Tennessee, 7 others, could be added to NY quarantine order
Some travelers must isolate upon their arrival
ALBANY, N.Y. – Travelers from eight additional states — including Tennessee — could soon be added to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut’s mandatory quarantine order, which would push the total to 16 states representing nearly half the country’s population.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office intends to analyze each state’s COVID-19 data Monday night and Tuesday morning to determine which states will join the original eight subject to the travel order, which requires travelers from places with high infection rates to isolate for 14 days upon arrival in New York or the two neighboring states.
A data analysis by the USA TODAY Network New York shows eight states were in line to be added to the list as of Sunday night:
• California
• Georgia
• Iowa
Idaho
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Nevada
• Tennessee
That would double the original list of states that qualified when the order was first unveiled last week: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, all of which continue to qualify.
Add it up and New York, New Jersey and Connecticut’s quarantine order could soon apply to 48% of the United States population, barring a drastic change in policy or infection rate.
Cuomo’s office and the New York State Department of Health declined to confirm which states will be added to the list.
“Like virtually all the metrics we use, it will be a rolling average,” said Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s senior adviser and spokesman. “Monday night into Tuesday we’ll run the seven-day averages and then we’ll know for sure.”
What determines which states are on the list?
The quarantine order applies to travelers from any state with a high rate of COVID-19.
There are two ways a state can make the list, both of which are measured on a rolling seven-day average:
1 Having 10% of COVID-19 diagnostic tests come back positive
2 Having at least 10 daily positive tests for every 100,000 residents
Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont first laid out the quarantine order Wednesday. It took effect Thursday.
At the time, Cuomo said states could be added and removed from the order as their COVID-19 rates rise or fall.
“We will update daily what states are above that infection rate,” Cuomo said.
Those updates, however, haven’t been made on a daily basis, despite what Cuomo said.
Instead, there will be a weekly adjustment with the first one coming after Monday’s data is in, according to state Department of Health spokeswoman Jill Montag. An FAQ on the New Jersey Department of Health’s website also says it will update the list of affected states weekly on Monday.
Montag said New York is pulling COVID-19 data from every state’s website and crosschecking it against The COVID
Tracking Project, a volunteer-driven project led by The Atlantic that meticulously tracks state-level coronavirus data and makes it available for download.
Technical glitches spared two states at first
Using The COVID Tracking Project’s curated data, the USA TODAY Network calculated each state’s rolling sevenday average dating back to the early days of the outbreak in March.
State officials appear to have crafted the original list of eight states included in the quarantine order based on the seven-day period that ended June 21.
At the time, six other states — including California — had an average between nine and 10 positive daily cases per 100,000 residents, narrowly missing the cut.
Two states — Louisiana and Mississippi — likely should have been included in the original quarantine order. Instead, they were the beneficiary of technical glitches and were left off.
On June 21, Louisiana’s rolling sevenday average was 9.7 positive cases per 100,000 residents. But that calculation included zero new cases on June 19, when the Louisiana Department of Health removed more than 1,600 duplicate positives, which made the state’s cumulative case total fall that day and threw off the seven-day average.
Now, Louisiana has 19.9 cases per 100,000 residents, fifth most in the country.
Mississippi, meanwhile, showed only 5.4 positive cases per 100,000 residents for the week that ended June 21. That number was clearly suppressed, however. Technical issues had prevented Mississippi state officials from updating their daily case total for the four days prior.
When the five-day backlog of cases was added June 22, Mississippi’s number jumped to 11.9, according to the USA TODAY Network analysis. Since then, it has steadily increased to 25.2 as of Sunday, trailing only Arizona (42.2) and Florida (29.1).
Jon Campbell is a New York state government reporter for the USA TODAY Network.