Audio & Rush Transcript: Governor Cuomo Announces 27 Additional Establishments Issued State Liquor Authority Violations

Hey, guys. Andrew Cuomo. I'm joined by Melissa DeRosa, Rob Mujica, Jim Malatras and Gareth Rhodes who can assist on any questions. We have more good news today. Today is day 149, and it is a very good day. 57,000 tests yesterday, 608 positive. Infection rate of about 1 percent, which is what we like to see. 11 New Yorkers passed away yesterday, they're in our thoughts and prayers. 642 hospitalized, which is just about where we've been which is where we began on March 18. So, that is all very good news.

New Yorkers have to remember that where we are is a function of what we do - there's a direct cause and effect. The numbers are the numbers that we make happen, and that's why every day in these briefings it's two sides of the coin. The numbers are very good today because we made the numbers very good today. We want to keep the numbers very good, so we have to be diligent about our actions. We have two possible situations that we have to watch, because I don't want to get complacent for myself or for anyone else. The situations we're watching are the national increase and the probability that we will be subject to the national increase at one point. We are a destination, New York. People come here, they come here to do business, they fly through here. If you have the virus going up in other parts of the country, it's almost inevitable that it will have an effect. You can try to minimize the effect, but it will have an effect, and we're still seeing increases across the country.

So, we have our quarantine in order. We have a quarantine enforcement in order. We've notified everyone across the country that if you're coming here you're going to be impacted by the quarantine. So, we're continuing that, but we won't be out of the woods totally on COVID until COVID is contained all across the country, if not globally. You know, you can screen international visitors, but at a minimum you need to get it under control in this country before we can really take a full deep breath. Taking partial deep breaths, but a full deep breath you'd have to know it's in control all across the country.

The second situation that we're watching is lack of compliance, that's particularly among young people, that's particularly among bars and restaurants. That's not unique to New York. Even the President of the United States said young people shouldn't go into packed bars. He said packed bars. But it's a national problem. I've said every day for weeks local governments are not doing what they need to do and they have to step up. The state will be doing everything they can with the most aggressive enforcement mechanism. That continued last night, Sunday night, which is basically a more quiet night than Fridays and Saturdays at the bars and restaurants. But even last night 27 establishments were issued violations. Saturday we had 53, Friday we had 52. But again, Sunday is a more quiet night, but even on a Sunday 27 more violations. This is primarily New York City based, we had people in Nassau and Suffolk, no violations were issued in Nassau and Suffolk, but they were issued in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Queens and Staten Island.

So, I want the establishments to know that we will continue to diligently enforce the law, that's what this is, it's enforcing the law. I understand their position that this closedown has been very tough on them, I understand it, I appreciate it, I respect it, I'm sympathetic with their plight. But, we also have to protect public health and we accomplish nothing if we have to roll back some rules and regulations on bars and restaurants. Most of the bars and restaurants have been great, really have been great. It's always the same - it's a handful of bad actors who ruin it for everyone and it's the bad actors who wind up hurting the good ones. And that's why you see many of the major groups that represent bar owners and restaurants are 100 percent supportive of the enforcement because if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have to worry about the enforcement. But if it's a way to stop the bad apples, great.

I was asked the other day about Kawasaki disease and what we're seeing on that. The number of cases in New York has gone up slightly, we're at about 240 cases now. That was about 15 or so more in the past month. But, New York is not a good gauge for this because the number of cases is coming down across the board, right? We are seeing the numbers increase in other states where the cases are increasing, and what we're seeing is the more you look for it, the more you find it. If you're not aware of it, you don't see it. But, the findings of our State Department of Health here in New York have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and we're proud of that. So, we're getting the word out to the other health departments that they should look for this. And as they're looking for it, they're finding more across the country. But we have not seen it increasing significantly in New York, but then again we haven't seen the cases increasing significantly in New York.

Last point, as we work through this situation, there's a number of levels here, right? It's three-dimensional chess. You want to number one - keep the number low and that's my main priority and we're doing that and we've been successful at that. Number two, you want to look ahead on the horizon - do you see any waves building that could be problematic? Is there a second wave? Could the increase nationwide have a more dramatic effect? Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate. The third level is what have we gone through that we can learn from and start to correct now and that level is actually exciting and positive and we're exploring that all across the board.

We're going to have a significant economic development challenge in the New York City area going forward. How do we start to prepare for that? How do we learn from this? Tele-educate, remote education, telemedicine, and how do we make sure we're better prepared for a health crisis in the future? The country could be doing a number of things, Defense Production Act, there's been a lot of conversation. A state doesn't have a state production act. Maybe they should but they don't. We can get to the same basic point by encouraging the manufacture of necessary medical equipment and supplies in this state so as a security matter we don't go through what we went through last time which is you can't get the PPE, you can't get the gowns, you can't get the masks, you can't get the gloves, you can't get the vials, you can't get the testing agents. That should never happen again.

Empire State Development has identified 20 companies that we will be investing in that will increase their manufacturing capacity of PPE and part of that agreement will be that those companies will make that PPE available to the State of New York for our health care facilities when and if we need it. So we have 20 companies who we are working with now but the Empire State Development is going to renew that request for proposals. I encourage companies across the state to look at that. If you are in a similar manufacturing line and you want to expand or if you're actually making the equipment and you want to expand, we have companies in Manhattan who were old clothing manufacturing businesses that are now making medical gowns, so there's a lot of opportunity and there's also significant necessity.

We can't go through what we went through last time. We can't be scouring the globe and paying exorbitant prices for medical equipment. You know, an N95 mask, before COVID started we paid 70 cents per COVID mask. When the crisis was at the high point, $7 per COVID mask. So it's not just a necessity. It's also an economic reality that the price gouging happens and we don't want to be subject to either.