(Bloomberg) -- New York State reported a 26% increase in Covid-19-related deaths in the last day, pushing the total above 1,200.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the 253 new coronavirus fatalities on Monday even as he offered some positive news: The rise in confirmed cases is slowing, and the hospital-discharge rate is rising.

“People come into the hospital, they stay for a period of time, a number of days, and then they move on,” Cuomo said.

Even so, there was still no clear pattern in the data. While the doubling of infections has slowed from every two days to every six, the number of people who had to be moved into intensive care with intubation surged in one day.

New York added almost 7,000 confirmed infections overnight, for a total of more than 66,000, Cuomo said. Of those, roughly 9,500 are hospitalized, an increase of more than 1,000, and about 2,350 were in intensive care, up 315.

Cuomo, at a news conference in Manhattan, continued to press Washington for more help, seizing on President Donald Trump’s description of the outbreak as a war.

“This is a war. Let’s act that way,” he said. “And let’s act that way now, and let’s show a commonality and a mutuality and a unity that this country hasn’t seen in decades, because the Lord knows we need it today more than ever before.”

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