Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces New COVID-19 Data Hub Website to Expand Public Access, Centralize Information and Increase Transparency

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the launch of a new centralized website for New York State COVID-19 data. This website includes new data as well as a reorganization of previously released data to make it easier for the public to access, read and understand. In addition, more COVID-19 data is now being made available on Health Data NY.

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

AUDIO of today's remarks is available here.

PHOTOS are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

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

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. I want to make a few announcements this morning before we get to our update on COVID and the pandemic. When I was first sworn into office, less than two months ago, one of my highest priorities, I said then and still continue to say, is to restore people's faith in their government. And an important part of that is increasing transparency. Transparency comes in many forms and there are many opportunities for us to establish that we will be the most transparent administration in the history of the State of New York. There are a couple of bills that have come before me that I believe will achieve that end partially, because there's many more facets of this, and I'll be signing legislation that'll be boosting transparency in state and local government.

This is something I know quite a bit about. I spent 14 years as a local government official. We had our Monday meetings, and all of our agendas had to be available to the public. Even before the internet was wildly available, they're available several days before. So at minimum, I believe that every government agency in the State of New York that's subjected to the Open Meetings Law should provide this information, because the best constituents we have are informed constituents. They have a right to know on what's on the agenda. They have a right to contact their elected officials and to share their concerns, and in cases where that information is not available until the last minute or at the meeting, that denies the public what I believe they are rightly entitled to.

So I'm going to sign a bill in a few moments that requires that documents discussed at meetings must be made available to the public upon request or posted on the public body's website at least 24 hours prior to the meeting. And I want to thank the sponsors of this, Senator Anna Kaplan and Assemblymember, Amy Paulin, and the whole idea of the Open Meetings Law is to increase transparency and accessibility, and that's exactly what we're going to do. There's also a more specific bill that was introduced by Senator Comrie and Assemblymember Robert Carroll. And that is related to the MTA.

Everybody who lives in the New York City metropolitan area cares about the MTA and how decisions are made. So I will now be mandating that data be published and easily accessible, downloadable, and can be used by the public. And the MTA will designate a data coordinator and have 180 days to publish as much data as it possibly can and feasible in three years. So we're going to take a backwards, look as well and make sure that data is out there.

So transparency's important. We're going to sign a couple of bills today and then I'll give the update.

[Governor Signs Bills]

Okay. Let's get started with our weekly update. Well, since we're requiring transparency and other levels of government, also starts with our administration. Today I'm also announcing a new data landing page that's live today. Very exciting. And what we've heard over the last few months is that our dashboards appear in different places, they're not easily accessible, and that the residents of this state, as well as the media, ought to be able to go to one common place and access that information with the click. And so we've added our first of new data sets today. There'll be 10 new data sets. So you have the data behind the dashboards. Again, people want to analyze it deeper. I believe they should have this available to them easily. So we'll have the schools daily report card, the nursing home and adult daycare facility fatalities, and again, I want to remind everyone, on our first day we released data that had been previously undisclosed relating to nursing home deaths, and we're going to continue providing all the information as we find it.

And this'll be out there at our new data hub. We'll also be sharing vaccine completion by county, hospitalization by gender and zip code, and information on hospitalizations and beds. And over the next few weeks, we're going to continue adding more data sets behind the dashboards whenever they're available, and we can put them on this site here. So hopefully people will take advantage of this information. Again, it's all about transparency.

We have our daily COVID update as well. Let's get into that. Our percentages, stabilizing. 2.58 percent is our most recent data statewide, and that's our regional positivity. We are in a holding pattern in a sense. That's a good place to be, I believe, rather than heading upwards, but, you've heard me say it every week. I'm going to continue saying it. We are heading into a vulnerable time, and we are not getting complacent. And we are hopeful that this is the last Halloween when parents have to worry about whether their children should go trick or treating, or whether they go to the mall starting in November and December, and their children are with Santa Claus, and they wonder if Santa Claus is vaccinated. We need to get more people vaccinated to drive these numbers down.

We know the answer, the answer is within our reach, and these numbers are still, I believe could be lower. New York City has done an extraordinary job, 1.2 percent. It's evidenced, I say this all the time as I'm walking the streets, or heading to a sports bar to watch a Bills game, people wear their masks, walking the streets, and people are being really smart about it, or they're vaccinated. You had the vaccine to go into many of the facilities and that's what's making the difference. Well done there. We also started adding this other data point because it's not just the positivity rate. It's the rate per hundred thousand. And so you can compare the regions, how well they're doing with respect to that metric as well.

Seem to be flattening the hospitalization numbers. You know, we could say we're approaching the other end of the wave. I still want to see a little bigger dip in our numbers, but again, it's all about capacity. The hospitals have already been through the worst, but they are ready to stand up if we need to. I want to congratulate all the hospitals in the State of New York for taking this so seriously. Working hard to take care of the people who do present themselves with COVID, but also making sure that our numbers stay lower, with compliance with our vaccine mandates.

Speaking of vaccine mandates and updates, we're getting more people vaccinated. We're at 86.1 percent. Remind everybody, we have a deadline coming up. November 1st vaccine requirement is going to be in place for Office of Mental Health psychiatric hospitals, Office of People with Disabilities-certified specialty hospital, our specialty hospitals, their employees, and they all must have at least one vaccine shot by November 1st. So we'll start seeing these numbers head up very soon as well.

Like to see more young people, we'll be talking about the younger grades that we hope will be approved by federal government shortly, but I think we can do a little better there as well. I'm going to continue my weekly call to parents. Protect your kids. You do not want to have your child ending up with COVID and then we'll be talking in a few minutes about the long haul cases and what that looks like. And we don't even know how that affects children in the long-term if they contract COVID as a child. So I'm asking all parents to put the health of their children.

First, take advantage of their 12 to 17 to get them vaccinated as soon as possible. It's easily available. Many schools. We have pop-up clinics. There's countless places where they can be getting this, these shots and they need to do that.

So let's talk about that. We have been having, again, I mentioned last week, conversations with the White House to prepare for the approvals. We're expecting sometime in early November, Pfizer doses for children, ages five to 11, that's 1.5 million children in the State of New York.

And we are also having a call. I have a call late Wednesday night, I believe. I'll be speaking to the New York State chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. I want to tell them directly, from me, how important this is that they make sure that they have the supplies. We'll work with them to have everything they need, and they have additional staffing brought in. I anticipate, as a mom who took my kids to get doctor appointments and well visits and vaccines for many years, that there could be actually a crush of interest in this, which is good. But I want to make sure that the, the doctor's offices where I think the majority of parents will get those vaccines are ready for this.

We're offering our help, I want them to hear the early warning from us there'll be having a lot more interest in this, and are they ready for it? So I don't want to just leave it all to the providers as well. I want to make sure we're talking to pharmacists as well, that they're ready to be able take care of children, urgent care centers, as well as schools. So we have a lot that we're planning for. This is going to be a great opportunity. Again, just relieve some of the stress that parents are feeling about the safety and health of their children. So let's start scheduling people. And again, we're going to monitor how long it takes to get children into these, and we'll be adding backfill support wherever necessary.

Schools, I believe are the answer though. We are aggressively right now, connecting schools to provider partners and other community organizations, outreach, education materials, it's all out there right now. We are getting ready for this. But I want the schools to know that we are here to help we're already in conversation with the school superintendents, letting them know we want this offered in schools, or at least in the immediate vicinity of schools.

We can come up with the forms, we can come up with the parental approval slip, the permission slip that parents may need. We will make this as easy as we can for the schools. So they will step up, particularly, you know, this will be in elementary schools now that they'll be ready to offer those shots, the vaccines in the schools, which I think will be easiest, as well as other places in their community.

So that all is happening right now. And just again to the parents, I'm telling the parents make your appointments now, you don't know, you don't want to hear that the first appointment available is in February when you want your child to have that shot as soon as possible. So I would encourage parents to start making appointments with their pediatricians, knowing that this is going to be coming out early to mid November.

Breakthrough Infections. We had a very high profile case, Colin Powell. And our sympathies go out to his family and thank him for his extraordinary service to our nation. But his story cannot be hijacked by the anti-vaxxers. He had unique circumstances, as many older people have. They have, they're immunocompromised. There are other circumstances that clearly went into his unfortunate death.

And I don't want anyone to say that this is a reason not to get vaccinated because listen to this, how did he get sick in the first place? Someone who wasn't vaccinated gave him the virus. He certainly had to get that from someone else. And that is what happened. And so if we had more people vaccinated, people, even in vulnerable situations wouldn't have contracted COVID that's the whole system we're talking about.

We also have to be protecting each other and realizing that our actions or inaction have consequences that are dire. So are our thoughts and our sympathies go out to him, but we do not want that to be the narrative that people who get vaccinated, look at the percentages. The cases are still very small.

How many people who are fully vaccine who have contracted COVID, but also our hospitalizations are very manageable. They're small. So that's the story that has to be out there.

Booster update. We're going to let people know how many booster shots, we're continuing to go up in our booster shots, we're waiting for more information, from the federal government on how this is all going to work right?

Last week, the FDA recommended a Moderna and J&J booster shots, but we're still waiting for final approval on that. Also yesterday, we heard that they may be talking about getting different doses. We don't know if that's going to be the case, that you can get a different type of vaccine from what you already had, but we'll certainly get that information out the second we have it available.

So we all know that they're working, helping prevent severe illness, preventing hospitalization and death even against the Delta variants. So we want to make sure that people continue to get their booster shots if they're eligible. And again, my hope is very soon that we get the, okay. We make it as easy as possible. I personally think it's a little more effort for someone who had a certain type, with Moderna, J&J, Pfizer, for them to go track down where they can get another dose. Let's make it easy on people, but this'll be up to the experts. We're going to continue to be guided and driven by the experts, who will tell us what is going to be available to the residents, but stay tuned, hoping to have very good information on that as soon as possible.

There's been a lot of coverage of this phenomenon known as a long haul or the long haulers, long COVID. And you know, you have seen some of the headlines most recently, and it's scary. It's scary for people. I know people personally, who contracted COVID very early on, who are still dealing with the effects of this.

And I want people to know, even though we think about 30% of people have long COVID, a couple of things. I want them to know we're going to look out for them, that we want to ensure that they have medical coverage for their conditions. And there's not one easy answer on, on a diagnosis it's complicated, but I feel very strongly that we need to get more information out about this.

Our Department of Health will be hosting a webinar on October 25th to raise awareness among healthcare providers, to make sure that they know the symptoms that have been established thus far and any treatment forms that are out there. We have over 600 providers already signed up for this. So this is good news, but I'm also going to convene an expert panel to determine what steps New York State can take to lead in this effort.

And we want to make sure that we have the funding available for this. Department of NIH in Washington has allocated nationwide a billion dollars for this research. We'll make sure that New York State gets a share of this. And we'll be setting up our own research entities to take steps. We will lead on this initiative. That is what we're going to be announcing in the next couple of weeks, our plan for addressing this because clearly, it is still with us. And there are many new Yorkers still struggling with this, trying to get back to work and take care of their families and get on with life, while dealing with very scary unknown side effects from having contracted COVID many months ago.

So this is something I want New Yorkers to know, that your state is on this, and we'll be making sure that we convene the smartest best researchers, and we may be incentivizing opportunities to continue the research and development in this. All right. Well, I wanted to tell everybody we have two more weeks. If you want to go see a football game, kind of a sore subject for me this morning. Anyhow, there's always next week. It's kind of our slogan, but, it was a great game. Great game. Last night, I had a lot of fun going out with our Lieutenant Governor, bringing out our staffs to kick back a little bit and thank them for their help. Our staffs work extraordinarily hard and let them have a little R&R too, but it was fun to be with people out in a bar in New York. It turns out the person standing next to me, from my hometown, his mother knows my mom. It was fun to be out with everybody. So we love our football games. If we can still continue a few more days, a few more weeks of winning tickets, why not enter this? If you get vaccinated soon, go to our website and you can get Bills, Giants, and Jets gear and tickets and exclusive VIP experiences. So we have had 41 winners so far, and I want to show you a couple of our PSAs that our teams have put forth and to help the overall effort. I want to thank the members of our New York state teams, The Jets, The Giants, and The Bills for stepping up. We saw them here a couple of weeks ago, and they've done a great job in getting the message. About how important it is for people to get vaccinated. So let's watch our PSA.

[PSA Plays]

Governor Hochul: Thank you, Bruce, and I know the Jets had also participated. They did a radio spot for us as well. So we'll take some questions from everybody. And I think we're going to go to Zoom first, but if you want my reflections on the game last night You know, I wish we had held out for the field goal. But I also trust the judgment of the Buffalo Bills and 4 and 2's not bad. And we're going to numbers are going to continue to increase as we have a winning season. So, I'm very excited about that. And my predictions for the super bowl, I do believe the Buffalo Bills will be in the Super Bowl, but that's another topic.