EXPECT MORE

New York City Mayor: Two More People Have Caught Coronavirus, and There Will Be More

Mayor Bill de Blasio warned: “We are going to see more cases like this.”

Two more people in New York City have been infected with the coronavirus in so-called community transmissions, meaning they didn’t catch it while traveling or from other known patients. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the two new cases Thursday morning, only revealing that they are a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s. Both are in intensive care. “Neither patient has a connection to travel nor any of the other local individuals diagnosed with COVID-19,” the mayor wrote on Twitter. “We are going to see more cases like this as community transmission becomes more common. We want New Yorkers to be prepared and vigilant, not alarmed.” De Blasio also called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “urgently” provide the city with more coronavirus testing kits and speed up the approval of any new testing methods developed by private companies. He warned: “Our single greatest challenge is the lack of fast federal action to increase testing capacity—without that, we cannot beat this epidemic back.”