Virus Deaths Mount, but N.Y. Avoids Predicted Surge at Hospitals So Far

“We’ve been seeing much lower rates of some other sorts of emergencies,” said Dr. Andrew Bauerschmidt, a critical care physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. “I was covering stroke calls from the emergency department last week, and the volume was far lower than usual.”

“What the public needs to know is that if you are really sick with something that’s not Covid, you should still call 911 or come to the hospital,” he said. “What we don’t want is for people to not seek medical attention just because they are not having something related to Covid.”

For some of these reasons, or perhaps for all of them, New York’s hospitals have been able to scale back some of their most serious and unusual contingency plans.

Only weeks ago, there were grave concerns that the hospitals, confronting a flood of gasping patients, would run short of lifesaving ventilators. But by Friday, doctors had largely abandoned the experimental practice of ventilator sharing, in which one machine was used to support several patients.

On Friday, Mr. Cuomo still seemed to be balancing optimism with caution and trying to understand how the projections he received had not yet squared with the realities he was seeing.

“How do you come up with an actual curve that is so much different than what those experts predicted?” he asked.

Part of the answer, he reasoned, was that it remained unclear whether the statewide shutdown he ordered last month would continue to be followed and effective.

But even more unclear, he said, was the situation itself.

“In fairness to the experts, nobody has been here before,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Nobody. So, everyone is trying to figure it out the best they can.”

Reporting was contributed by James Glanz, Brian M. Rosenthal and Margot Sanger-Katz.