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De Blasio: New York hospitals have enough ventilators for this week

New York State needs 30,000 ventilators — which cost between $16,000 and $40,000 a piece — to fight the coronavirus outbreak, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo on March 22, 2020. (REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo)

City hospitals are now equipped with 5,500 ventilators, enough to safely treat novel coronavirus patients for the next week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday. 

On Sunday, the mayor estimated that the city would need 200 to 300 ventilators a day to meet demand but now, that number has shrunk to just 100 — a promising sign that the curve might indeed be flattening.

“It’s very early, it’s very preliminary, but that is a striking difference,” said de Blasio during his daily novel coronavirus briefing. On Tuesday, city hospitals received 500 ventilators from the state and has 135 ventilators in reserve, the mayor added. 

“We are not going to say that we can actually predict next week yet,” said the mayor. “But the fact that we have confidence that we can get through this week is definitely a good sign.”

As of Wednesday morning, there are 149,316 cases of the novel coronavirus in New York state with the governor reporting that 779 people died due the virus in the last 24-hours, the highest one-day death count to date.