state, an increase from the 965 deaths on Sunday, according to Cuomo.
In all, about 66,500 people have tested positive for coronavirus, over 9,500 people are currently hospitalized and 2,352 of them are being treated in the intensive care unit, Cuomo added.
The number of new hospitalizations is doubling about every six days, which is actually slower when compared to last week, when new hospitalizations were doubling every two or three days.
“So while the overall number is going up, the rate of doubling is actually down,” Cuomo said.
On Monday, Cuomo asked medical workers in less affected areas to travel to New York to help contain the outbreak.
“If you don’t have a health care crisis in your community, please come help us in New York now,” he said, adding that New York would return the favor down the road.
We reported that federal guidelines to combat coronavirus were recently extended to April 30th.
We’ll keep you posted on the latest.
TSR STAFF: Christina C! @cdelafresh
