As the city’s coronavirus case count neared 10,000 on Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to provide New Yorkers the truth — even difficult information — about the pandemic.
“I think my job is to tell you the things that we’re going to confront, including some things that are difficult to hear, but to brace New Yorkers for the reality,” Hizzoner said.
Since then, his administration has repeatedly refused to provide basic statistics about the capabilities of the city’s health care system as it strains under the crushing weight of COVID-19 pandemic.
Key stats the city won’t share include the number of intensive care beds that city hospitals have for the sickest patients, how close city morgues are to running out of capacity or even what neighborhoods are hardest hit in the outbreak.
“New Yorkers deserve full transparency from our city government at a time like this,” said Councilman Chaim Deutsch, a Brooklyn Democrat.
“This is a pandemic of epic proportions, and we can’t even get a basic breakdown of cases within NYC,” Deutsch said.
A state database last updated in January says NYC’s public and private hospitals have just 1,442 ICU beds. According to reports FEMA puts the number closer to 1,800 — and even those units will be full by Friday.
City tallies show there are 840 patients in ICUs, but officials refuse to say how many critical care beds remain empty.
When asked to confirm the FEMA report Wednesday de Blasio said, “I am not going to get into details that are ever-changing.”
His public hospitals chief, Dr. Mitchell Katz, has said that regular hospital beds can be converted into ICU beds with staff and ventilators, but has declined to say how many beds have been transformed.
The mayor also refused to discuss a Politico article that said some morgues at city hospitals were already full. “The facts, as I have heard them from folks in my administration, are that we have capacity right now,” de Blasio insisted at a Wednesday briefing.
A mobile morgue has already been rolled out at Bellevue.
City Hall only provides a borough-wide breakdown of COVID-19 cases and has resisted giving New Yorkers closer view by neighborhood or zip code even though other places like Nassau County publish detailed maps.
City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said a more detailed breakdown wouldn’t make sense in the city because “we have hotspots all over the place.”
The mayor’s office routinely provides other coronavirus stats that are constantly in flux, including the death toll, positive cases and hospitalization rate. Other city departments also regularly publish information about ever-changing statistics like school attendance counts and crime figures.
Mayoral Press Secretary Freddi Goldstein defended de Blasio’s approach.
“The mayor, Dr. Katz, Dr. Barbot and the rest of our healthcare professionals are working tirelessly to build out the capacity of our hospitals and morgues. That’s what matters, not how many we have of any given thing at this very hour on this very day,” Goldstein says.