Governor Andrew Cuomo has kept New Yorkers’ expectations in check throughout his daily news conferences, noting that it’s possible that glimmers of hope during the COVID-19 outbreak could mean something or next to nothing. He said as much a few days ago, when the state experienced its first drop in deaths since the outbreak hit.

But that positivity was seemingly erased yesterday (April 7), when Cuomo announced that the state had suffered its greatest single-day loss of life so far, with 731 deaths reported (that was up to 5,489 from 4,758). So far, the daily trend has mapped out to this: April 2 (562), April 3 (630), April 4 (594), April 5 (599) and April 6 (731).

This ran counterpoint to a few other data-points: the number of hospitalizations, ICU admissions and daily intubations was down.

New York still has the most COVID-19 cases of any state to date, with more than 130,000 reported (the state with the second most, New Jersey, has 40,000-plus).