New York City health officials said Tuesday that a fifth person has died in the Upper East Side Legionnaires' outbreak, a toll that underlines how far the illness has spread across Manhattan. The city also said 82 cases have now been confirmed, with eight people still hospitalized.
The numbers offer a clearer picture of the outbreak's reach: 53 people have been discharged, 12 others did not need hospitalization, and officials have already identified 34 cooling towers with live bacteria and cleaned and disinfected all of them. Nine cooling towers tested negative, and results from the remaining 140 are expected over the next week.
The death that has drawn the sharpest attention is Robert Goldstein, 88, of the Upper East Side, who died on Friday after spending two weeks in intensive care. His wife, Ida Goldstein, said seeing him attached to machinery and helpless was unbearable, and her attorney said she plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Ron Ketter said the building where Goldstein lived tested negative for Legionella, and he said the owner of the cooling tower that made him sick will be sued.
The city still has not said which tower caused the outbreak. Officials have been identifying buildings with cooling towers that could be the source, but DNA matching is what ultimately ties a tower to a patient: the bacteria from a patient's culture is compared with the Legionella found in a building, and a match can point investigators to the source. That is why the city's cleanup work, while extensive, has not yet answered the most basic question in the case.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin said the administration's communication was not acceptable and said officials learned about a second death from a news account. She also questioned why more than a third of water ecologist positions in the Department of Health are vacant. City Councilmember Lynn Schulman said the department is supposed to have twice as many inspectors as it did last year, but has not hired many of them. For residents on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the next step is not another round of numbers. It is the test results from the remaining towers, because only then can officials narrow the outbreak to the building that actually set it off.
