Mark Bergin
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday a second confirmed case of coronavirus in New York.
Cuomo said the man who tested positive for COVID-19 is in his 50s, lives in Westchester County, works in Manhattan and had traveled to Miami.
“[Miami] is not a place that we have known that there is any cluster of coronavirus,” Cuomo said.
Florida has two confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Monday: a woman in her 20s in Hillsborough County and a 60-year-old man in Manatee County. Both people remain in isolation and are in stable condition.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that Florida has tested 23 people in the state, with 184 people currently being monitored for potential symptoms and 795 people who have been monitored.
Cuomo said the Westchester County man had not traveled to China or other countries at the center of the outbreak.
“The gentleman had an underlying respiratory illness, and he is ill, and he is hospitalized,” Cuomo said.
In Albany giving an update on the #coronavirus response in New York State. https://t.co/4WWKkm6PQv
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 3, 2020
New York health officials announced Sunday the state’s first case, a 39-year-old health care worker in Manhattan. The New York Times reported the woman remains quarantined in her apartment after visiting Iran, the country with the third-highest amount of confirmed coronavirus cases behind China and South Korea.
“She’s at home. She’s not even hospitalized,” Cuomo said. “And they said, ‘why isn’t she hospitalized?’ Because she has mild symptoms, right?”
As of Tuesday morning, there are more than 92,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus with about 106 in the U.S. So far, 3,129 people have died.
“We said for the past several weeks with this coronavirus situation, you’re going to see continued spreading,” Cuomo said. “And, that spreading is inevitable. I said you’ll start to see community-spread cases where you can’t track it back directly to one place or one visit.”
It’s unclear how long the threat of coronavirus will last because there is not a vaccine to protect against it or medication approved to treat it. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote “the immediate health risk from COVID-19 is considered low” for the general American public.
“We’re all focused on the spread trajectory,” Cuomo said. “The real fact that’s relevant is 80% of the people who get this virus will self resolve. They may not even know that they had the virus. It will be like a flu with mild symptoms. Twenty percent could get ill, and the lethality rate estimated by [the] CDC [is] 1.4%.”
