What you should know
- New York City officials issued a new public warning Tuesday advising people at risk to take greater precautions when hospitalizations reach their highest levels across the city since early June; have doubled in 3 weeks
- At the same time, hospitalizations statewide topped 3,700, an alarming volume that had not been seen since May; Governor Cuomo warned that this is just the beginning of a dreaded upturn that may overwhelm the hospital system.
- New Jersey, which has also seen its hospitalizations skyrocket to mid-May levels, reported Tuesday (90) its highest number of daily deaths since May 4.
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Could the tri-state area be ready for another stay-at-home order in search of curbing the increasing spread of COVID infection? Dr. Anthony Fauci says it doesn’t have to come to that, but people must take responsibility for their behavior.
“All of us in the health sector and people in the public health group feel that if we do the really standard things that we recommend all the time … that we can avoid having to resort to a lockdown,” the director of the Institute National Allergy and Infectious Diseases told our sister network NBC 4 New York in a personal interview on Tuesday.
Uniformly adhering to mitigation measures “definitely” has a positive impact on flattening the curves of surges or preventing them altogether, Fauci says. While majority adherence could still bend the curve in all three states, whether the tri-state area can prevent this latest increase is a moot point. It is already underway.
About 1 in 134 New Yorkers tested positive for COVID-19 in November, nearly triple the number in October, and health officials warn that the already dire situation will worsen, especially if those at higher risk of serious complications related to the virus does not limit non-essential activities.
Hospitalizations have risen for weeks in the United States with a seasonal rise in infections, and the dreaded “post-Thanksgiving” effect has yet to really materialize. New York City’s top physician issued a new public health advisory advising at-risk populations and caregivers to limit non-essential activities outside the home, citing hospitalizations doubled in three weeks.
New Jersey has also seen a sharp increase in hospitalizations, which are at their highest levels since mid-May. The state also reported Tuesday (90) its highest number of daily deaths since May 4, a sobering statistic that will likely only increase over the next month, as some hospitalized patients do not recover. The state Department of Health advises residents not to have parties with non-immediate household members for the remainder of the year, as it did before Thanksgiving.
There may be more restrictions in the Garden State due to an expected increase in addition to the increase already underway. Earlier this week, Gov. Phil Murphy announced that he would suspend all indoor youth sports as of Dec. 6 and lower the limit for outdoor gatherings to 25, a reduction of 95 percent in less than a month earlier. of this fall, the next day.
Murphy has said he would like to avoid another massive shutdown for New Jersey, but has left the option on the table. If the situation forces him, he says he will not hesitate to make more serious modifications to the state COVID protocol.
A month ago, Murphy expressed concern that multiple counties in New Jersey were reporting at least 100 new cases of COVID a day. On Tuesday, seven saw at least 300; three of them, Middlesex, Bergen and Essex, saw more than 400.
With about two-thirds of new cases linked to private gatherings in homes, the ability of officials to enforce the law effectively is beginning to falter. Compliance, to varying degrees, has been a problem in the tri-state area. Contact tracing has been a particular challenge in New Jersey, dishonest business owners flaunting the protocol remain a concern for the entire region.
A restaurant in New York City declared itself a self-governing zone last month, refusing to close after Governor Andrew Cuomo called part of Staten Island an orange zone due to its high rate of positivity for the virus. Mac’s Public House’s decision to continue its indoor food and beverage service is indicative of the frustration of small business owners who cannot stay afloat without customers.
But it also poses a public threat, officials say. New York City issued a statement Tuesday saying “there are consequences for endangering your neighbors in a pandemic.” That can come in the form of fines, or even larger-scale restrictions.
“If we don’t get these numbers down soon, of course, there is a real possibility of much bigger restrictions. So we have to do this work individually,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We have the tools to fight.”
Cuomo warned that New York state could revert to “PAUSE,” the measure that allows only essential businesses to remain open and requires 100 percent of the nonessential workforce to stay at home, if the hospital system is shut down. overwhelms. Each of the state’s 10 regions already has hospitals on standby, jeopardizing their ability to redistribute finite resources as needed among hospitals in the northern part of the state.
Hospitalizations statewide are currently at their highest total since late May (3,774 through Tuesday) and both New York City and Long Island fall short of the 30 percent hospital bed availability Cuomo requested. to the regions they held when the state began to emerge from its months-long lockdown this spring.
It has activated new emergency hospital procedures across the state as part of its new five-point winter strategy. Those procedures include ordering hospitals to identify retired doctors and nurses to come back to the front line, confirm a 90-day PPE reserve and increase bed capacity by 50 percent. Elective surgeries will stop in the regions as needed, beginning with Eric County on Friday.
Cuomo cautions that the numbers will continue to rise over the next month. Thanksgiving was the beginning of a period of increased social activity, the governor said: It was not just a day of celebration or an isolated event.
Many health experts agree. They fear the post-Thanksgiving effect could be disastrous, given trends across the country, which have skyrocketed for months regardless of any Christmas threat. Fauci says travel and collective COVID fatigue will fuel a side wave in addition to the current intense surge.
He warned that the next 30 days will be a “precarious risk” period, as people will start buying Christmas gifts in stores and hosting New Year’s Eve parties.
There is hope on the horizon in the form of vaccines. On Tuesday night, an advisory group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities and nursing homes be the first to receive the vaccine once it is implemented. Approximately 24 million Americans are among those highest priority groups.
The vaccines could start rolling out by the end of the year, Fauci told News 4, but they won’t be widely available until sometime in the spring or early summer of 2021. Even the initial late-year shipments won’t arrive in time to halt the spread. Christmas wave.
Almost 37,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in November, the most in any month since the first darkest days of the pandemic. To date, more than 269,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, the highest death toll in the world by far. The tri-state area alone has confirmed nearly 50,000 deaths and likely has thousands upon thousands more deaths attributable to the virus in some way, authorities say.
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