Cases soar in FDNY as burden rises
At least 20 in EMS have virus, sources say, amid med call uptick
Nearly 50 FDNY members have tested positive for coronavirus, the department told the Daily News on Monday — a sharp increase from last week’s numbers that comes amid an uptick in citywide 911 medical calls.
The Fire Department said it has 46 COVID-19 positive employees as of Monday, and that total includes firefighters, Emergency Medical Service workers and civilian staff at its Brooklyn headquarters.
While the department declined to give a specific breakdown by bureau, sources said there were likely at least 20 infected in the EMS, which is handling the brunt of all the FDNY’s 911 traffic.
Internal FDNY documents obtained by The News show just how fast coronavirus has thinned the ranks of the front-line responders. As of March 9, the FDNY had only 19 employees quarantined, and only one of them was a known COVID-19 positive case, an EMS member who contracted it while off-duty.
A little over a week later, by last Thursday, the FDNY was tracking 178 staffers, 125 of whom were firefighters and 49 EMS workers. Another four were civilian workers, documents obtained by The
News said.
The FDNY still only had 10 positive coronavirus cases. But by Sunday, the number was up to 25 — and a day later it nearly doubled to 46, according to the FDNY’s latest figures.
At the same time, the 911 call volume started to spike, picking up significantly Friday, when Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo began to talk in earnest of a citywide shutdown.
On March 13, the FDNY completed 4,582 emergency calls, the FDNY said. By last Thursday, it completed nearly 300 more in the same 24-hour period — up to 4,850, the FDNY said.
But the 911 system actually received nearly 6,000 calls on Thursday, sources told The News — the kind of volume that normally occurs only on New Year’s Day, which is traditionally the department’s busiest period.
By 4 p.m. on Monday, 911 had already logged nearly 4,000 calls, the FDNY said.
The strain of being on the front lines during the coronavirus pandemic is particularly acute for the city’s 4,500 EMS workers, who have been operating under state-of-emergency protocols for the better part of two weeks and are already report