NYC deaths exceed 4,000, top toll for 9/11 attacks

New York City’s death toll from the coronavirus rose past 4,000 on Tuesday, eclipsing the number killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

However, the crisis seemed to be easing or at least stabilizing, by some measures, in New York and parts of Europe, though health officials warned people not to let their guard down. After 76 days, China finally lifted the lockdown on Wuhan, the city of 11 million where the outbreak began.

COVID-19’s toll in New York City is now more than 1,000 deaths higher than that of the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, which killed 2,753 people in the city and 2,977 overall, when hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.

New York state recorded 731 new coronavirus deaths, its biggest one-day jump yet, for a statewide toll of nearly 5,500, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.

“A lot of pain again today for many New Yorkers,” he said.

But in an encouraging sign, the governor said hospital admissions and the number of those receiving breathing tubes are dropping, indicating that measures taken to force people to keep their distance from one another are succeeding.

And alarming as the one-day increase in deaths might sound, the governor said that’s a “lagging indicator,” reflecting people who had been hospitalized before this week. Over the past several days, in fact, the number of deaths in New York appeared to be leveling off.

“You see that plateauing — that’s because of what we are doing. If we don’t do what we are doing, that is a much different curve,” Cuomo said. “So social distancing is working.”

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, trained his anger at the World Health Organization and threatened to freeze U.S. funding for it, saying the international group had “missed the call” on the pandemic and that it was “very China-centric.”

Across the U.S., the death toll topped 12,000, with about 380,000 confirmed infections. Some of the deadliest hot spots were Detroit, New Orleans and the New York metropolitan area, which includes parts of Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. New Jersey recorded more than 1,200 dead, most of them in the northern counties where many residents commute into New York City.

China, which officially recorded more than 82,000 infections and more than 3,300 deaths, listed no new cases Tuesday, though the communist country’s figures are regarded with suspicion by some public health experts.

In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a month-long state of emergency in Tokyo and six other prefectures. The order will close hostess bars and other night entertainment.

In Spain, new deaths Tuesday rose to 743 and infections climbed by 5,400 after five days of declines, but the increases were believed to reflect a weekend backlog. Authorities said they were confident in the downward trend.

In France, the number of dead passed the bleak milestone of 10,000, climbing to more than 10,300.

Worldwide, about 1.4 million people have been confirmed infected and more than 79,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.