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U.S. deaths due to coronavirus topped 16,400 on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally, although there are signs the outbreak might be nearing a peak. U.S. officials warned Americans to expect alarming numbers of coronavirus deaths this week, even as there was evidence that the number of new infections was flattening in New York state, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. But Americans must resist the temptation to backslide on social distancing now that signs of progress have emerged in the battle against the coronavirus outbreak, U.S. medical and state officials said on Thursday. (Shumaker, 4/9)

“That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don’t even have the words for it,” Cuomo said, describing the outbreak as “a silent explosion that just ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.” “It’s gotten to the point, frankly, that we’re going to bring in additional funeral directors to deal with the number of people who have passed,” he said. (Finnegan, 4/9)

As the death toll continues to rise, the hospitalization rate has dropped, Cuomo said. He explained that health experts have warned from day one that would happen, since the longer people are on ventilators the more likely they are to not come off the machines alive. “I understand the scientific concept, I understand the data, but you're talking about 799 lives,” Cuomo said. (Klar, 4/9)

U.S. confirmed cases rose to more than 466,000, according to Johns Hopkins, though the actual number is likely higher, experts say, due to lack of widespread testing, false negatives and differences in reporting standards. The number of U.S. deaths was 16,686. In comparison, Italy’s death toll was 18,279, the highest of any country, and Spain’s was 15,447, according to Johns Hopkins. As lockdowns across the U.S. continue, the economic picture is darkening. The U.S. Labor Department said Thursday that an additional 6.6 million people submitted applications for unemployment insurance in the week ended April 4, bringing the total number of unemployment applications to 17 million since the beginning of the pandemic. (Strumpf, 4/10)

In the first five days of April, 1,125 people were pronounced dead in their homes or on the street in New York City, more than eight times the deaths recorded during the same period in 2019, according to the Fire Department. Many of these deaths were probably caused by Covid-19, but were not accounted for in the coronavirus tallies given by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his widely watched daily news conferences — statistics that are viewed as key measures of the impact of the outbreak. (Watkins and Rashbaum, 4/10)

The number of patients hospitalized with the coronavirus in New York State rose on Wednesday by only 200 from the previous day, officials said on Thursday, the smallest increase since before the imposition of a statewide lockdown and another promising sign that the government’s measures may have started working. But even as the flow of infected people into emergency rooms appeared to level out, more than 18,000 ailing patients — nearly equal to the capacity of Madison Square Garden — were still packed into New York’s hospitals, and the daily death toll was near 800 for the second day in a row, bringing the state’s total fatalities to more than 7,000. (Feuer, 4/9)

New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island as the city’s daily death rate from the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days. The city has used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral since the 19th century. (Jackson and McDermid, 4/9)

The New York governor signed an order to bring in additional funeral directors as the number of coronavirus cases in the state outpaced all countries except the United States. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive order will make it easier for licensed funeral directors from other states to practice in New York. At least 16,686 people have died of coronavirus in the United States -- nearly half of them in New York. Of the 466,299 total confirmed cases nationwide, about 162,000 are in New York, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. (Karimi, 4/10)

Americans must resist the impulse to ease social-separation measures at the first glimpse of progress now being seen in the coronavirus battle, state government and public health leaders warned on Thursday, as the U.S. death toll surpassed 16,500. (Caspani, 4/9)

New York City could begin to ease some coronavirus restrictions in late May or June — but it will require widespread testing of residents for the virus, which the city does not yet have the ability to do. Even as the death toll continues to surge — reaching 5,150 on Thursday, according to state data, with more than 84,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 — the city has begun to plan for a gradual return to normalcy down the road, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. (Durkin, 4/9)

Brooklyn is dark except for the streetlamps when Carla Brown’s alarm goes off at 5:15 a.m. -- much too early for an average Monday. But with the coronavirus laying siege to New York, today looms as anything but ordinary. Brown runs a meals-on-wheels program for elderly shut-ins and in her embattled city, that label suddenly fits nearly every senior citizen. For two weeks, she’s been working 12- to 14-hour days, taking over routes for sick or missing drivers. Today, she has to find room on the trucks for more than 100 new deliveries. (Geller, 4/8)

They let trains that look too crowded pass by. If they decide to board, they search for emptier cars to ride in. Then they size up fellow passengers before picking the safest spot they can find to sit or stand for commutes sometimes lasting an hour or more. This quiet calculus is being performed daily by people who must keep working during the coronavirus pandemic and say the social distancing required is nearly impossible to practice in the enclosed spaces of New York City’s public transit system. (Hays and Ritzel, 4/10)

The numbers seem catastrophic, overwhelming, beyond a magnitude that the human mind or heart can grasp: What do 60,000 — or even 240,000 — deaths look like? Those are roughly the lower and upper limits of projected fatalities in the U.S. from Covid-19 in models that have been informing U.S. policy. (Begley and Empinado, 4/9)

COVID-19, which is caused by the coronavirus that is spreading across the globe, is now the deadliest disease in the U.S., causing more deaths per day than cancer or heart disease. A new graph published Tuesday by Maria Danilychev, a physician, showed COVID-19 is the cause of 1,970 deaths in the U.S. per day, according to Newsweek. (Deese, 4/9)