Rhode Island door knocks in search of New Yorkers

The Rhode Island National Guard started going door to door Saturday in coastal areas to inform any New Yorkers who may have come to the state that they must selfquarantine for 14 days while Gov. Gina Raimondo expanded the mandatory selfquarantine to anyone visiting the state.

Raimondo also ordered residents to stay at home, with exceptions for getting food, medicines or going to the doctor, and ordered nonessential retail businesses to close Monday until April 13 to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. She also directed realtors and hotel operators to include new requirements that any out-ofstate residents must quarantine for 14 days in their purchase agreements.

State Police set up a checkpoint on Interstate 95 in Hope Valley on Friday where drivers with New York license plates must provide contact information and were told to self-quarantine for two weeks, WPRI.com reported.

If New Yorkers don’t comply, they face fines and jail time, Raimondo said, adding that that’s not the goal.

“I want to be crystal clear about this: If you’re coming to Rhode Island from New York you are ordered into quarantine. The reason for that is because more than half of the cases of coronavirus in America are in New York,“Raimondo said, adding that it’s not meant to be discriminatory.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbot on Thursday joined other states in imposing quarantines on air travelers from the New York area, including New Jersey and Connecticut, and New Orleans, two places where COVID-19 outbreak is more severe. The Republican said travelers who don’t comply with the 14-day quarantine risk jail time, adding that state troopers would conduct visits to make sure people were staying put.

In Rhode Island, which reported its first two deaths from COVID-19 on Saturday, a team of a Westerly police officer and a Guard member were visiting stately and modest coastal homes in the Westerly neighborhood of Watch Hill collecting contact information from New Yorkers and telling them to self-quarantine. They expected to go to about 1,000 homes over a few days.

“This is more of an education tool to make people aware and comply with what we are asking them to do,” said Westerly, R.I., police chief Shawn Lacey. “We are certainly hope it doesn’t get to enforcement action that has to happen.“

Reha Kocatas, a New Yorker who arrived March 22 from the Bahamas to his Rhode Island home, said his wife and two children were visited by a police officer and a national guardsmen. Already under a 14-day quarantine per a state order because he had arrived from outside the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Kocatas said he volunteered information to the authorities including the number of people in the home, when they entered Rhode Island and his and his wife’s date of birth.

But he questioned why it was necessary to send a police officer to his door.

“It seemed like a pretty large waste of resources for something that could have been volunteered through an online form pretty quickly,” he said.