3 more states on don’t visit N.Y. list
Three more states, including Joe Biden’s Delaware, were added Wednesday to New York’s growing list of places from which visitors must quarantine to guard against coronavirus.
Delaware along with Kansas and Oklahoma have now been included on the list that includes 19 hard-hit states like California, Texas, Arizona and Florida.
Gov. Cuomo stressed that states are being added to the list based on metrics suggesting that there is a significant spread of the COVID-19 virus.
“New York is taking action to ensure the continued safety of our phased reopening,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Our entire response to this pandemic has been by the numbers, and we’ve set metrics for community spread just as we set metrics for everything.”
Anyone arriving from the states on the list is required to self-quarantine for 14 days, a rule that also applies to New Yorkers returning from visits to those states.
States are added to the list if they have more than 10 people infected with coronavirus per 100,000 residents or a 10% positive test rate. Both benchmarks are computed on a seven-day rolling average.
Biden has been mostly running his Democratic presidential campaign from his home in Wilmington, and has only rarely left Delaware since the pandemic exploded in March.
He would apparently now be subject to New York’s rule if he tried to enter the Empire State at any time until the pandemic eases in his home state.
President Trump has brushed aside similar coronavirus restrictions, saying they don’t apply to him.
The pandemic remains somewhat under control for now in New York, which registered a positive test rate of 1.04% in the past day, Cuomo announced.
There were 834 people hospitalized with coronavirus, a slight uptick from the previous day. Ten people died.
Even though those numbers are minuscule compared with those faced by New York during the darkest days of the pandemic, some experts warn that New Yorkers should not be complacent.
Other countries, particularly in Europe, got their numbers down much lower before they gingerly started to reopen society.
With the pandemic spreading widely in other parts of the country, Cuomo and public health experts fear it is only a matter of time before COVID-19 rebounds in the Empire State.