San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
• New York, Massachusetts introduce more restrictions for visitors.
As the Northeast fights a new surge of coronavirus cases, Massachusetts and New York are revising quarantine rules for travelers.
New York is scrapping its list that required residents of most states to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival in New York and instead, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday, travelers from all non-neighboring states must test negative twice for COVID-19 before they may stop quarantining.
First, they must test negative for COVID-19 within three days before arriving in New York.
Once in New York, they will have to quarantine for three days and then take a second test. If that’s negative, they do not have to continue to quarantine for a total of 14 days.
Travelers who decide not to get tested will be required to quarantine for 14 days, the governor said.
Massachusetts, meanwhile, is reinstating quarantine rules for travelers who visit the state from Connecticut and New Jersey.
Visitors from the two states will be required to quarantine for two weeks or have proof of a negative COVID-19 test, Boston.com reported.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health tweeted that the new rules were to go into effect on Saturday. The two states are removed from the Massachusetts “lower risk state list,” the department tweeted.
Failure to comply with the rules could result in a $500 fine per day, state officials said. The lower risk state list includes all of the other New England states, except Rhode Island. It also includes New York, Washington, California, Hawaii and the District of Columbia.
Elsewhere, Maine’s spike in coronavirus cases continued with the rolling average of new daily cases more than doubling since last week from below 30 per day to more than 67 by Oct. 30.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services also reported an additional death Saturday.
Maine has one of the lowest incidences of the disease in the country, but cases have grown in recent days. The state has reported more than 80 new cases of the virus a day for several days after having not even approached those numbers since May.
The state has had 6,668 cases and 147 deaths, the health department reported.
“We are nearing a phase of exponential growth, if we haven’t entered it already,” Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Nirav Shah tweeted.