Today Was New York’s Deadliest Day Yet in the Fight Against COVID-19 | NBC New York

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he has authorized the National Guard to take ventilators from institutions that don't need them immediately and redistribute them to hospitals that do, as he reported Friday New York had seen its biggest single-day increase in deaths from the virus.

The state has now lost 2,935 people to COVID-19, more than the number who died at the World Trade Center in the 9/11 terror attacks. Nearly 103,000 have been infected, a jump of more than 10,000 cases in 24 hours. The weekly comparison is more jarring: New York's death toll has spiked 400 percent, its cases by almost 130 percent, in the last seven days.

Cuomo's new executive order, which applies to personal protective equipment (PPE) as well as ventilators, comes a day after he said he only had enough of the latter in his stockpile to last six days at the "current burn rate." The trajectory only went up -- daily hospitalizations hit a new record Thursday after declining the previous two days. About a quarter of hospitalized patients are in ICUs. Those people need ventilators, and they stay on them 20 to 30 days, much longer than the typical two-to-three-day use for a non-COVID-19 patient.

There's increasing need -- and less turnover. Cuomo has procured thousands of ventilators in recent weeks but says the market has "collapsed" as states vie for the coveted life-saving machines and the federal stockpile dwindles. He is leveraging creative techniques to stretch supply like co-venting and retrofitting anesthesia machines. It's still not enough.

Cuomo says the facilities that have their ventilators redistributed will get them back; if that doesn't happen for one reason or another, they'll be reimbursed. And if their need eclipses others' at some point in the near future, he'll reallocate again.

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