New confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York are mostly coming from those who left their homes to buy, exercise or socialize, instead of from essential workers, Governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday.
“That person got infected and went to the hospital or that person got infected and went home and infected the other people at home,” Cuomo said during his daily news conference on the coronavirus outbreak.
State data showed the quantity of recent cases statewide has varied between 2,100 and 2,500 per day. On Saturday, the quantity of recent cases reduced to 2,419, from 2,762 on Friday.
Cuomo said while previous week he had hypothesize that recent cases were coming from essential workers, “that was exactly wrong.
“The infection rate among essential workers is lower than the general population and those new cases are coming predominantly from people who are not working and they are at home,” he said.
The state’s budget director, Robert Mujica, said officials expect to find out plenty more about the genesis of recent cases from contact tracing over the following week.
Cuomo has said that New York was hiring thousands of workers to trace the contacts of individuals who test positive for the coronavirus. Health experts say contact tracing is critical to isolating potentially contagious people in order to limit further outbreaks.
Cuomo said the five regions of the state that were permitted on Friday to resume for business — out of 10 total regions — were required to possess a specific number of tracers proportionate to their inhabitants.
“The tracing operation is tremendously large and challenging,” he said.
New York state, home to both bustling Manhattan and hilly woods and farmland that stretch many miles north to the border of Canada, has been the world epicenter of the pandemic, but rural areas haven’t been nearly as badly impacted as the NYC, the country’s biggest city at roughly 8.4 million people.
Driven by the effect in the NYC, the state has accounted for over one-third of the nearly 80,000 American who have died from COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, as stated by a Reuters tally.
Statewide, the outbreak is ebbing, with coronavirus hospitalizations falling to more than six thousands, over a third of the amount at the height one month ago, according to the state data.
In the five regions where restrictions were relaxed on Friday, in central and upstate the New York, construction and manufacturing work was permitted to continue, and retail businesses offering curbside pickup or in-store pickup for orders placed ahead were permitted to reopen. A broader pause on activity in the NYC elsewhere was expanded until not before May 28.
New York, together with the nearby states of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware, will partly reopen beaches for the Memorial Day holiday weekend on May 23-25, Cuomo said.
Cuomo alerted that with a rise in economic activity, New Yorkers should expect a rise in coronavirus cases.
