With New York State’s rate of COVID-19 infection above 4% for the second day in a row, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new emergency hospital rules to prevent the state’s health care system from being overwhelmed Monday. They include calling on retired doctors and nurses to help out, and cancelling elective surgeries in Erie County. And Cuomo says he can’t rule out another statewide economic shutdown if the infection rate continues to rise.Cuomo, likening the COVID-19 pandemic to an ongoing war, says it’s time to shift battle tactics again. He says future decisions to limit economic activity and in person gatherings will be take into account a region’s hospital capacity.
Under new rules, all hospitals in the state will have to immediately boost available bed space by 50% , and emergency field hospitals will prepare to be reactivated. To prevent individual hospitals from being overwhelmed, private hospital systems will be required to move patients between their facilities, and even transfer them to another system, if needed.
“We are not going to live through the nightmare of overwhelmed hospitals again,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo says he’s even more worried about potential staff shortages. He says medical personnel, several months into the pandemic, are already overextended. He says in the spring, the virus was largely concentrated downstate, and it was possible to shift patients and hospital personnel to other regions of the state in order to keep enough beds open. But he says now that the virus is rising all over the state, that won’t be possible. The 30,000 out-of state doctors and nurses who volunteered to assist New Yorkers earlier this year also will not be available, because they’re needed in their own states, where in most cases the virus is climbing at an even faster rate. He’s putting out a call for retired medical professionals to consider coming back to work.
“Every hospital has to identify retired nurses and doctors now,” Cuomo said. “We are already experiencing staff shortages. Staff just gets exhausted after awhile, they’ve had a horrendous year.”
In Erie County, where the virus rate is the highest in the state, at over 7%, elective surgeries will be cancelled. Cuomo says he won’t rule out a total shutdown of all non-essential businesses in a region if it appears that its hospitals are overcapacity.
But the governor says, for now, he’s sticking with the micro cluster approach to controlling the disease. It includes designating yellow, orange and red zones with corresponding restrictions for things like religious gatherings and indoor dining. But there will be new modifications based on the region’s ability to care for hospital patients.
And he says the threshold numbers for declaring those zones, (a 10 day positivity rate of 2.5% for yellow zones, 3% for orange zones, and 4% for red zones, in cities, and slightly higher thresholds in rural areas), are “artificially low”. He predicts the state will soon surpass those limits , as the after effects of small gatherings over Thanksgiving drive the rate of the virus even higher.
"There will be a week to 10-day lag before we see that number come to effect,” Cuomo said.
And he says it’s likely there will be a further spike in mid-January, after the winter holidays conclude.
Cuomo spoke as the statewide positivity rate hit 4.57% on Sunday. 3,532 were in the hospital with COVID-19 and 54 died of the disease.
The governor says unlike the spring, though, every effort will be made to keep the schools open, even in orange and red zones. He says in-person learning for kindergarten through 8th grade students is a priority, and stricter testing protocols will be required. Cuomo says so far, the rate of the virus in schools is lower than the average for the surrounding community, so it’s safer to keep kids learning in the classrooms.
