68-bed field hospital being constructed in New York City's Central Park for coronavirus patients

A 68-bed field hospital will be constructed by Tuesday in the city’s iconic Central Park to help enhance New York City's medical capacity to treat the rapidly increasing coronavirus cases.

Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday that Mount Sinai Hospital, working with a relief organisation named Samaritan's Purse, is creating the 68-bed field hospital in the sprawling Central Park.

"Very important, in Central Park, we're going to be using every place we need to use to help people…So, this is the kind of thing that you will see now as this crisis develops and deepens,” he said that the Central Park Conservancy, the city’s Parks Department and the Mayor's Office “all worked together to get this done” with Mount Sinai and Samaritan's Purse.

The hospital should be operational by Tuesday, he said.

Crews started construction of the long, white medical tents in the park's East Meadow lawn. The field hospital has been specially designed as a respiratory care unit.

New York has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the US and the state passed a grim milestone of recording 1,000 deaths due to the COVID19 pandemic on Sunday.

Deaths due to COVID19 in the state went from 728 to 965 in just one day.

At 237, this was the largest one-day increase in number of deaths since the coronavirus outbreak began. By the end of the day, the death toll in the state had crossed 1,000.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US stood at 142,356 and 2,493 people have died in the country, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Over 7,000 additional coronavirus cases in New York State were recorded, bringing statewide total to 59,513, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

de Blasio said that the number of coronavirus cases in the city alone were 32,308, "a stunning number. And we have lost, and this is so painful, 678 of our fellow New Yorkers.

That means in the last 24 hours from this morning to Saturday morning, we lost 161 more people in this city. People of all walks of life, every kind of New Yorker.”

In an interview to CNN, the Mayor said that New York City only has enough medical supplies to last through the week.

We have enough supplies to get to a week from today with the exception of ventilators. We're going to need at least several hundred more ventilators very quickly," de Blasio said.

"But we have otherwise the supplies to get to next Sunday. We are going to need a reinforcement by Sunday, April 5th in all categories, especially ventilators but in other areas as well. And personnel is becoming more and more the issue.”

Cuomo has said that as the state tries to reduce the spread of the virus, it is also preparing for the worst.

“We are expanding hospital capacity so that the system is not overwhelmed during the "apex" of the virus — the point at which the number of cases is at its high point,” he said, adding that a 1,000 bed temporary hospital is opening at the sprawling Javits convention center Monday, and other temporary hospitals are being built in partnership with Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Three COVID-only facilities are also planned. The USNS Comfort, a Navy hospital ship, will arrive in New York Harbour on Monday, staffed with 1,200 medical professionals.