Exactly one month after the state saw the seven-day average COVID-19 positivity rate hover around 1%, new infection rates across New York stand at nearly 3%, with several contributing factors to blame, said Governor Andrew Cuomo.
"We know the factors that contribute to spread, like COVID fatigue, winter, restaurants, gyms, and living room family spread," Cuomo said in a statement.
"What's going to happen? Will we shut down and will we have more restrictions? What has worked for New York from day one is it's a pure consequence of science."
The seven-day rolling average now stands at 2.81%, according to the latest statistics released Saturday. High COVID-19 infections in the the state's designated orange, and yellow zones are contributing to the spike, specifically in neighboring Westchester County. There, the Village of Port Chester, which is now considered an orange zone, has a seven-day rolling average of 9.62% and has been designated an orange zone.
"What has worked for New York from day one is it's a pure consequence of science," Cuomo added. "There's no political decision making, no ideological decision making. Look at the numbers, and if the numbers are increasing and if they're not slowing, then you have to restrict activity. Our actions today determine our positivity rate tomorrow, so follow the public health law - wear a mask and adhere to gathering limits, and localities need to do the enforcement."
Twenty-four New Yorkers succumbed to the virus on Friday, including two from the Bronx, three from Brooklyn, two from Manhattan, one from Queens, and another from Staten Island.
Cuomo had seen a silver lining in the increase of rates, noting that other parts of the country are seeing higher rates even with the same restrictions as New York is experiencing, such as a curfew for restaurants.
U.S. Reports 184,514 Daily COVID-19 Cases, A New Record
The United States saw 184,514 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University, setting yet another new record for daily cases.
There have now been 10,746,996 cases in the country, per Johns Hopkins' data; the following countries with the highest totals are India (8,773,479), Brazil (5,810,652), and France (1,915,677). France is two weeks into a national lockdown to control its rising number of cases; its daily positivity rate is around 40%, and its daily caseload was 60,000 last week (the country is about a fifth of the U.S.'s population). France has closed bars and restaurants but kept schools and factories open—and has seen its new cases drop due to the lockdown.
Cases are expected to rise as the weather gets colder and people retreat indoors, especially for holidays. In the U.S., where the federal government has ceded managing the pandemic to states, COVID-19-related deaths are rising. According to the NY Times, "More than 1,000 Americans are dying of the coronavirus every day on average, a 50 percent increase in the last month. Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Tennessee and Wisconsin have recorded more deaths over the last seven days than in any other week of the pandemic. Twice this past week, there have been more than 1,400 deaths reported in a single day."
Epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told the Times, "It’s getting bad and it’s potentially going to get a lot worse. The months ahead are looking quite horrifying."
Texas has more than 1 million cases, and health officials in El Paso, Texas have asked FEMA for 10 morgue trucks.
There he was Friday morning, abruptly telling us that the city’s public school buildings may be closing and we should have “an alternative plan for beginning as early as Monday, for whatever will help them get through this month.”
While parents with kids in school buildings work on those “alternative plans” this weekend, parents whose children have stayed remote until now (or just logged off altogether) have until Sunday to decide whether or not to re-enroll them in classrooms for the rest of the year.
“What none of us could have anticipated,” the mayor told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “is that this signup period overlapped with a sudden surge around the country and now hitting us” so that school buildings may close literally the day after parents have to decide whether to put their kids back in them.
Actually, pretty much every parent, teacher and administrator I’ve talked with anticipated it. So I wrote a column two weeks ago anticipating it, and I’ve never been so unhappy to have been right.
The mayor spent the summer touting an “astounding” survey he insisted showed that “75% of our New York City public school parents want to send their kids back to school in September.” We found out in October that was as bogus as it sounded, as the city eventually admitted that just one in four students has shown up for even a single in-person class.
So in part to try and boost in-person enrollment and keep the public system from being further exposed as one of last resort, his schools chancellor changed the rules in the middle of the school year to replace the quarterly re-enrollment windows parents had been promised with a one-time-only deadline this Sunday.
Speaking of shady numbers, we still don’t know how many students are enrolling in this new system, let alone how many will actually show up if and when classrooms are open again, with the mayor saying Friday that it’s “a meaningful number for sure.”
For sure.
At the same time that they’re trying to push kids who don’t necessarily need to be in the classroom back in, the mayor and his schools chancellor are about to boot out the kids who do urgently need to be there. That’s because de Blasio insists that he has to stick by his self-imposed threshold to shut the school buildings if the city’s rolling positivity rate hits 3%, which it appears we’re about to, even though the rate in the schools is 0.17%.
“We set a plan out there. We said to everyone in school communities, ‘believe in this and trust this.’ Everyone came forward. It was in effect a social contract and it worked and people trusted in it and people were safe. And we’ve got to keep that faith because we will be bringing the schools back. And when we bring the schools back, if they do go down, when we bring them back, people are going to have to believe in that situation as well.”
Here’s what I believe: When de Blasio gave his word to public school parents and kids, that was no binding social contract so far as he was concerned.
But when the chronically underprepared mayor, who wasted months counting on federal funding that never came, gave his word to the teachers union to secure their 11th-hour support for reopening school buildings even without that money and as other big cities chose to start the year remotely, that was a binding contract.
And that’s why public pre-Ks in community spaces, whose workers aren’t UFT members, will stay open even if we cross 3%. The mayor says — in one of his pet phrases to explain why his rhetoric yesterday doesn’t apply today — that’s “a different reality,” and that the 3% threshold “is something the city decided; it’s not part of any collective bargaining agreement.”
Sure.
This isn’t public health. This is smoke-filled backroom politics.
De Blasio says he’ll shut down the schools, even as bars and restaurants remain open (closures under the governor’s control, rather than the mayor’s, which is its own can of worms) because “part of maintaining trust is remaining consistent.”
I’d laugh but there’s nothing funny about this. And, by the way, no reason to trust de Blasio when he says parents need to make those “alternative plans” for “this month,” rather than indefinitely.
“This is really hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived through every day and hour of the decision-making process during COVID,” the mayor said, “but the one thing we learned a long time ago with this disease and the ramifications (is that) everything changes all the time.”
So the key, according to de Blasio, is accepting that “everything changes” and trusting his decisions to “remain consistent,” or not, amid “different realities.”
He’s gaslighting us.
Survey Indicates More Transit Workers Had COVID-19 Than MTA Had Determined
More MTA workers were sick with COVID-19 than previously believed, according to a new survey conducted by NYU health researchers.
About 24% of MTA workers who responded to a survey form said they had been infected with COVID-19, according to the pilot study.
That rate is higher than the 14.2% positivity rate for antibodies found by state officials under a preliminary review in May. (For comparison, citywide, about 26% of those tested in the five boroughs had antibodies for the virus, according to city figures.)
Nearly 7.4% of workers under NYC Transit and the MTA Bus have tested positive for the virus throughout the pandemic, or 3,921 out of about 53,000 workers, according to the MTA's figures.
"We had more markers—including whether or not a doctor had told them [they had coronavirus]," NYU epidemiologist Robyn Gershon said. "Some people may not report to [the] MTA, to their occupational health clinics. They may never tell them what their doctor found."
"All these numbers are varying because they're all using different metrics," she added. But the MTA's statistics "just don’t jive with what we know about how many people were on quarantine, how many people were isolated, and even in some respects how many people we know have died."
The mental health implications the pilot study found were particularly concerning for Gershon.
Nine out of 10 transit workers were concerned about getting the virus at work.
About 60% said they could not control worrying and felt anxious, and about 72% were fearful of long-term health impacts from the virus.
About 70% were afraid for their safety—particularly from transit users who have lashed out at workers for asking riders to wear masks.
"Here we have people who come to work everyday, they don't know if the will be attacked either verbally or physically or racially attacked and somehow denigrated just for coming to do their essential worker jobs," Gershon said. "It's compounding."
To conduct the pilot study, researchers sent an anonymous survey link to about 3,000 Transit Workers Union Local 100 members in August. About 700 responded within three weeks, of which 645 were complete.
The survey participants mirrored union demographics, mostly Black and Hispanic middle-aged men, researchers said. Coronavirus has most impacted New Yorkers of color—laying bare racial health disparities that have long existed in NYC.
This individual surveyed a fraction of the NYC Transit workforce, and captured only those who were most motivated to participate," Collins said. "The self-reported nature of this poll would unquestionably also drive the numbers higher.