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More than 100 new coronavirus cases were confirmed in New York City over the course of Tuesday, with officials expecting an exponential rise in the coming days.

There are currently at least 923 confirmed COVID-19 patients in the city, up from 814 reported cases earlier Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on MSNBC.

“It’s unbelievable how rapidly this crisis is growing right now,” de Blasio said Tuesday night.

The mayor reiterated that residents should prepare for an unprecedented “shelter-in-place” order to contain the coronavirus. The mayor expects as many as 10,000 cases of the disease in the Big Apple by next week.

“I didn’t even know by the time I got to your show there would be 100 more people, but what I said earlier today is this is moving very fast,” de Blasio said. “We should all be very concerned about how we find a way to slow the trajectory of this virus.”

“The idea of shelter in place has to be considered now. It has to be with between in our case the city and state working together,” the mayor added.

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The Pentagon is starting the process of activating Navy hospital ships USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) as part of the Defense Department’s domestic response to the spreading COVID-19 virus, USNI News has learned.

“We’ve already given orders to the Navy… to lean forward in terms of getting them ready to deploy,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told reporters on Tuesday.

The ships will now begin the several days-long process of bringing aboard medical staff and equipment ahead of deploying along the East and West coasts, a defense official confirmed to USNI News on Tuesday afternoon.

Two sources told USNI News that the idea was for the ships to provide relief for coastal hospital systems, with the ships taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus. The Pentagon also has extensive equipment for erecting field hospitals in addition to the hospital ships, but those facilities are optimized for trauma cases, with several beds close together, and not for infectious patients.

“So one of the ways you could use field hospitals, hospital ships or things in between is to take the pressure off of civilian hospitals when it comes to trauma cases, to open up civilian hospital rooms for infectious diseases,” Esper said.