Cuomo warning

Governor: If virus continues to spread “your business is going to close.”/

Albany If the current rate of COVID -19 infection stays steady, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the state will be forced to once again institute a shutdown in which all nonessential businesses are closed.

“All the numbers across the world are going up; all the numbers across the nation are going up — welcome to the holiday season,” Cuomo said in his Monday briefing. “If we don’t change the trajectory we’re going to go to shut down, and then your business is going to close.”

The statewide positivity rate Monday was 5.66 percent on about 159,000 tests, which works out to 9,000 new cases. Cuomo stressed that hospital capacity remains a concern, and that the state Department of Health expects hospitals around the state to plan proactively to avoid being overwhelmed.

“Don’t wait to get overwhelmed and then call and say, ‘I have people on gurneys in the hallways,’” Cuomo said. “It’s too late.”

The state has enough experience tracking the spread of CO

VID -19 that there should be no surprises about when hospitals experience a surge, Cuomo said. Hospitalizations, and ultimately deaths, are simply a linear function of the positivity rates in the surrounding community: The state can see which ZIP codes are experiencing high infection rates, and from there, the hospitals in the surrounding communities should expect more cases soon thereafter. A region is automatically placed into a “red zone,” which requires a shutdown, if it’s on track within three weeks to reach 90 percent of hospital capacity.

“That’s because we don’t want to be Italy,” Cuomo said, referring to how that nation’s health care system was swamped by the virus.

Hospital systems should work to distribute patients evenly, so that any single hospital isn’t overwhelmed, Cuomo said.

The increased positivity rate in the stat is driven almost completely by “living room spread,” Cuomo said. Based on state contact tracing data, about 70 percent of infections are from such small gatherings in people’s homes, while nearly all other single sources are negligible.

Cuomo offered one of his daughters as an example of the attitude toward small gatherings that the state is dealing with. He said that one told him that she’d be attending a birthday party at a friend’s house with a few others, but they’d be wearing masks and distancing indoors.

“How would that work?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

“I get it, but this is where it spreads,” Cuomo said, adding that even loved ones can spread COVID. “Get a different picture of the holidays in your mind.”

The state’s guidance says that no more than 10 people should gather in a home, while Cuomo said the federal government recommends that people should not gather with those outside their household. Gathering with family this year is “beautiful and romantic and enticing, but it’s also dangerous.”

“It just takes one nephew, one cousin, one uncle, somebody you love, and now you have a problem,” Cuomo said.