April 28, 2020 – Syracuse, NY – Governor Andrew M. Cuomo provides a coronavirus briefing during a press conference in Syracuse. (Mike Groll/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo)
SYRACUSE – Gov. Andrew Cuomo offered more details Tuesday on how regions of New York will be able to reopen.
Cuomo held his daily coronavirus task force briefing in Syracuse as statewide cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19 continued to decline. The governor said deaths from the virus declined to 335 on Monday.
The governor also outlined a 12-point plan for reopening the economy on a regional basis and announced that an advisory board of business and education leaders would help guide that process. He also said that the main focus will be on the rate of transmission in various regions and also hospital capacity.
Businesses will be able to restart in parts of the state where there has been a 14-day decline in cases and COVID-19 patients are taking up fewer than 70-percent of hospital beds. Construction and manufacturing will be first on the list to re-open, but all employers will have to meet safety guidelines.
“Tell us how you are going to incorporate the lessons that we just learned? How are you going to incorporate social-distancing, how do you incorporate fewer people in the space so you reduce density?” Cuomo said.
The Governor says you can’t have “attractive nuisances” that bring in big crowds from outside.
The governor has said some regions of New York could open as soon as May 15 as hospitalizations continue flattening – but noted that Western New York won’t likely be one of them because of the ongoing rise in cases in Buffalo and Erie County.
Cuomo also said that an ideal testing capacity would be 30 people for every 1,000. He added that when it comes to contact tracing, the ideal number is 30 tracers per 100,000 people.
Diagnostic testing also has ramped up across the state while antibody testing continues. More than 7,500 people have been randomly tested across the state in the past two weeks to determine if they carry antibodies for COVID-19, a sign that they had been infected but recovered.
Many of those individuals never had symptoms of the flu-like illness, but the World Health Organization has cautioned that having the antibodies does not necessarily mean a person cannot be re-infected. Some experts fear a second wave of the virus could hit the nation in the fall.
The Governor on Tuesday also confirmed 3,110 additional cases of novel coronavirus, bringing the statewide total to 295,106 confirmed cases.
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