What you should know
- Beginning Sept. 13, all New York City municipal workers must submit proof of vaccination or weekly COVID-19 test, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday during the press conference.
- However, city health workers from the system NYC Health + Hospitals and the Department of Health and Mental Health will initiate the measure as of August 2. Additionally, 45,000 government workers employed in congregated and residential settings will begin the measure on August 16.
- Also, as of August 2, all municipal employees who are not vaccinated must wear masks in their workplaces. In addition, the mayor said Monday that New York City will launch an app called NYC COVID Safe as an additional tool for vaccination cards.
—
NEW YORK – Beginning Sept. 13, all New York City municipal workers must submit proof of vaccination or weekly COVID-19 test, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during the press conference Monday.
However, the mayor said, two other groups of municipal employees of the city will begin to implement this measure earlier. First, all city health workers in the system NYC Health + Hospitals and the Department of Health and Mental Health will initiate the measure as of August 2. The second group, 45,000 government workers employed in congregated and residential settings, will begin on August 16.
On the other hand, as of August 2, all municipal employees who are not vaccinated must wear masks in their workplaces. In addition, the mayor said Monday that New York City will launch an app called NYC COVID Safe as an additional tool for vaccination cards.
The news comes less than a week after the mayor announced a policy requiring workers at New York City-run hospitals and health clinics to be vaccinated or tested weekly, as the delta variant is generating increases alarming in the count of daily cases.
De Blasio on Friday and Monday urged the city’s private sector companies to institute vaccination requirements for their employees, saying the “limits of a purely voluntary system” have been reached.
“If people want freedom, if people want work, if people want to live again, we have to vaccinate more people and obviously it is time to fulfill the mandates that we can achieve,” he told the WNYC host, Brian Lehrer.
“Any form of mandate helps,” he said.
Positive COVID-19 cases have nearly doubled across New York in the last week as vaccinations decline. The highly transmissible delta variant has been the most dominant COVID-19 variant in New York City and cases have skyrocketed from about a quarter of positive samples tested to nearly 60% in just two weeks, and virtually all the important infection metrics in the city have gotten worse as well.
The increase led to De Blasio’s latest vaccination mandate and he said he would like private hospitals to implement similar policies as well.
Meanwhile, the mayor has repeatedly said that he would not consider reinstating a mandate of indoor mask use for fully vaccinated people, even as other major cities like Los Angeles do so in an effort to slow the rapid spread of the delta variant.
– .
