NEW YORK CITY — New York State has more novel coronavirus cases than any nation on the planet.

Gov. Cuomo announced Thursday 159,937 New Yorkers had tested positive and 7,067 lost their lives to COVID-19, pulling the state well beyond any nation on John Hopkins University's tracker. The Empire State has roughly 7,500 more cases than Spain and 20,000 more than Italy, once a the global coronavirus hotspot, Johns Hopkins University data show.

To keep up to date with coronavirus developments in NYC, sign up for Patch's news alerts and newsletter.

New Yorkers makes up one third of the 432,596 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and near half of the 14,696 who have died, according to Johns Hopkins and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

When Mayor Bill de Blasio addressed New Yorkers Thursday to detail his problematic stay-in-place exit strategy, he said the total case count might be much higher than reported because of the scarcity of COVID-19 tests. "It's incredibly challenging and frustrating and difficult," said de Blasio. "Eight million of us have to earn our way out of this."

Both de Blasio and Cuomo were the subject of a scathing New York Times analysis published Wednesday that detailed weeks of delayed response on the city and state level and a catastrophic cost.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former commissioner of the city's Health Department and ex-CDC head, told the Times the estimated death toll might have been reduced by 80 percent if New York had started social distancing two weeks earlier.



"Flu was coming down, and then you saw this new ominous spike," Frieden said. "And it was Covid. And it was spreading widely in New York City before anyone knew it." Coronavirus In NYC: Latest Happenings And Guidance