4 MAY 7, 2020 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
Gov. to take four-phased approach to reopening
BY MARK HALLUM
MHALLUM@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@QNS
With 24,891 deaths out of
324,890 cases in New York,
Governor Andrew Cuomo
is looking to a reopening plan that has
four phases instead of the original two
pitched in April as COVID-19 hospitalizations
started declining.
Cuomo said by following the metrics
and taking a nuanced approach,
society could get back to life while
compensating for rate of transmission
of the coronavirus at 1.1 or less.
Any more than that and it is at “outbreak”
levels.
“As long as your rate of transmission
is low and manageable, then
reopen your businesses. And reopen
your businesses in phases so you’re
increasing that activity level while
you’re watching that rate of transmission,”
Cuomo said. “If it gets over 1.1,
stop everything immediately.”
A summarized by Cuomo in earlier
press conferences, the Centers for
Disease Control mandates that before
a region can begin reopening, they
must have 14 days of consecutive decline
in hospitalizations and deaths.
As such, the governor has set May 15
for the end of the PAUSE program.
For regions with very few COVID-19
cases, new total cases cannot exceed
15, and new deaths cannot exceed five
on a three-day rolling basis. Before
regions can begin reopening, they
would also need a testing capacity of
30 for every 1,000 people.
Although the daily death toll has
gone from 299 on May 1 to 226 on Sunday,
Cuomo said this statistic is not on
the decline as fast his administration
would like.
In preparation of any surges in
cases, Cuomo says 30 percent of
hospital and ICU beds have to be
reserved for coronavirus patients
as not to overload the system.
This was announced during
Sunday’s press briefing in which he
said hospitals will now be required
by the state to keep up to 90 days of
personal protective equipment in
stockpile at any given time.
“We have a couple of weeks, but
this what local leaders, what a community
needs in order to reopen
safely and intelligently. It can’t just
be, ‘We want to get out of the house,’”
Cuomo said.
The success of a region’s reopening
can depend on the competence of
elected officials, according to Cuomo,
which can mean the difference between
life and death, he said.
BY MARK HALLUM
MHALLUM@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@QNS
Hospitals in New York now have
up to three months of personal
protective equipment (PPE) on
hand at all times going forward, according
to Governor Andrew Cuomo,
who attributed the severity of the
situation in the northeast to travelers
from Europe.
During a Sunday briefi ng, Cuomo
said that while the United States was
focusing on the coronavirus threat
from China, they should have been
looking to Europe and could have
avoided overloading the hospital
system. The overarching message of
today’s appearance was that the health
system in the United States did not act
fast enough.
“We were looking at China, and the
travel ban on China might have been
helpful, but the horse was already
out of the barn in China. The virus
had left ,” Cuomo said. “Meanwhile we
have European travelers coming here
and they’re bringing the virus which
is now a diff erent strain of the virus
to the East Coast… The timing of our
travel alerts should have been earlier.”
Cuomo said that New York may
have been struck by a diff erent strain
of coronavirus than other parts of the
country or the world in that it was not
a deadlier form, but a more virulent
form. As he conceded that it is not his
area of expertise, he pointed at the
density and the fact that over 180,000
people from Italy had passed through
New York and New Jersey airports
unabated in February, citing data from
the Centers for Disease Control.
Healthcare capacity in the state is
dependent on the 176 private hospitals
which don’t include the 12 in NYC
Health and Hospitals or four others
on Long Island. Organizing the hospitals
to operate as one system in the
early days of the pandemic was a challenge
widely discussed by the Cuomo
administration.
“It was a lot to do on the fl y and we
need to institutionalize these lessons…
This was just a situation that nobody
anticipated, it happened all across the
country,” Cuomo said. “We’re going to
put in a state requirement now that
every hospital needs to have a 90-day
supply — their own stockpile — of all
the equipment they could need at the
rate of usage that we saw with this
COVID virus.”
This circumvents the “mad scramble”
of supply chain breakdowns that took
place from diff erent states and private
parties buying up PPE, according
to Cuomo, which led to prices being
driven up — about $2 billion has been
spent on medical supplies by the state
of New York in 2020 alone.
The seven-state coalition will buy
up to $5 billion of PPE, ventilators and
medical equipment to increase their
“market power” and more competitive
on the international marketplace.
Read more on QNS.com.
Courtesy of Cuomo’s offi ce
Screenshot via Cuomo’s press conference
Cuomo mandates that every hospital in NY has 90
days of personal protective equipment at all times
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