Mayor Bill de Blasio | AP Photo De Blasio cites potential good news amid otherwise daunting picture

The number of gravely ill coronavirus patients showing up at city hospitals is finally showing signs of leveling off, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday — but he acknowledged the official death toll may far understate the number of New Yorkers who have already died from the virus.

“In the last couple of days, something is starting to change. We don’t know if it will be sustained, but it is meaningful now,” de Blasio told reporters.


The mayor cautioned that despite some hopeful signs, it was too early to say the crisis had begun to turn a corner in the city, the national epicenter of the pandemic. “No one should let down their guard,” he said. “It is way too early to draw any definite conclusions.”

After weeks of increasing, the number of ventilators in use stayed flat across public hospitals on Monday. There are about 830 patients intubated in those facilities.

“The number of people showing up in our hospitals who need a ventilators, that situation has improved a bit in recent days,” de Blasio said. “When you go back about two weeks, every day ... we needed more ventilators than the day before. Every single day. For the first time yesterday, we were pretty much breaking even.”

It is unclear if the trend will continue, and it will not change the need for New Yorkers to stay home. “This is testament to the fact that social distancing, shelter in place is clearly having an impact,” de Blasio said. “We’ve got to keep it tight. If people suddenly start loosening up, you’re going to see those numbers shoot right back up.”

The official death toll in the city rose to 3,202 on Tuesday morning, with the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases at 72,324.

But de Blasio acknowledged the true toll is far higher.

As WNYC first reported, people who die at home without being tested for coronavirus are not being tallied in the official count — and 200 people are dying in their homes each day, compared with 20 to 25 during normal times.

“I am assuming the vast majority of those deaths are coronavirus-related,” de Blasio said. “We do want to know the truth about what happened in every death at home, but I think we can say at this point it’s right to assume the vast majority are coronavirus-related, and that makes it even more sobering — the sense of how many people we’re losing.”

The city's health department is not currently including probable coronavirus victims in its counts without a test showing they had the virus, de Blasio confirmed. New Yorkers who are not hospitalized are generally unable to get tested.

“It’s understandable in a crisis that being able to make the confirmation is harder to do with all the resources stretched so thin,” de Blasio said. “I think we’ll, over time, be able to get a clearer picture.”

The mayor also promised to release data this week showing the impact of the coronavirus by race, after repeated calls by elected officials to provide more information.

“This disease is affecting people disproportionately in lower income communities, in communities that have had more health problems historically, and in communities of color,” de Blasio said. “There is a disparity dynamic here. It is real. It is meaningful.”

De Blasio spoke at P.S. 1 in Chinatown, one of over 400 school sites that are now handing out free meals to anyone who needs them.

They initially were open only to school kids, but now any New Yorker can pick up meals. P.S.1 has given out 3,100 meals in the last week, while citywide, 2.6 million meals have been given out in the last three weeks.

“Folks are struggling to make ends meet, running out of money,” de Blasio said. An estimated half million New Yorkers have already lost jobs or will soon be out of work.

Billionaires Debra and Leon Black have also donated $10 million to distribute food and household supplies to the families of hospital workers, the city announced Tuesday.