State is Partnering with Northwell Health to Establish 24 Temporary Testing Sites at Churches in Predominately Minority Communities
Results of State's Diagnostic and Antibody Surveys and Comprehensive Survey of Newly Admitted Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19 Found Communities of Color are Most Impacted by COVID-19
Preliminary Results of Antibody Testing Survey of More Than 1,300 Transit Workers in the NYC Region Show 14.2 Percent Have COVID-19 Antibodies
Confirms 2,715 Additional Coronavirus Cases in New York State - Bringing Statewide Total to 333,122; New Cases in 48 Counties
Governor Cuomo: "Today we're launching a new initiative, again to address exactly this which is to expand access to testing in low-income communities and communities of color. We're partnering with Northwell Health which is the largest health system in New York and they're going to set up 24 additional testing sites at churches in predominantly minority communities."
Cuomo: "This is a different kind of partnership, it's creative, but it's necessary. We're working with both churches individually and association of churches and Northwell. Northwell will provide the testing in churches in lower-income communities and communities of color. The churches will help us outreach to the community to get people to come in and explain why it's important that people come in and get tested when you put the church based sites together with the drive-thru sites, together with the walk-in testing sites, and our sites at public housing, the coverage will be extensive."
Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the launch of a new initiative to expand access to testing in low-income communities and communities of color. The state is partnering with Northwell Health to establish an initial 24 temporary testing sites at churches in predominately minority communities in downstate New York to build on the state's network of downstate testing sites.
The results of the state's diagnostic testing and antibody testing surveys show that low-income and minority communities are suffering the most from COVID-19. The largest statewide antibody testing survey of 15,000 New Yorkers found a greater infection rate in communities of color. Additionally, the state's comprehensive survey of all newly admitted patients hospitalized for COVID-19 found communities of color are most impacted and of the 21 zip codes with the most new COVID-19 hospitalizations, 20 have greater than average black and/or Latino populations. A deeper look into two of the most impacted communities in the survey, in Brooklyn and the Bronx, found communities of color are also lower-income and have a greater percentage of COVID-19 hospitalizations and infections than New York City overall.
Today's testing expansion initiative builds on previous state actions to address inequalities and deliver for those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, the state has partnered with Ready Responders to bring healthcare services, including COVID-19 diagnostic testing, to residents of public housing in New York City and delivered one million cloth masks and 10,000 gallons of hand sanitizer to public housing.
The Governor also announced the preliminary results of the state's antibody testing survey of more than 1,300 transit workers in the New York City region show 14.2 percent have COVID-19 antibodies, compared to 19.9 percent of the general population in New York City.
VIDEO of the Governor's remarks is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here, with ASL interpretation available on YouTube here and in TV quality format here.
AUDIO of today's remarks is available here.
PHOTOS will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Governor Cuomo: Happy Saturday. I know its Saturday because I don't wear a tie on Saturdays. That's why I can tell it is Saturday. People ask me often, "what do you think about our situation?" And I say I think about what I know. What does that mean? Good question. It means in New York what we've been doing is we follow the facts, we follow the data, we follow the science. We focus on what we know and the facts that we know, and we make our decisions based on the facts.
So, every morning we look at facts. Facts today are that the hospitalization rate dropped once again which is very good news. The total hospitalization rate has dropped, the intubation rate has dropped, the number of new cases per day has dropped down to 572, and those are new cases, people who walk in the door of the hospital or people who are in hospital and that test positive, but that is down to 572. You see it hasn't been that level since we started back March 20, March 21. So, that is welcome news. This is not welcome news and this has been heartbreaking every day - 226 deaths. 226 families. And you see how that number has infuriatingly constant. 226 is where we were 5 days ago. So, we would like to see that number dropping at a far faster rate than it has been dropping. And these are 226 people who lost their lives despite everything our health care system could do, right? That's despite the best hospital care, the best nursing, the best doctors, the best equipment. So, they are people who we know we made every effort possible to say. And to the extent there's some peace in that then we're looking for peace wherever we can.
The priority for us today is a dealing with a new issue that has come up which is truly disturbing. And that is the issue on how the COVID virus may affect a young people, very young people. Infants, children in elementary school. We had thought initially and again so many of what the initial information we had turned out not to be correct or turned out to be modified, but we were laboring under the impression that young people were not affected by COVID-19. And that was actually good news, right? The vulnerable populations were older people, people with comorbidity. But one of the few rays of good news was young people weren't affected. We're not so sure that that is the fact anymore. Toddlers, elementary school children, our presenting symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease or toxic shock like syndrome.
Now, these are children who come in who don't present the symptoms that we normally are familiar with with COVID. It's not a respiratory illness, they're not in respiratory distress, and I think that's one of the reasons why this may be getting discovered this far into the process. It's more an inflammation of the blood vessels which can then cause problems with their heart. And there are 73 cases that the Department of Health, Doctor Zucker, is now studying. But the illness has taken the lives of 3 young New Yorkers. So this is new and it's developing. The Department of Health has communicated with the federal officials, the CDC, and the CDC has asked New York to develop national criteria for this so that other states, other hospital systems, can also be checking into this and looking into this. Again, as it turns out, these children happened to have the COVID antibodies or be positive for COVID but those were not the symptoms they showed when they came into the hospital system. So it's still very much a situation that is developing but it is a serious situation.
The Department of Health is also going to be working with the New York Genome Center and Rockefeller University to conduct a genome and RNA sequencing study to see if there is something about these children that may present a definable situation. But rest assured the Department of Health is on top of it. This is the last thing that we need at this time with all that's going on, with all the anxiety we have, now for parents to have to worry about whether or not their youngster was infected. And again, symptoms that don't even see a like the symptoms we associate with COVID-19 so we still have a lot to learn about this fires and every day is another eye opening situation. But rest assured the Department of Health is doing everything that they can do.
I think it's fair to say that the New York State Department of Health is the first one that has been on this situation and again working with the CDC and whatever we find out we not only share with the public but we'll also share with other states and other hospital systems because it is very possible that this has been going on for several weeks and it hasn't been diagnosed as related to COVID. So again we'll keep you updated. I know many people are concerned about as they should be.
A priority that we've been working on throughout has been protecting our frontline workers. We're very aware of the sacrifices that our frontline workers are making so many of us can stay home and stay safe and we want to make sure we're doing everything we can to protect our frontline workers. We've been working with the health care workers, police officers, firefighters, EMT and our transit workers.
In New York we have to keep the public transit system operating. That's how many essential workers, frontline workers get to work. If we got to a situation where we had to close down public transit our hospital system would have suffered. That's how nurses get there. That's how the hospital staff gets there. But our transit workers had to operate that transit system right in the midst of this COVID virus and it never stopped. Bus operators, train operators, station cleaners, so while everyone was trying to get home, trying to stay safe, they were showing up for work every day to make sure that the people who didn't need to go to work or get to work.
We've already conducted the largest antibody test in the country. 15,000 people in that sample. What the antibody test tells you is who has been infected by the virus and then has the antibodies as they recover and that gives us a baseline, that 15,000 survey statewide, to compare other groups against so we know what the average infection rate is in different parts of the state. We can then compare groups to that baseline.
We recently tested the transit workers writ large who have been doing the operations of the transit system. We tested 1,300 so that's that a large size sample. 14 percent was the infection rate among transit workers and that's actually good news. We'd like to see 0 but 14 percent is below the average infection rate for New Yorkers so it means that the transit workers' infection rate is below the norm for New York City.
Within the transit workers it's a little higher with station workers than with bus operators or train conductors, assistant conductors, but all categories are below the New York City norm. The New York City norm was 19.9 so that is that is good news and that also affirms the news we've heard on the other essential workers, frontline workers.
Our health care workers, nurses, doctors were afraid that because they were literally in the emergency rooms that have a higher infection rate but turns out that's not true. 12 percent was the infection rate among those workers - shows that the PPE works when we talk about masks and gloves, et cetera. Not that nurses and doctors in those emergency rooms have fancier equipment or more sophisticated equipment. This is the same type of mask that they wear so it works.
New York Police Department had an infection rate of 10 percent. Fire department and EMT had an infection rate of 17 percent which is the highest of all those groups. We think it's higher because of the EMT workers, but again all below the New York City rate of 19.9 percent.
Another issue that we've been aware of and we're working on is the fact that poor and minority communities are suffering most. The numbers in the state are not nearly as bad as the disparity in many other states, but any disparity is bad. And that's what we have been focusing on here. We did surveys and data that show if you look at the 21 zip codes with the highest number of hospitalizations for covid, 20 of those 21 have greater than average African-American or Latino populations. 20 of 21 of those zip codes. So, there's no doubt that it is a problem and we've mapped this, and you can see exactly where people are coming from as they're walking into hospitals. Part of the new system that we've implemented through this is hospitals report nightly how many cases they have, where they come from, and we can now literally map the number of people and where they're coming from throughout the state. And then when you look into that information, especially in Brooklyn, and in the Bronx, it's clear that the communities are heavier minority population and heavier year low-income population. And when you compare that with the overall city rate, it makes the same point that hospitalization rate, infection rate among the minority community, among lower-income communities is higher than the average.
Unfortunately, in a cruel irony, this is often the case. When you look at disasters, emergencies, I don't care if they're hurricanes, floods, whatever they are. Cruel irony is, the poorest people pay the highest price. I've seen this across the country when I was at HUD. You're there to take care of a flood or a storm, it's the poorer communities that get wiped out first, right. It's the lowland, it's the land that tends to flood that it has the lower value and that's where the lower community, lower-income community tends to locate. We understand why, we understand the health disparities, we understand co-morbidities, but we also understand it's just not right. It is just not right and we have to address it. We saw the same thing in Hurricane Katrina. Those people who are on rooftops were not the wealthy white part of the community. They were predominately minority, they were predominantly low-income, those rooftops very often were public housing. So, this has been the pattern. Flint, Michigan, the people who were drinking water that was poisoned, they were low-income minority populations. If you even go back to 1927 the Great Mississippi Flood. Where does the Mississippi flood? It floods the low lands. It floods lower income communities. We get it, but we have to break the cycle.
New York, we're going right at finding the reasons for the disparity and resolving them. We're doing more testing in low-income communities and communities of color. We're do testing in public housing aggressively. Partnering with Ready Responders which is a group which is doing great work. We've delivered PPE equipment, masks over one million, hand sanitizer, etcetera to public housing.
And today we're launching a new initiative, again to address exactly this which is to expand access to testing in low-income communities and communities of color. We're partnering with Northwell Health which is the largest health system in New York and they're going to set up 24 additional testing sites at churches in predominantly minority communities. This is a different kind of partnership, it's creative, but it's necessary. We're working with both churches individually and association of churches and Northwell. Northwell will provide the testing in churches in lower-income communities and communities of color. The churches will help us outreach to the community to get people to come in and explain why it's important that people come in and get tested. And Northwell will do the testing. We have 24 sites in the New York City area. Some will be opening the week of May 12. Some will be opening the second week of May 19. But you see the coverage when we had the network of churches is very broad, again focused on these communities that we want to reach out to. These 24 new sites will be working with the current network of sites and we've already located many testing sites in minority communities, in low-income communities. But when you put the church based sites together with the drive-thru sites, together with the walk-in testing sites, and our sites at public housing, the coverage will be extensive.
So, the sites will be there. We now need New Yorkers to go get the tests. And I know, I do this with people all day long. "I feel fine, I feel fine." You can feel fine and test positive for COVID. You can - you can be asymptomatic and still have the COVID vipers. "Well I feel fine, what's the difference?" Because you can give it to someone else who will not feel fine. And you can give it to a person who's more vulnerable group, older person, person with an underlying illness, and they could be in serious trouble. So, you want to know if you have it not just for yourself but so you don't communicated to anyone else.
I want to thank our partners for who have been working on this. It's exactly what we want to do. All through this situation we said we don't want to just deal with this virus. We don't just replace what was there - we actually want to make sure that we build back better than before. I understand that this inequity, this disparity exists. I understand it existed for decades, I understand it exists all across the country. Been not New York. Not New York. It shouldn't be here. I want to thank our congressional leaders who are partners in this effort who have been very instrumental in organizing the churches and putting it together with Northwell Health, especially Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez and Congresswoman Yvette Clarke from Brooklyn and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who we're going to hear from in a moment.
I also want to thank the church groups. This is not in the normal line of business for churches to be setting up testing sites for a COVID virus. But I think it is the mission of the churches. They're there to serve the community, they're there to work with the community and meet the needs at that time, and this is the need at that time. So, they've been extraordinarily helpful and cooperative. I especially want to thank Reverend Rivera and Reverend David Brawley for coming up with the idea and then working with the other groups to get them to all participate.
So, we've never done anything like this before, but there are a lot of firsts for all of us in this situation. So I want to thank them very much for what they're doing here. And it's my pleasure to announce that we're being joined with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who is a personal friend of mine, he's a great star for the state of New York. In Washington, his voice, his leadership has been pivotal not just for New York, but for the entire nation. And this is a time when we need the federal government to actually work, and work well and work efficiently and work effectively and work for the people, which show sometimes doesn't happen in Washington. And the people, the police, the firefighters, the people of this state couldn't have a better, more powerful advocate than Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. And the Congressman worked tirelessly to put together this arrangement that we're announcing today with the churches. Again, it is a different type of partnership. But we do what we have to do in New York, and the Congressman saw the need and he reached out to the church groups and brought them together to be where we are today. Congressman, thank you so for everything you do, but especially thank you for what you did to bring these church groups together with Northwell, so we could announce this initiative. Congressman, good to be with you.
Congressman Jeffries: Morning, Governor. Great to be with you and of course, thank you for the tremendous leadership that you have provided to the people of the Empire State and in fact the nation in so many ways during this moment of trial and tribulation. And I just appreciate the fact that your leadership has been evidence-based, data-driven, compassionate and comprehensive, and today's announcement is just another example that. We know that this is an extraordinary pandemic and it requires an extraordinary governmental response at all levels of government, it's all hands on deck at the city, the state and the federal level. And the New York delegation is committed to continuing to work with you to make sure that we can drive to federal resources into New York State to match the level of infection, pain, suffering and death that we've all had to endure. It's an all of government moment and, of course, an all of America moment, as you've encouraged all of us to dig deeper here in New York and throughout.
In that spirit, we know that the houses or worship, the spiritual community, has always been there to help the community get through the storm. These churches have been there through the crack cocaine epidemic to welcome people in while others were rejecting them. Our churches have been there, for instance, to address the high rates of gun violence in our community through gun buyback programs, taking thousands of guns off the streets in their congregation buildings. We also know that these houses of worships, our churches, our spiritual leaders, have been there to partner with the state and with law enforcement organizations like the Brooklyn District Attorney's office to begin again initiatives to address old warrants and summons and citations that can impact the ability of people from communities of color to be able to get all of the opportunities to benefit from our full economy.
So, now at this moment, thanks to their continued engagement and your leadership and willingness to partner, we can address this COVID-19 pandemic with these houses of worship and religious leaders who have the credibility, the authenticity, and the capacity to reach those in the community who need to be tested. At the end of the day, this is not over for any of us until it's over for all of us. As you've indicated, we know that communities of color have been hit particularly hard. We are disproportionately overrepresented amongst our essential frontline workers, live in dense environments, and have historically been under resourced throughout the nation.
This testing initiative will be incredibly essential to ensure we can turn the corner in communities of color such as those that I represent as well as those represented, of course, by great members of the delegation like Nydia Velasquez, Yvette Clarke, Greg Meeks, Adriano Espaillat and so many others.
So thank you, Governor, for your partnership. I thank EBC and the other church coalitions for their initiative and willingness to do what is necessary for us to confront this storm. The scripture says, "Weeping may endure during the long night, but joy will come in the morning." I'm thankful for your leadership, Governor Cuomo, thankful for the partnership with our houses of worship. We're all going to be there with the community until its morning time in the United States of America once again.
Governor Cuomo: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Congressman, so well said. Some people say the churches are closed. No, the churches are open. Churches never close. They're doing their work and they're performing their mission. And Congressman, big week for you. What you're doing in Washington is so important to all of us. This legislation that may be passed by Washington - getting this country the aid they need. Getting this state the aid we need. Pass legislation, did great for small businesses, et cetera. But I know your priority now is to bring funding for working New Yorkers, working Americans. The police, the firefighters, the healthcare that have gotten us through this. Making sure the state governments can function so we can do the reopening.
We couldn't have a better voice, a stronger voice, a more capable voice than yours in our delegation fighting for us and for the nation. You make the case for New York, you're making the case for America because we are just a micro chasm, New York. We did get hardest hit in the number of cases, but you address the need here, you address the need in America. God bless you, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you, Congressman Jeffries.
Congressman Jeffries: Thanks, Governor, God bless you.
Governor Cuomo: Thanks.
That's our congressional delegation, representing all New Yorkers who are tough, smart, united, disciplined, and loving.
Contact the Governor's Press Office
Contact us by phone:
New York City: (212) 681 - 4640