The Trump administration issued a Major Disaster Declaration for the state of New York meaning it is now eligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid as it battles a growing coronavirus crisis. The designation allows New York to access billions of dollars in aid from the Disaster Relief Fun and came shortly before Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the number of coronavirus cases in the state had crossed the 10,000-mark. The state now has conducted 45,437 tests and has a total of 10,356 COVID-19 cases, accounting for more than half of the total in the United States, Cuomo said. In New York City alone, more than 6,000 have tested positive. “The more tests you take, the more positives you find,” he said, a day after issuing a decree calling on New Yorkers to stay inside.

In hospitals around the state, health workers warned that the surge in cases they had been expecting had arrived and ventilators were already starting to run short along with other much needed supplies, including masks. Even as authorities had warned the surge was possible, the speed at which cases increased was still shocking to those on the front lines. “The most striking part is the speed with which it has ramped up,” Ben McVane, an emergency room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens told the New York Times. “It went from a small trickle of patients to a deluge of patients in our departments.”

Officials have said that the number of available hospital beds in the state would need to double to 100,000 and New York is short as many as 25,000 ventilators. State officials are now considering setting up temporary hospitals on college campuses and Cuomo called on businesses this week to help the state deal with the shortage of supplies. “If you can make them, we will give you funding to do it,” he said. “And we will give you funding to get the right equipment, to get the personnel, etc. I’m asking businesses to be creative.” State authorities expect as many as 80 percent of New Yorkers will be infected with COVID-19 at some point.