Police in N.Y.C. Enforcing Social Distancing Rules: Live Updates

The New York City police have begun to enforce social distancing rules.

The New York City police have begun a new series of patrols to ensure that residents are practicing appropriate social distancing, the Police Department said in a statement.

On Sunday, in the span of three hours, the patrols issued at least 50 warnings to restaurants, bars, supermarkets and salons, as well as people crowding in public spaces, the department said.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has banned all nonessential gatherings in the state. The governor also closed all nonessential businesses on Sunday. People have been asked to practice social distancing of at least six feet from each other in public, while businesses and other essential service providers were required to implement rules for social distancing.

A White House official is troubled by the ‘attack rate’ in New York.

The White House’s coronavirus response coordinator offered a grim assessment of the virus’s assault on the New York metropolitan area Monday evening: She said that nearly one in 1,000 people in the region had contracted the virus, an “attack rate” five times that of other areas of the country.

The coordinator, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, said at a White House briefing that the rate of infection showed that the virus must have been spreading for weeks “to have this level of penetrance into the general community.”

She added that 28 percent of tests for the coronavirus in the region were coming up positive, while the rate was less than 8 percent in the rest of the country.

“To all of my friends and colleagues in New York, this is the group that needs to absolutely social distance and self-isolate at this time,” Dr. Birx said.

In epidemiology, the attack rate is the percentage of a population that has a disease. New York State now has an attack rate similar to that of Italy. In New York City itself, the attack rate works out to about one in 700.

There are more than 21,000 cases in New York State.

New York State had a one-day increase of nearly 5,000 cases on Monday, putting the total at 21,689 as of Monday night, with at least 157 deaths. Some 13 percent of people who have tested positive were hospitalized as of Monday, with a quarter of those hospitalized in intensive care. In New York City there have been 13,119 cases.

Other highlights from Monday’s briefings by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio:

• The state has tested more than 78,000 people and can now test 16,000 people a day — up from 1,000 a day last week.

• The federal government is sending 400 ventilators to New York City. “That’s going to make a huge difference,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Our need for ventilators is in the thousands, but we’re going to fight every day to stay ahead of this curve. We’re going to literally be in a race against time.”

• To address the imminent influx of patients, Governor Cuomo said he was issuing an emergency order requiring hospitals to increase capacity by at least 50 percent.

Population density has made New York City the nation’s coronavirus capital.

New York is far more crowded than any other major city in the United States. It has 28,000 residents per square mile, while San Francisco, the next most jammed city, has 17,000, according to data from the Census Bureau.

All of those people, in such a small space, appear to have helped the virus spread rapidly through packed subway trains, busy playgrounds and hivelike apartment buildings, forming ever-widening circles of infection.

“Density is really an enemy in a situation like this,” said Dr. Steven Goodman, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. “With large population centers, where people are interacting with more people all the time, that’s where it’s going to spread the fastest.”

Harvey Weinstein tested positive.

Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film producer who was convicted in February of rape, has contracted the coronavirus in prison, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Weinstein recently tested positive and was being held in isolation at the Wende Correction Facility near Buffalo, according to the two people, who spoke anonymously to discuss a private medical matter.

Mr. Weinstein falls squarely within the category of people for whom the disease could be dangerous. He is 68 and has had a series of recent health problems: He was hospitalized twice for high blood pressure, heart palpitations and chest pain — once after his conviction and once this month after he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Michael Crowley, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Nicole Hong, Jesse McKinley, Andy Newman, Azi Paybarah, Jan Ransom and Brian M. Rosenthal.