What you should know
- New 10pm closures for indoor service in bars, restaurants and gyms go into effect in New York on Friday; Governor Andrew Cuomo also imposed a 10-person limit on gatherings inside private homes starting Friday.
- In New York, the progressive positivity rate reached 2.83% on Friday, on the verge of the 3% threshold for school closings; Mayor de Blasio told parents to have a plan starting Monday in case schools change remotely
- The US reached more than 100,000 daily cases Thursday for the ninth consecutive day; It also set a new record in daily cases (nearly 160,000) surpassing the previous record it set just one day earlier.
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NEW YORK – New COVID restrictions go into effect Friday night across New York state imposing limited hours at restaurants and gyms and limiting gatherings in private homes to 10 people, while city schools in New York is on the brink of closure.
In a conference call, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he will meet with five other Northeast governors in pursuit of joint action to curb the spread of the virus.
Similar measures went into effect Thursday in New Jersey, while the Connecticut governor moved to private residential meetings a full week ago.
In New York, bars and restaurants are required to stop indoor service starting at 10 pm, although they can continue to collect food at home on the sidewalk. Gyms must also close by 10 p.m. Also starting Friday: Social gatherings in private homes are limited to 10 people. Those are three “big spreaders” identified by contact tracing in recent weeks, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. They are the first targets of the new restrictions.
If these limitations prove ineffective in curbing the resurgence of COVID in New York, Cuomo cautions that more will be on the table in the near future. It has said it would probably start with stricter capacity limits for indoor services. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said months ago that he would reassess indoor use if the city’s seven-day positivity rate exceeded 2 percent, though he admits it’s up to the governor.
What it aims to meet, however, is the 3 percent threshold that it set for all New York City schools to be remote again over a period of time. That threshold is close.
As of Friday, New York City’s continued positivity rate was 2.83 percent, nearly 9 percent higher than the day before and on track to hit the closing threshold any day of these. It has increased every day this week, reflecting the daily increase in cases since the end of October. If it reaches 3 percent, De Blasio says the city’s schools would move completely remote the next school day. The city’s Department of Education sent a letter to principals Thursday asking them to prepare for that potential reality.
“As a precaution and to keep our school communities safe, I ask all schools to be prepared for a short period of completely remote learning, system-wide,” the letter from Chancellor Richard Carranza read. “And while no decision has been made about a system-wide transition to remote learning, as every great school leader knows, we must be prepared for every scenario.”
Schools have been a bright spot for New York City in its ongoing war against coronavirus. Random tests show a positivity rate of about 0.17 percent, an indication that the in-person learning experiment within the nation’s largest school system has been a success so far amid the pandemic.
De Blasio was asked Thursday if he would raise the closing threshold of 3 percent, given those numbers. Across the state, for example, Cuomo has set a progressive positivity rate threshold of 9 percent for school closings. The mayor, after battling with teacher and principal unions over school safety in person over the summer, says he is sticking to that 3 percent threshold regardless.
“It’s a rule that we put very clearly,” De Blasio said. “If one day we see in the morning that the indicators go out and reach that level, then we will move immediately. The next day, the schools will close.”
“If we reach a closure point, we will assess what we should do to return as quickly as possible,” he added. “At that point, we will look at a variety of options because now we have something that we didn’t have before: evidence of how things would end up working in this environment.”
De Blasio emphasized that closing again was not inevitable, although anyone who sharply focuses on the various core metrics over the past 10 days may feel different.
The latest numbers have been jarring, to say the least. The city’s average daily cases has soared since early November. Last week, it hit 600 for the first time since early June. By Wednesday, it was 817. By Thursday, it hit 870. That daily average number of cases has risen every day since Oct. 30, city data shows. A less measurable sign that the situation has worsened: test centers now see long lines even in the evening hours, which did not happen a month ago.
Across the state, the numbers have skyrocketed, though certainly not in the exponential way they did in March and April. New York has averaged more than 4,800 new cases in the past two days, which is half the number it was seeing at the peak of the crisis, but roughly four times the daily totals it was seeing in early September.
The seven-day continuous positivity rate, which provides a more accurate image over time, is at its highest (2.6 percent) since May 29. That marks a 44 percent increase in the past seven days.
The increases have been most pronounced in neighboring New Jersey, where, meeting with more questions about the impact of the new restrictions on Thursday, a frustrated Governor Phil Murphy responded: “You know what is uncomfortable and annoying? When you die.”
This is not spring, officials say, and the numbers are certainly not there yet. But with new restrictions taking effect in the tri-state area and New York City schools on the brink of closure, anxiety is certainly familiar to millions of people once again feeling concerned about their children and their livelihoods. The numbers will increase; They don’t have to morph into April’s nightmare peaks, but they certainly could, officials say.
Let this latest round of rules, which are much looser than the spring closures, serve as a wake-up call of the utmost urgency, the New Jersey health commissioner pleaded Thursday.
“If we are lax, if we continue on this trajectory, our state will go back to where we were last spring,” said Judy Persichilli. “This is a wake-up call. We need your help.”
New Jersey reported its third consecutive day of more than 3,000 new cases Thursday, marking the first time it reported such high consecutive counts since April. The 3,877 new cases reported Tuesday were not that far from the one-day high of 4,391 that the state reported at its pandemic peak. Wednesday’s report fell to just over 3,000, while Thursday’s report rose again to 3,517.
Hospitalizations are at their highest levels in the tri-state area since June. While treatment is generally much more effective than in April and ventilator use remains much lower for hospitalized patients, hospitalizations are expected to continue to rise among vulnerable populations in the coming weeks. That delay increases in cases. And deaths are delayed in admissions.
Hospitals in our area (and the US) have been stocking up on supplies of PPE for months since the first wave of the virus began to subside, and now they are preparing to have to access those resources. Hospitalizations in the Hackensack Meridien healthcare system have increased six-fold in just two months.
At the current rate of spread, the US is on track to reach 20 million cases by Christmas, according to data from NBC News. That’s almost double his highest total in the world now. No state has been affected by the latest US surge.
The country registered more than 100,000 daily cases on Thursday for the ninth consecutive day. It also set a new record for daily cases, with nearly 160,000 confirmed infections, topping the previous record of 148,000 on Wednesday. California also joined Texas as the only states to have surpassed one million confirmed cases.
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