After seven weeks of near total closure in New York State, the national epicenter of COVID-19 infections, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that some areas may start reopening later this week.
"This is an exciting new phase," said Cuomo in his daily briefing. “We are all looking forward to going back to work. We want to do it intelligently. "
The reopening will start region by region, starting in rural western and northern New York, Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley and Southern Tier, where the infection rate can be monitored, according to a list of measures that the state has asked regions to monitor daily.
In contrast, non-essential businesses in New York, where some 940 people tested positive for the virus on Sunday alone, are expected to remain closed until the end of the month, at least, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday.
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The businesses that will return to work first are construction, manufacturing, collecting all retail sidewalks, as well as agriculture, forestry, and fishing.
In one of the most promising changes for trapped New Yorkers, the governor also allows movie theaters to reopen in all regions of the state.
"Talk back to the future," he joked on Monday. Landscaping and landscaping services can also be resumed across the state, as well as low-risk outdoor activities that were previously prohibited, such as tennis, however, nothing Is still known on golf.
"We start with companies that are more essential and less risky," said Cuomo, adding that it would be up to companies to reconfigure workspaces to comply with the rules of social distancing. Workers must be able to stay six feet away and have access to personal protective equipment, such as face masks. Employers will also have to prevent staff from meeting, perhaps by closing workplace cafes, the governor said.
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The first steps toward reopening come when the number of daily deaths from COVID-19 totaled 161 Sunday, the lowest number since March. New hospitalizations, falling to less than 500 on Sunday, also fell to levels last seen at the start of the crisis in mid-March.
"This is where we started this horrible situation," said Cuomo.
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The next phase of infection mitigation will be left to what the governor calls "regional control rooms", a collection of local leaders and lawmakers who will monitor the data daily ", if not hourly, how many people enter hospitals, ”said Cuomo. The regions are now following seven main measures, all related to hospitalizations, tests, tracing and hospital capacity, as a way to control the virus when part of the economy reopens.
However, Cuomo advised New Yorkers to continue to wear their masks, adding that "people need to understand that it is not that the doors are open".
The governor's order "New York Paused" will remain in effect primarily for seven of the 10 regions of the state, although some are nearing reopening than others.
For example, the rural region in the north of the country has only one obstacle, slightly increasing the tests, before being able to reopen. Downtown New York, which includes the cities of Syracuse and Utica, is also about to reopen; You should also increase the daily tests by about 15%.
Meanwhile, New York is behind schedule in achieving these reopening goals. Daily hospitalizations are still too high and hospitals are still overcrowded. About 24% of the city's intensive care beds are available, below the 30% threshold required to start phase 1 of the reopening.
According to state and local measures, New York should have until June before certain non-essential cases can resume, de Blasio said during his briefing on Monday morning.
"Unless something miraculous happens, we will go in June," de Blasio said, hoping that "real change" could start next month.
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As of Sunday, about 180,000 New Yorkers had tested positive for the coronavirus, more cases confirmed in a single city than most countries had registered; According to the city's health service, 14,753 people died in the city on Sunday, almost 20,000 if COVID's "probable" deaths are taken into account.
The city's ability to reopen in several weeks will largely depend on how residents continue to adhere to social distancing, said de Blasio.
"At any time, if the data has started to change, it delays the moment when any constraint can be relaxed," said de Blasio. "We have to win every day, that’s the end result. And I think the good thing is to think about this conversation; late May, early June is when we can start filling in the blanks. "