Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces Booster Incentive in Partnership with The Christmas Spectacular Starring The Radio City Rockettes

Governor Kathy Hochul today, joined by Radio City Rockettes Maranda and Sarah, announced the start of the Christmas Spectacular Booster Incentive. Five vaccination sites will hand out vouchers to be redeemed for tickets to the Rockettes production to the first 50 individuals to receive their booster shot.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks are available below:

Dr. Bassett, thank you for joining us. Also joined by Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin. He'll be joining us in a few moments as well. Today we are going to be focused on some updates on COVID. Very, very, very good news is that the FDA just said authorized Pfizer boosters for 16 to 17 year olds. Therefore, I encourage everyone, first of all, get the vaccine. But also now that we have a broadening age group for the booster, it's really important that millions of teenagers will now be eligible to get that extra shot. They should. Let's do it before the holidays. Let's get it done.

I also wanted to say, and this is why I have Dr. Bassett here, because there's still a lot of questions about the Omicron variant. And we have right now, 20 confirmed cases in the State of New York. One in Broome County, I spoke to the county executive recently about that situation. New York City has 13, Oneida has two, Suffolk has three and Westchester has one.

But, however, we expect these numbers to continue to rise. And at this point we are prepared to say, what we have is community spread. It is not coming from people who have traveled, it is being spread in the communities. And so we are watching what has happened in other countries where this first originated, it spreads very quickly and we are still monitoring the situation, I'll have the doctor speak about this, but I want everyone to know that we are prepared for this. We are working very hard to make sure we have all the tools at our disposal, as I've mentioned, and at this point I want to make sure that everyone has our updates. I'll talk about them in a couple minutes, but Dr. Bassett, would you please address the variant and also what we know in any information coming out of other sources. So Dr. Mary Bassett.

Dr. Bassett: Thank you, Governor Hochul. As you've just said, we've identified six additional Omicron cases in New York State. So we have a total of 20. They're mostly from the New York metropolitan area, but they come from all over the state. They have come from also the Southern Tier and the Mohawk Valley. As you said, Governor, this is consistent with community spread.

We have over half of states reporting Omicron. It's been reported in nearly 60 countries and we know that in this state, there are more undetected Omicron cases and as there are also in the rest of the country. I do want to stress that the uptick that we're seeing in cases and in hospitalizations reflects the Delta variant. It remains, overwhelmingly, the dominant strain in the United States and, in fact, around the world, and we don't know yet whether Omicron will out-compete Delta.

So, we are still learning. We are lucky in New York State to have the internationally recognized Wadsworth Center Lab, which conducts sequences of COVID-19 virus samples. They ask other labs to submit samples to Wadsworth that have a characteristic PCR pattern, it's called the S drop, that's associated with the Omicron.

And they also sequenced a random sample of other strains of other samples. So this is important because we have reports that not the Omicron sequences contained this characteristic S drop signature. So, we are assuming that this variant is circulating around the country and that enhanced surveillance is appropriate.

There are at least three questions about Omicron, to which we all want answers, which we are too early to answer with certainty. The first one is whether it will prove more transmissible than the Delta variant, whether it will cause more severe disease than the Delta variant and how well our vaccines, which were developed for the original strain, will protect against the Omicron variant.

So, we're going to know more, we're learning more. So far we know from looking at where Omicron is circulating in other countries, that it seems to be highly contagious, that it is no more lethal than the Delta variant and that vaccines continue to offer protection against severe symptoms and hospitalization.

While we are all looking at this Omicron variant, we're also thinking at the department about the broader health impact of COVID and looking at long haul COVID, children's mental health, which, for example, we all know recently has been so adversely affected.

So, we're interested in taking a broad approach to COVID. There are other things for us to be concerned about than the emerging strains as we think about the consequences for this pandemic on the residents of our state. We're working with all levels of government, with federal, state, and local parties. We are particularly happy about this governor. We've worked to establish, re-establish, whatever you want to call it, daily working connections with our colleagues in the New York City Health Department, with whom we are communicating frequently.

I know that the world is weary of COVID. We are all wary of COVID. Fortunately, as new variants emerge, we have more advanced warning than we had when COVID first made it's appearances on our shores, when our federal leadership was looking to the east and New York City was the place that got slammed.

We now know that we have tools and before I turn it back to the governor, and I know, Governor, that this is what you always tell us, but I'm going to add my voice to it. We want people to get fully vaccinated. If you're fully vaccinated, we want you to get a booster. You've heard that we are now expecting soon for the CDC to recommend boosters to the 16 and 17 year olds. The best protection that children have is that every adult around them is fully vaccinated.

Children under five can't get vaccinated, so let's put them in a circle of protection in terms of adult vaccination. Wear a mask; masking indoors is a good idea. Get a flu shot. We're in flu season. Think carefully as we go into the holiday season about crowds, stay home if you're sick.

We simply must use these tools. Our physical and our mental health depend on it. As we prepare for the holidays, I want to encourage everyone to plan around the most vulnerable person in their family unit. If it's a child who's not eligible for vaccination, look at your plans from the perspective of that child. If it's an elderly parent, my mother is 93, look at your holiday plans from the perspective of that person.

I continue to be very hopeful as we face 2022. I'm hopeful, not only for my hometown, New York City, but for the whole state, upstate, too. I can't wait to get back to Albany actually, where I'm living, and I want to urge everyone to remember the vaccine is how we protect ourselves. Masking is how we protect each other. We want everyone to be safe, be smart. We're in this together. Thank you, Governor.

Governor Hochul: Thank you, Dr. Bassett, for embracing the leadership role in which you've been entrusted. There are 20 million New Yorkers looking to you for the guidance to help us navigate through these turbulent waters. So great to have you as a partner and put an exclamation point on every point you made. You see this in the Newsweek article and I just want to remind everybody who's filling up the hospitals; ten times more likely to face hospitalization if you're unvaccinated. And that does not have to be. We understand that.

I did want to give an update. I was on a call this week with the White House, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and the national governors and when I was in Washington and a week or so ago, we had conversations about this and reinforcing that the dominant strain still is Delta. And we are very, very focused on making sure that people have the ability for in-home testing. The federal government has quadrupled the availability for at-home testing, meaning they've approved, I believe it was, 13 and previously have been eight manufacturers of this. So there should be more supplies on the shelves that it continues to drive the point price point down, which is also good news, but that, as I had previously announced, private insurance companies are now required to cover the cost of your test kits. We're trying to alleviate any barriers to people getting those test kits, especially for children. So we're going to continue partnering with the federal government. These updates are very helpful for us. I do want to thank President Biden and his administration for their enlightened leadership as we continue to work through what we anticipate is going to be a very challenging, challenging wintertime.

We were very concerned that we have testing kits here in the State of New York, we've ordered an additional 1 million test kits. They should be coming mid next week. We'll be getting those out to the counties. I want the county health departments to be ready for this. It is our desire that these go into schools, that they work closely with the school districts, particularly in cases where someone tests positive in a classroom. We want children to be able to get back in the classroom, test to return, because as Dr. Bassett mentioned, there are still collateral mental health impacts from the time when children were isolated, learning from home. But it's not any better for them to go to school and had to be sent back because there is a positive case and we want to make sure that we restructure this, and give parents what they need and get these to the schools, to the parents so we can get kids back in school as soon as possible, huge priority of our administration. And these test kits are good for up to six months, which is really important. So we're getting them out to schools, getting into the counties and having a very strong dialogue with our partners in education, as well as in local government.

Let me show you some of the cases. We are looking at 34.6 per 100. There was a time we used to just tell you the percentages and the reason why the percentages used to be one percent in New York city and Buffalo might have been seven or eight percent or higher. The reality is that this is a more accurate representation. When you look at the cases per 100,000. We don't have a good handle on who is getting tested, especially with now the advent of home testing kits. We don't know if someone's testing at home or getting tested at work. So at a time when we used to be able to track all those, we had a better idea of who was actually being tested.

We could put forth a realistic, number that showed the positive cases and in light of how the testing opportunities are more diverse and spread out and not necessarily managed as well, we want to make sure that we're using per a hundred thousand cases. So two weeks ago, we were at 34.6 per a hundred thousand, just so you have context. We're almost 50 now. So literally in two weeks, we've made that major jump. And I want people to see the state as a whole to get, an idea, New York City still being higher than it had been. It did jump. It had been quite, quite a bit lower, just a couple of weeks ago, but, this red is an alarm.

This is an alarm going off as you see what's happening. Not unexpected. Everyone seen the toughest states in America are all in the Northeast, no surprise. It's getting colder. People are staying indoors more. And that was actually foreseeable. We've been talking about that for a while. So, we're not an anomaly, but it is not still a good place to be. Hospitalizations, you know, this is what keeps me up at night. We continue to see an uptick in hospitalizations and this is a trend. You can draw a direct correlation between vaccination rates in an area and the number of hospitalizations. And we know it's the indoors, the colder temperatures, but also the areas where people are more likely to be vaccinated.

And certainly with the booster shot, those are not as high as the areas where people are un-vaccinated therefore this does not have to be, but look at where we were last April in 2021 and how the numbers are spiking up as well. So we want to make sure that we're alerting people. This is not the sky is falling. I just want to make sure that people take this very seriously. So it is that increase in hospitalization results in fewer beds and less access to critical services. And that is, is that is what's happening in at least 32 hospitals right now that we determined, needed additional help. They had to suspend their elective surgery. So here's what we did. We, first of all, to deal with anticipating that there'd be a crisis along these lines, we did sign an executive order to expand the eligible healthcare workforce to allow more people to administer the vaccine, because at one time it was limited. We've expanded to EMTS and others. So we have a larger political can administer vaccinations. We're also allowing out of state healthcare workers, to be an out of country, to be able to come here and are allowing them to practice here in New York State. During this crisis time, allowing EMTs, as I said, midwives, registered nurses, physicians and other one on everyone else to administer the vaccine. Continue to deploy the National Guard. I've been receiving pictures around the state of the National Guard being welcomed into nursing homes. I wasn't sure what people would think about it, but the people are very excited about this. I even said that they need to wear uniforms because it looks a little intimidating and apparently they all feel very secure when they see someone in uniform, walking down the hall. So that's been an interesting dynamic I didn't expect, but I wanted to make sure that we used all of our resources.

The reason they're in nursing homes is as I mentioned, there's a backlog of people who should be discharged from hospitals who cannot go to assisted living or long care programs or nursing homes. So we had to help with the staffing there because we have shortages throughout the entire healthcare system, but we took a proactive approach to help them as well. So our hospital data, as you know, today is the day. We said that elective surgeries would be suspended if any hospital was not able to increase their bed capacity. We gave plenty of notice. We wanted people to make necessary steps, activate their surgeon flex plans. And right now we have, as I mentioned, 32 hospitals affected by that. I want to make sure that people understand two things: One is that we are going to reassess this on January 15th. I don't want to give long term changes in protocol and requirements without an end date, or at least a time that we're going to reassess. So on that date and leading up to that, we'll have a better sense of whether or not we got through this surge, and we don't have the increase in cases we fully expect and how we manage them and how the hospitals are doing and want to be flexible as the hospitals can step up above those threshold of having more than 10% bed capacity. We want to be flexible, we want to be reasonable, and not a have a top-down approach only in this space as well. Hospitals have been through a lot in the last few years.

Also reminding people what's still covered. We want to make sure that people do get preventative and certain diagnostic procedures still taken. So I've listed a number of the illnesses and conditions: cardiac, limb threatening, vascular procedures, dialysis. diagnostic. So you have a whole list there. That's important to get out to people that those are the areas where they do not have to suspend elective surgery. So our Department Of Health keeps working with the local health departments to work closely, to bring elective surgeries back on at the appropriate time. And we expect to get there. Again, a preemptive strike, make sure we have capacity, hospitals already don't have capacity in certain areas. Some had already suspended elective surgeries, but some did not. And we feel that this is the right correction at the.

So we have an increase in people getting vaccinated. We knew nearly 92 percent 18 and older have had at least one shot that is phenomenal and good news to report. We are very concerned initially that the children from ages five to 11 were not getting fully vaccine at the rate we wanted to see, the first wave of kids have now received. Their second dose in many are full fully vaccine.

And these aren't great numbers, but it's going right last, last week, it was 0.5 percent of children in that age group were fully vaccinated. And now it's 5.8 percent, a 5.3 percent jump. That's good, but we have a long way to go there and that's, that's some progress, but I'm very focused on these, these children getting the vaccination. I do want to talk about some areas are doing very well. I want to give a shout out. I mentioned the National Guard earlier. They are running our statewide Albany Crossgates Mall vaccination site, which is right near the hotel I used to stay in all the time. So I know this mall well, they hit a milestone and they've had over 300,000 doses already. And I just want to give them a huge round of applause and shout out from here and thank them for the work that they're doing. It is people like this. And again, Flashback into the past. There were so many people that we praised constantly called them heroes, recognize them. And I just think that a, as many of them are getting exhausted, they've been at this longer than they anticipated.

So, we need to continue to recognize them and honor them and thank them for the extraordinary service that they are continuing to do, including the men and women who are part of our National Guard. They're always there when we need them. We are opening more vaccination sites. We have existing ones already. Here's a list.

We have brand new ones in Allegany, Broome, Clinton, Cortland, Delaware, Erie, Fulton, Suffolk, and Yates. Again, this is in coordination with the local public Health Departments. This is not us telling them they have to have this. This is. These are areas we can bring more resources and these are the places that we're doing it already. So these are bases, also we've identified places that had outreach. We know the vaccination rates are too low and they can continue to increase. I mentioned boosters briefly, but we've had a big increase in boosters. I think the Omicron variant got everybody a little nervous. They started realizing that there are some instances of breakthrough with the original vaccinations. And so we've had nearly a half-million booster doses just this past week, a 50% increase, which is really quite incredible. So we're proud of that. Here's our booster map. You can see the numbers going up all over and let's keep it going all over the state. This is our key out of this schools. Right now only 20% of five-to-11-year-olds are vaccinated. What I referenced before was those who've already been fully vaccinated. We're continuing to gather data from the school districts. We're letting them know we want this to be increased and requiring all schools now to issue a vaccination survey to parents so we can find out what's going on. Tell us where parents are, and if they're not able to access the vaccines, we want to get them in schools as often as possible. Are they going to their children's pediatrician? Are they going to the local pharmacy? We want to know what's going on. Get a better handle on the numbers and work with our local county health departments to target the high need areas that need additional support.

And we're going to be talking about that. I'll be releasing information on that tomorrow. So that's where we're at my friends.