Third person tests positive for new coronavirus in New York

A man wears a mask on Wall St. near the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., March 3, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

(Reuters) – The number of people ill with the new coronavirus has risen to six in New York state, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.

New York’s Yeshiva University said one of its students had tested positive for COVID-19, and it was canceling all classes on Wednesday at one of its four New York City campuses as a “precautionary step” while it worked with authorities on how to best prepare and keep its students safe.

On Tuesday, officials said a man in his 50s who lives in a New York City suburb and works at a Manhattan law firm tested positive for the virus, the second identified case in the state. Health authorities said one of his children was a student at Yeshiva.

The man has severe pneumonia and is hospitalized, officials said. The patient had not traveled to countries hardest hit in the coronavirus outbreak, which began in China in December and is now present in nearly 80 countries and territories, killing more than 3,000 people.

Of the six cases of people with coronavirus in New York, only one is hospitalized, Cuomo said at a news conference.

The four new cases include three family members of the hospitalized man, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a statement. The fourth was a neighbor, according to media reports.

“There are going to be many, many people who test positive. By definition, the more you test, the more people you will find who test positive,” Cuomo said.

New York wants to get the state’s capacity for testing for the virus to up to 1,000 a day, he said.

“The people who we are most concerned about, who are most vulnerable are senior citizens, people with immune comprised situations. What we’re worried about: nursing home setting, senior care setting. That’s what we’ve seen in other places and that’s where the situation is most problematic.”

At least one school in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City closed on Tuesday. The SAR Academy and SAR High School remained closed on Wednesday, but online classes were taking place, according to a man with a child at the school.

A synagogue in New Rochelle, New York, where the family of the hospitalized man lives said on Tuesday it was halting “all services immediately and for the foreseeable future.”

The latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) listed 108 confirmed and presumed cases in the United States. That tally consists of 60 reported by public health authorities in 12 states plus 48 among people repatriated from abroad, most of them from an outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess cruise liner in Japan.

Nine people have died in the Seattle area, health officials said. Washington state in the Pacific Northwest has the largest concentration of coronavirus cases detected to date in the United States with 27 people infected as of Tuesday.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Laila Kearney and Hilary Russ in New York; writing by Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

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