New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said on Wednesday he thought Americans would be living with the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic for a long time to come.

“I don’t think we get back to normal,” Cuomo said. “I think we get to a new normal.”

He declared it was Americans’ responsibility to ensure the change brought about by the pandemic will be positive rather than negative.

Cuomo also emphasized that all US states need to be better prepared for such crises because “something like this will happen again”.

On Wednesday afternoon Florida issued a statewide stay-at-home order to its residents after days of resisting pressure from health officials and even Washington, as cases in the state surged towards 7,000.

New Jersey is also reaching worrying levels of illness, with the small state coping with 18,000 cases and 267 deaths so far, Cuomo reported in his midday address, which discussed the situation in New York but also saw him expand to give information beyond his borders.

New York state has confirmed 83,712 cases of coronavirus, marking an increase of 7,917 since Tuesday, Cuomo said, and the virus has claimed 1,941 lives in the state, up from 1,550 yesterday. Of those, about 1,000 deaths have occurred from coronavirus in New York City, now the center of the epidemic in the US.

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Cuomo noted many people are looking for answers about when this crisis will end, but he said it was currently impossible to say. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” Cuomo said.

He announced that city-controlled playgrounds in New York City would be closed, which affects not just children playing but community basketball, volleyball and other such activities, because people are not staying apart.

New York authorities rushed to mobilize an army of medical volunteers, as other hotspots flared around the country in places such as New Orleans, Detroit and southern California.

In New York City, which is eerily quiet during a stay-home order by the authorities, bodies of those taken by coronavirus are now being loaded on to refrigerated morgue trucks by overwhelmed hospitals – in some cases in full view of passing motorists.

Cuomo predicted that based on modeling projections, the worst time for deaths in New York will be the end of April and prompting the need for between 75,000 and 110,000 beds for Covid-19 patients and between 25,000 and 37,000 ventilators for extreme cases, depending on how effective stay-home and physical distancing orders are.

By Wednesday midday the US had about 188,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and the death toll was 3,918.

Worldwide, about 900,000 people have been infected and more than 44,000 have died, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University, though the real figures are believed to be much higher because of testing shortages, differences in counting the dead and large numbers of mild cases that have gone unreported.



Healthcare workers who have hit the ground already, many brought in by staffing agencies, have discovered a hospital system becoming overwhelmed. Some patients from New York City have been transferred to Albany.

“I have never seen so many human beings in an ER at one time in my entire life,” said Liz Schaffer, a nurse from St Paul, Minnesota, who had her first shift on Tuesday at Mount Sinai hospital. “Shoulder to shoulder. It is a sight I never thought I would see. Patients are dying every day. Every single day.”

With New York on near lockdown, the normally bustling city streets are so empty that a single siren, to some, is no longer the easily ignored urban background noise.

“After 9/11, I remember we actually wanted to hear the sound of ambulances on our quiet streets because that meant there were survivors, but we didn’t hear those sounds, and it was heartbreaking. Today, I hear an ambulance on my strangely quiet street and my heart breaks, too,” said Meg Gifford, 61, a former Wall Streeter who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

With many city police officers and fire department EMS teams off sick, the city is experiencing a shortage of ambulance drivers and paramedics, as well as law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile Mike Pence compared the United States to Italy in terms of the effects of coronavirus on the two countries.

“We think Italy may be the most comparable area to the United States at this point,” the vice-president told CNN on Wednesday in response to a question about death toll projections. Italy has seen the highest number of coronavirus deaths, already losing more than 12,000 residents to the pandemic.

White House officials said yesterday that up to 240,000 Americans could die of coronavirus even if physical distancing measures are maintained.