Bill de Blasio: Okay we have updates for you. First of all what you heard from the Governor earlier I want to emphasize here in the city. Obviously, this is this a new reality of community spread. So the fact is, even compared to a few days ago, we have a very different reality. When we began the week, our focus was on people who had traveled to effected countries overseas and those who had come in contact with people who traveled to those countries. What's happened in just the last few days is the initiation of community spread, meaning that these cases now are coming from within our communities in an untraceable fashion. That's going to lead to a series of changes.
So starting now, I'm going to offer some specific things that are starting to change in our approach. You'll hear more in the coming days. But let me first start with the overall numbers at this hour. At this point, still five confirmed cases of coronavirus, five individuals in New York City. We have an update on testing that will show a big jump in numbers compared to yesterday. This is the beginning of numbers starting to expand rapidly. So we have 47 negative now. That's about double where we were yesterday. And that's good. The number of negative tests continues to be strong. We have 40 outstanding tests at this moment. Now these numbers are very dynamic as new cases are being discovered, but right now that's the pertinent scorecard and we'll keep giving you updates as we get more information.
The community spread means we're going to have to determine some new strategies and it means it's going to be particularly dynamic. As we get more information, we're going to constantly update because sometimes we will learn something and it changes the approach and we want people to understand it in real time. What we have now that we didn't have as well, is our own information. So when we started dealing with this crisis, we were dependent on information from the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and the broader medical literature. Now over these last days, we've started to get direct information from our own disease detectives and they have every day more and more information to work from. And we also are working, of course, very closely with the State Health Department and the cluster in Westchester is crucially providing us a lot of information. We of course, wish there were no cases at all. But when we see more and more cases, we actually learn from them and it helps us to understand how what's going on with this disease and how to address it.
A reminder to everyone, this is a brand new disease. The global medical community is still trying to understand it. There are still things that we just don't understand about this disease and again, it is a disease with no cure at this moment and no vaccine. So it is clear that we will learn by doing, our health professionals will learn by doing and get a better sense of this. We know one thing now from experience for sure, community spread means a greater ease with which this disease can be transmitted because it's just in more places. Even compared to a week ago, the likelihood of being in a place where someone had been infected by coronavirus was less than it is now. It has grown in the last week, so there's a volume issue here. There's just more places where more New Yorkers might come in contact with someone because the disease has been spreading out in the community. Now I remind you over the vast majority of people, they experienced very mild symptoms and have no lasting impact from this disease. There are people who may have it, don't even realize they have it. We've certainly seen that in some of the cases already. One of the children in the Westchester family had almost no manifestation of the disease. But the fact is it has spread substantially.
The other thing, and this is going to be a little graphic, so forgive me, but you will certainly understand what I'm saying. How it transmits from people to people. We've said from the beginning, it is not like the measles and I've asked our health professionals to be really clear and specific about this. Everything we know about this kind of disease, because it is part of a family of diseases is you're never going to have a situation where it becomes an airborne disease. Meaning it hangs in the air like measles does, like some other diseases do and can be contracted hours later after its presence in a room, for example. That is not coronavirus. What it is, is something that transmits through bodily fluids, but not all bodily fluids. So again, forgive the bluntness – a sneeze, a cough, if you spit and remember sometimes people spit inadvertently just talking energetically. That's how it can transmit, but not just that. It actually has to get into your body, which means basically your mouth, your nose, your eyes. Hands can also be the path.
If something's on your hand and you often, all of us have, we're touching our mouth, we're touching our nose, we're touching our eyes. People do it all the time. They don't even realize they're doing it. That's how it gets into you. It cannot just be any place else on your body or any place else in the air. It has to get directly into you. So the point being you kind of need a direct hit because it doesn't just hang in the air. It's also important to know, I’m sure people will have common sense questions. What if someone sneezed on a countertop? The disease doesn't last long, literally minutes and it's gone. I asked earlier, what if someone sneezed into someone's drinking water? It doesn't transmit through anything you ingest. What if someone sneezed on your soup? It does not transmit through something you ingest. It has to have come in mouth, nose, eyes, through directly breathing it in, directly breathing in someone sneeze or cough or spit. Or it gets on your hand, hand there to your body, but really soon thereafter because it doesn't stay alive very long in the open air. So just to make sure we are abundantly clear about what they call transmissibility.
So I'm going to go into some of the specific cases in a moment, but in light of the community spread, here is where we start to give some new guidance. And again, this is not yet invoking emergency powers and I hope we don't get to that point. This is guidance right now. We'll be very explicit day after day with any changes and if we ever get to the point of needing to use emergency powers. So I'm going to separate the guidance into two categories. Folks who are well and folks who have symptoms. And again, the symptoms are the symptoms you would normally associate with a common cold or flu.
If you're well and you don't have any symptoms, it's just go about the basic precautions. Wash your hands, use alcohol based hand sanitizer. Try not to be touching all the parts of your face that allow in the disease. Avoid handshakes. So I'm someone who shakes a lot of hands all day. Our Health Commissioner saying she would really prefer people tap elbows, not do handshakes while we get through this part of it. And be vigilant about symptoms. If you do get symptoms, if you get a fever, if you get a cough, if you get a sore throat, don't assume it's nothing. Assume it's something in this atmosphere.
Again, community spread has caused us to want to up the ante on our guidance to New Yorkers. So in light of that, if you do have the symptoms, if you have a fever, if you have a cough, if you have a runny nose, if you have congestion, stay home. Simple voluntary point, just do the smart thing. Stay home, don't go to work, don't go to school, don't go out on the town, don't go to a restaurant, don't go to a theater, just stay home. If it is the normal kind of sicknesses we have this time of year, as everyone knows over a few days that passes by and then you can go back about your life. If it turns out it's something more serious than obviously we want to get you help, but in the first instance, just a simple symptoms and nothing else. Stay home. Obviously the parents, the same guidance for your kids if your kids are sick, and we've said consistently and it still remains true, this disease again seems to be much more prevalent in the older folks than in kids. But if your kids are sick, just abundance of a caution. Keep them home. Alert your doctor as soon as you're sick. Again, if there's no extenuating circumstances like a travel nexus or other things that – or preexisting conditions, it was just an average healthy person having these kind of diseases we typically have this time of year. That's those kinds of symptoms. Call your doctor, let the doctor know what's going on. Give it a day or two. If you're getting well, that's great. If you're not getting well, we want you in.
We're going to talk about testing and the expansion of testing that has occurred. And the good news is for folks who are going to need testing, we have more capacity. Again, alerting your doctor immediately to everything. I want emphasize this folks, if you have travel history, if people in your family have travel history, that's still pertinent here. Even though the community spread is the new powerful reality we're dealing with, there's still that travel nexus, that's important. Also, preexisting conditions, crucially important – respiratory problems, heart disease, immune system problems. The doctor needs to know exactly what they're dealing with. And in the case of preexisting conditions, that's a case where probably they're going to want you to get tested right away. So as to the testing – we now have substantial new testing that has come online through the private sector. That is changing the numbers rapidly. So we've said in the course this week we could do dozens of tests in a day. As of now that is turning into hundreds of tests a day as we speak. We want to get up to thousands of tests per day capacity. We're on the way there, but what would help us immensely, and this is still where we need help from the federal government. We need the FDA to approve testing that is faster and more efficient than that, which is currently available. They have the capacity to do that. We've obviously made that request. So the number of tests we can perform is getting, those numbers are getting better. But the speed and efficiency of the test is still not what we want it to be. We need the FDA to help us. The faster we can get turnaround on results, the more we can do to address the situation.
Let me do an update on some of the individual cases. So, I talked about this morning, we have a man in Manhattan. And this directly relates to the original Westchester case. The gentleman who works at the law firm in Midtown, lives in New Rochelle. This is a direct nexus to that case via New Rochelle. The man in question is 51 years old. From what we know, no preexisting conditions, lives on the Upper West side, mildly symptomatic at this point and isolated at home. Married, his wife is 47 years old, has three daughters, ages eight, 10 and 11. All are mildly symptomatic. Essentially showing the kind of symptoms associated with a cold. All tested today. We're going to have the results later on. And the disease detectives have interviewed the families – the family members I should say, to clarify any contacts that they need to trace. And obviously we'll have that information ready and then we'll judge accordingly related to the test results.
Another case, which I think has been talked about publicly, and this spans a New York and New Jersey. 32-year-old health care worker, at Hackensack University Medical Center, in isolation, in stable condition. This individual has an apartment in Midtown, Manhattan that is his primary residence and also an apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The health officials in New Jersey have been working with us very closely and obviously with New York State Health officials as well. The disease detectives have done the interview in this case. I'm going to give you some of the information. There's some other pieces we're still confirming. We'll have more for you at the next briefing. He worked on February 29th, seeing patients while symptomatic. But also while wearing a mask and gloves, saw ten patients but then went for care the next day. All patients had been identified and monitored. None are symptomatic. So none of those ten patients are symptomatic at this point. And this has obviously been a number of days since then. So that's a very good sign that so much time has passed. We are tracing any other contacts now. We'll have an update on that tomorrow.
Finally I'll just give you some quick Spanish in a moment, But one more update. The teachers that we talked about previously. So yesterday we talked about a teacher from James Madison High School, Brooklyn tested negative. That was the teacher went on the trip to Italy. 44 kids, and six other staff, still none have any symptoms. And again, we're almost at the two week mark. There were two other teachers who were on their own personal vacations over the winter break. One is a teacher and I will, let me say the most important part first. Both tested both negative. The second and third teachers both tested, both negative. One teaches at PS 369 in Brooklyn. One teaches at PS 130 in Lower Manhattan. So as soon as those teachers, who do not have coronavirus, but have been just generally sick, as soon as they are fully well, they'll all return to the classroom. But none of those teachers have coronavirus.
