Coronavirus Update: Cuomo And Governors Announce Six-State Working Group To Plan Reopening

From CBS New York:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Governors from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Rhode Island announced Monday a new 6-state coalition will work out the timing for reopening the region from the coronavirus-driven shutdown of schools and businesses.

Roughly one month after the first positive cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the United States, the governors announced each state will have a public health official and an economic development official join a working group forming a coordinated regional plan.

According to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the working group is expected to release a final plan “within weeks” that could coordinate with the federal government on mandating gloves and covering, testing requirements and other details.

“Let there be no doubt about it and we’re not out of the woods yet and reopening ourselves back up will be equally challenging beyond the shadow of a doubt,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey.

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“The reality is this virus doesn’t care about state borders, and our response shouldn’t either,” said Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo.

Earlier in the day, numbers for the rate of hospitalizations in New York State – the hardest state hit by the outbreak – coronavirus have leveled out, but people who died due to COVID-19 illness put the state’s toll over the 10,000 mark.

“It appears we have a plateau,” said Cuomo said earlier on Monday, cautiously offering a personal opinion that “the worst is over.”

“Nobody knows for how long because nobody has been here before,” he said.

In New York State, a total of 671 people died on Easter Sunday, raising New York’s toll to 10,056 – a figure Cuomo pointed out was more than triple the total of 2,753 New Yorkers killed during the 9/11 terror attacks.

The hospitalization rates by region have not changed in the past 11 days, meaning earlier fears about Long Island becoming the next explosive hotspot have not come to pass. Cuomo said about 2,000 people per day were going into the hospital, with an equal number leaving.

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“We were worried about the spread from New York City to suburbs Upstate, and we have been very aggressive when we get a little cluster spot that’s acting up, we jump on it,” said Cuomo. “This is like watching a fire going through dry grass with a strong wind and it’s blowing the fire, and a couple of embers wind up on one side of the field and embers start to catch fire and that’s a cluster and you have to run over to those embers and stamp them out right away before they grow.”

Cuomo cautioned the coronavirus outbreak will not be “over” until a vaccine was available, a benchmark the federal government and CDC say remains 12 to 18 months away.

“You look around the world, you see warning signs from countries who have opened,” the governor said. “I want to learn from those other countries, frankly, and I want to make sure we know from our studying and assessment of what’s going on in other countries that what worked, what didn’t work, and let’s learn from those lessons and you can now go back and look at Wuhan province and look at Italy and look at South Korea, and see what they did and see what worked and what didn’t work so let’s learn.”

Read more at CBS New York