Governor Hochul: "We talked about this variant. We know it's coming. But here's the good news, we're not defenseless. Compared to a year ago we have so much at our disposal. Anyone over age five can get vaccinated. And if you're vaccinated, you can get the booster shot if you're over the age of 18, we are recommending highly that people wear masks indoors."
Hochul: "We are targeted but always have the tools to be able to deploy more widely if necessary. I know this is how we're going to come out of this with a stronger economic recovery, not to have shutdowns where shutdowns are not necessary, not to have unnecessary requirements where they're not needed, but making sure that any area that is showing vulnerabilities and we see a trajectory that is not good that we're deploying the resources intensely in a strategic way to make sure that we're doing everything that we have at our disposal and making sure that we leave no stone unturned in terms of protecting the health of New Yorkers."
Earlier today in New York City, Governor Hochul held a COVID-19 briefing.
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 of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks are available below:
Good afternoon, everyone. I understand technical corrections have been made so we're all set, sorry for the delay in getting started. I hope you all had a magnificent Thanksgiving holiday with your families. It was great to be able to gather in person. My family was fully vaccinated and fully boosted, so I felt very secure with them and it was great to see my father who I hadn't seen in a long time, from Florida.
We've officially begun the holiday season. We know what that looks like. It's an exciting time. It's a happy time, but it's a time of caution for us right now. People will be gathering more indoors, people are traveling, more people are seeing family members they haven't seen in a long time who may or may not be vaccinated.
So we'll be talking about some of those issues in a few minutes. But, right now I wanted to talk about the new variant, which has been dominating the news. We are watching this very closely out of South Africa, watching to see whether or not there is a case here in New York. I said on Friday I fully expected to arrive. We have notification that it has arrived in Ontario, which is literally across the bridge from where I live. I can see Canada from my house and Ontario is right there. And there's a bridge crossing that we want to bring our Canadian friends and they come in with restrictions. They are vaccinated in order to come here. So we hope that as we welcome our neighbors, that they will not be bringing any unwanted guests with them.
But we have to deal with the realities of a highly transmissible, we believe, variant, Omicron variant. And so I wanted to start with that and to let people know, first of all, we are fully monitoring this. We have ways to defend against this. We are not defenseless like we were one year ago and we all know exactly what has to happen. We know that it's an issue that we're grappling with right now.
The world is paying attention to this, so we're monitoring it globally. We're monitoring it here in New York State. I want to talk about an institution that does not get the recognition that it deserves, and that is our globally leading Wadsworth Lab. I went and visited Wadsworth Lab during the heat of the pandemic. These are the individuals who worked literally day and night round the clock, trying to be able to monitor the situation, but also more importantly, conduct the tests, travel, make sure that everyone had what they needed to get through the early days of the pandemic.
They are frontline workers who I want to applaud, 700 members of the Wadsworth family who work unbelievably hard and they're absolutely brilliant. We are so blessed to have the members of the Wadsworth family, part of the New York State family.
So, I wanted to turn over the conversation, first of all, to hear it from the experts. You know from the beginning, I am guided by the experts, I'm guided by the data, I'm guided by the science and there's an individual Dr. Kirsten St. George, who's the Director of Virology at the lab. It's a laboratory there. And I wanted to have her Zoom in for a minute. Give us some of her insights on what we're expecting to see what we know so far. Now let me turn it over to her by Zoom. Dr. St. George, welcome.
Dr. St. George: Thank you very much. And thank you for your kind words and thank you for the invitation to join this morning.
Governor Hochul: Well, we want to have you give an update and we're all waiting with bated breath. Nothing found yet in New York, correct?
Dr. St. George: That is correct. We just checked the international sequence databases, the public sequence databases, just a few minutes ago and still nothing in New York, nothing reported for New York and nothing reported anywhere else in the United States.
Governor Hochul: Okay. Can you just give us an update on what you're expecting and what Wadsworth is doing right now and what steps we're taking to prepare for this?
Dr. St. George: Certainly. So the New York State Department of Health Wadsworth Lab has been testing samples of SARS-CoV-2, since February of 2020, but these tests only detect the presence of the virus. To thoroughly monitor for genetic changes in the virus and attract the introduction of new variants, we need to actually sequence the genetic material of the entire genome of the virus. We call this process simply sequencing, and it's a much longer, more labor intensive process.
And Wadsworth has been sequencing patients' specimens to monitor for circulating strains in New York, since March 2021, the earliest labs in the country to do this. And we do this continually on a subset of positive COVID specimens collected from across the state, a representative sample set.
The results of the sequencing and what it tells us about the strains and variants that are circulating are reported to those public sequence databases that I just mentioned every week, so that the information is available to scientists worldwide. And this open sharing of sequence data is a vital component of the global response effort to the COVID pandemic and we strongly encourage all sequence labs to do the same.
We very recently established a consortium of four labs in New York State to assist with the sequencing so that the surveillance of varying strands could be further expanded beyond what we were currently doing. And since the announcement last week of the emergence of the new variant Omicron, we've done several things here.
We first checked those public databases to confirm that the variant had not been reported anywhere from New York or in the U.S. and, as I mentioned, just rechecked a few moments ago. We also send a notification to all of the laboratories performing COVID PCR essays in New York State, requesting that they immediately notify us of any detection of a positive sample that has specific test results, characteristic for Omicron and we could then expedite sequencing to specifically identify whether or not it really was. And this is only a small number of labs that use tests that do this, but it's an important indicator to alert people to.
There are now numerous other labs since March 2020 when we started sequencing, numerous other labs now around New York State and throughout the U.S. that sequence the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
And we therefore reached out to those labs and requested that they contact us immediately if they detect the Omicron sequence, so that appropriate public health response measures can be initiated promptly. So there are many lab investigations that are needed on the new variant. And we are very grateful for the ongoing operation of the New York State clinical labs, the sequencing labs, the other public health labs across the country, the CDC, and of course the state's epidemiology team, so that collectively we can map a rapid response and help protect the public of New York State.
Governor Hochul: Well, thank you Dr. St. George for the update letting the people of state of New York know that we're on top of this, we're monitoring, we're having direct conversation with the various labs around the state. For example, if a test comes into a lab in Western New York, you know, not unlikely given the proximity to Canada, that they're prepared, they know what to do with that information. So we can act with lightning speed to make sure that we get on top of this immediately and start tracking it. And then of course the contact tracing that's necessary to make sure that we can limit the spread of this, at least for now perceived to be highly transmittable variant. Is that correct? We're all set? All right.
Dr. St. George: Absolutely.
Governor Hochul: All right. Just wanted to confirm that. It's important to us to instill that confidence that I've always had. I want to make sure New Yorkers know that this is a real gem in our state, Wadsworth Lab. And Dr. St. George, please extend our gratitude to everyone who does put their heart and soul into their work. It's so critically important to keep New Yorkers safe. So thank you.
Dr. St. George: Thank you very much. I certainly will.
Governor Hochul: So we talked about this variant. We know it's coming. But here's the good news, we're not defenseless. Compared to a year ago we have so much at our disposal. Anyone over age five can get vaccinated. And if you're vaccinated, you can get the booster shot if you're over the age of 18, we are recommending highly that people wear masks indoors that they already have to, if they go out on public transit, you cannot go on the subway without making sure you have your mask on. You cannot go into a healthcare facility in the state of New York without wearing a mask. We've always encouraged mask use. And I'm asking businesses to encourage the same among their patrons as well as their employees as well.
Some of the simple measures, you know, mask wearing, the hand sanitation, trying to limit your activity around other crowds. I mean, these are all the things we've been asked to do, but again, the difference between this year and last year is the vaccine. And of course, if you're not feeling well, stay home and hopefully everybody gets the flu shot because this is a season when people get sick anyhow.
So we have been making these preparations even before this variant showed up on the scene because we knew, and I've been talking about this for weeks, literally a month, we knew this winter spike could happen. We are correct. The spike is occurring. You can see the number of people that are testing positive.
We look at cases per a hundred thousand on a seven day average. Look at some of these numbers, particularly upstate, Western New York, 65 positive cases per [100,000]. Some of the other hotspot areas or the Mohawk Valley, North Country. And so we've been directly engaged with their elected leaders. I literally just got off the phone a few moments ago with the leaders of the Western New York region. I'll be speaking to the other regions, the mayor's, the county executives, their public health teams, saying to them as we have from the very beginning, we're here to help you. This is what we're doing. We encourage you to do the same and let us know where you need more testing kits, where you want more sites, whatever we can do.
We believe that the pop-up sites are very effective, but we're going to be layering in more mass vaccination sites for other individuals. There are some tough areas. You know, we have been very successful in many parts of our state in encouraging people to get vaccine.
There are some areas and there's a direct correlation between vaccination rates and infection rates, but we're watching the numbers very closely. Some of the numbers aren't as high as we think they're going to be because of decreases in testing before the holiday, that's expected. So mark my words, we're going to see a surge in the next couple of days. And again, it takes about five days for it to manifest itself after exposure.
So, okay. You sat down with your family and you invited Uncle Harry who wasn't vaccinated, who sat right next to you at Thanksgiving Dinner. You could be exposed and you could be vulnerable if you do not have the vaccination and hopefully the booster as well. So watch your symptoms closely, stay in touch with your family members, make sure you know what everybody's up to, because if there is going to be a surge in hospitalizations, which we'd be naive to think there won't be, that would occur about 10 days from now.
So that's what we're watching for as well. Testing has always been important, we are up 42 percent in our testing from where we were a year ago. That is good news. We've been very aggressive in getting these tests out there to people. And part of our strategy dealing with the workforce, the New York State workforce is to have a vaccine requirement or a test.
And so that's why these numbers are high as well. And last year we had about 10 million around this time. This time we have 14.2 million tests between early September and currently. So, I'll be talking more about testing in a couple minutes.
Just the overall hospitalizations. This is what keeps me up at night, making sure that our hospitals have the capacity to handle the influx of patients, whether it's from COVID or otherwise.
And we currently, we have 2,829 people in hospitals right now. We've lost 41 people yesterday. How tragic that is that right after the holidays that families have to deal with this searing loss. And so our hearts go out to all of them.
So we know that the trend is continuing in a bad direction. You can see that heading up. Not anywhere near what it was back in April, but there is no excuse. This should be flat line. This should be going down because the vaccine is available and we know that. So we want to make sure that we have more people vaccinated. Our numbers keep getting better. They keep getting better, but there are some holdouts, 90.3 percent have at least one dose.
And what I want to make sure happens is that everybody that's only had the one dose gets that second dose because you're not fully protected without the second dose. We are sending text messages. We are aggressively going after it, by saying, come on now. I'm not sure when you got that or what you're waiting for, but get the second dose and then plan for your booster six months from then as well. So we want to make sure that we have people complete the entire series, over 18 it's about 80 percent. Better than many states, better than other areas, but this is New York. We have the highest standards we want to, after what we went through, with the early onset of this pandemic. We want to make sure that we protect as many people as well.
So get the second dose if you haven't already. And making sure that we're ready for the spike. So, as I mentioned, we're ready for the winter spike. People traveling, people dining together, the winter surge may be here, or we're just at the beginning of it and that's what we're focused on. So I'm focusing on preparing for the winter spikes. Since August, we've been monitoring very closely that the hospital bed capacity has declined. You can see the numbers here. Particularly the difference between upstate and downstate is rather stark. The yellow lines at the bottom there, that's the upstate numbers.
COVID hospitalizations are trending upward. The number of beds is going downward and that's a real problem for us. Since we've lost about 4 percent of our bed capacity since early August that equates to about 1,580 beds. At the same time, the hospitalizations in cases have gone up significantly. So this is what we're monitoring. We've lost, in fact, 70 percent of the bed losses are an upstate. That upstate lost 10 percent of its bed capacity, downstate lost about 2 percent. So hospitalizations are up, get this number, 150 percent upstate versus downstate. Not that I'm trying to create an upstate downstate divide in our state. I don't believe in that, but just looking at the numbers, these are with the numbers we're seeing and they're very troubling.
What I'm trying to present also, this is not a statewide phenomenon. It is not a statewide phenomenon. So this is how it's almost in a sense, easier for us to deal with because we know the target areas. We know the areas that we need to deploy the most resources, and that's exactly what we're doing. So I wanted to create a visual dish so you can talk about the hospital beds because I'll be talking about the executive order in a couple of minutes on why we had to do an executive order on Friday.
This is very targeted. You look at the bed capacity, the mid hot scenario, 31 percent. New York City, 28 percent. Long island, 27 percent. Those areas can handle the individuals who are seeking medical attention at a hospital. There is not a capacity issue there. So no broad stroke required for the state of New York. We're going to be targeting and looking at specific regions and do whatever we can to protect access to critical health services. Finger Lakes, 9 percent. Western New York, overall 11 percent North Country, lower than Capitol region.
These are the areas that were targeted. The ones that you see in red right there. So how do we boost bed capacity? First of all, that's why I signed this executive order on Friday. This allows us to have the flexibility when we call this surge and flex strategy and one area we have power now to do this is to limit non-essential, non-urgent scheduled procedures at specific hospitals that have the limited capacity.
Again, we know exactly the hospitals we're talking about. Probably 32 to 36 hospitals right now that fall into that category of having 10 percent or less bed capacity, so we can micro target those as well. Or those areas that have been determined by the department of health as needing additional capacity and, you know, we are having regular conversations. I can't tell you all the conversations that are going on with health departments, various health professionals and local health agencies with our health team here in Albany and in New York City. So beginning on December 3rd, elective procedures at these short-staffed hospitals will cease. And we'll reassess that again, January 15th.
Now, flexibility, key to success. If they're able to secure the necessary capacity and their bed capacity goes up, we don't have to wait until January 15th. We're not going to just have a hard and fast rule that doesn't show some injection of reality into it. If they able to manage this, they can get in supplemental staffing, they can address this, and we're working with them on, there's no reason why it has to go into them, but I wanted to give a range of timeframe that we're looking at. And again, if it's still bad, January 15th, we'll reinstitute it again. This is the flexibility that I need to have as the governor to address the situation. So we'll reassess on January 15th.
So, essential procedures will continue. And people who need cancer treatment, mammograms, colonoscopies, have traumatic injuries, heart surgery, they will get the care they need. Again, many of those procedures to detect for cancer, mammograms, for example, colonoscopies, they also can be performed at other places other than hospitals. And we want to make sure that no one puts off critically important preventative, procedures as well as happened during the pandemic, the first wave around and the second wave. And that ends up having long-term health consequences and perhaps that's one of the reasons we're dealing with a lot of people in the hospital now, one of the other factors as well.
So get those procedures done at outside the healthcare system. But again, this shows our approach. It's making sure that we limit non-essential non-urgent scheduled procedures at specific hospitals, but allows us to acquire, and the other reason why it's so important is it allows us to have more flexibility in securing more testing kits and getting them more widely disseminated. That it gives us what we would have been in place in the early months of the pandemic that stopped when the executive powers were removed and now we have those back now. So that allows our team to be scouring this nation and the world to make sure that we have an ample inventory of testing kits as well.
So, nursing homes. We've been concerned about nursing home patients. We pushed very hard to make sure that they had what they need in terms of tests. We asked nursing homes to make sure that they had testing kits, as well as the boosters available in-house so they could be administered before Thanksgiving.
Before Thanksgiving, we surveyed them and we wanted to make sure that there was an increase in people getting the booster shot. Many were vaccinated as you know, a lot of focus on getting nursing home patients vaccinated. The federal government was all over this last winter - that was fairly successful. We want to make sure now that we have enough booster shots available.
So we talked to the nursing homes and long-term health care facilities. We told them to make sure that they had as many places available that boosters can be available. We had about 90 percent of them respond and said that they would make boosters available before Thanksgiving.
So we're anticipating to see a healthy number of people who received their boosters. We're concerned about the wellbeing of these more vulnerable populations to make sure that they're safe.
One area I can add more staffing is the National Guard. We have surveyed our National Guard resources. We know that there are numbers who have EMT training or health care backgrounds, and we can deploy them in a targeted way to the health care facilities, the nursing homes and long-term health care facilities, where they're having a shortage because here's how it works - one of the reasons we have additional individuals still in hospitals who are non-COVID, who are ready to be discharged, is that the nursing homes don't have enough staff to take them.
Now I'm on one call with an institution in Buffalo and they said, I could release 50 people right now and that would take a lot of pressure off of them, but they don't have a nursing home to let them go to.
So my question is, okay, how do we get more help on the back end? National Guard can step in, some of the other programs we have, the student nurse program, what they're able to do, how we get more nurses hired across the staffing services. So we have a whole broad based approach to this, but working to increase the National Guard presence.
And also long-term I said I want an order out there that I want to make sure our National Guard members start getting training to be EMTs because we never know where we're going to need them. This won't start tomorrow. We'll start in January. It's a longer-term solution, but it's also going to be very helpful if they have to respond to a natural disaster or some other hurricane or storm that they have this training.
So we also believe that we can enhance the training capacity of our National Guard as well.
And also we've asked our downstate partners where there is plenty of capacity. You saw that the hospitals that have plenty of capacity downstate, some of them have agreed to help shift some personnel temporarily to our hot spot areas.
So those are all the strategies we're dealing right now to deal with the nursing homes and the hospitals shortages that we have upstate.
The booster update, and I keep talking about boosters, boosters, boosters. There's no reason not to get the booster as long as you're eligible. We have 2.4 million New Yorkers already vaccinated with the booster. That's great.
We're also going to be layering in the flu shot as well at our sites, making sure that it's available and when you go to a mass vax site and you go to one of the facilities that you can also get the flu shot. Let's make it easier on everybody. Let's be ready for both.
So I mentioned the long care facilities. I think I already addressed it. Here's the numbers on how many people had been vaccinated as of getting the boosters. These are already people who had the vaccination. This is the increase in people getting the boosters, the additional doses. As I was mentioning, we wanted to increase it. That'll go up higher in the next couple of weeks.
We're very aggressive in making sure that every nursing home that is part of my executive order, now requires every nursing home to make sure that they have the booster shots available and that they promote them inside the nursing homes. There's a few reasons why it's complicated, getting consent from people, as well. But we're very focused on protecting that vulnerable population.
So we expect the booster rate to continue to climb steadily after the holiday here. So we're going to have booster shots available. We're going to have the nursing homes and everybody, I mentioned that already, ramping up our vaccine and testing.
We have our mass vax sites. We have a new one opening up in Queensbury shortly. We're taking appointments. Queensbury is a little bit in the North Country. We have been on calls with our county leaders. We say to them, if you want a mass vax site, we'll do it. If you're already focused on this but you need more supplies, we'll do it. Tell us what you need. We are there to help. And so these conversations are ongoing.
We'll be ramping up vaccines and testing throughout the state of New York. And so we want to make sure people get their appointments. Go to this website, ny.gov/vaccine, or call in if you want to make a phone call. But these work so well.
And we're very excited to be partnering with local individuals across the state, whether it's the religious institutions, the churches and synagogues that have partnered with us before. Pop-up sites work successfully as well. So we have a lot to do on this.
Also, I'll be announcing more about, I'll be probably gathering to do a press event on Thursday, I'm looking forward to introducing the new leader of our Department of Health, Dr. Mary Bassett, she'll be joining us.
Also, we've talked about helping children in schools. My goal is to keep kids in schools, keep them there safely though, and making sure that we the opportunity to have people test and return to classrooms easier than is occurring right now.
And the state of New York is going to be very engaged with our school districts to make sure that they have all the resources they need so this can be a viable option and not an expensive one for parents either to pick up the cost. So those are some of the things we're working on. We'll have more to report on that very shortly.
So we're going to continue focusing on our approach to this new variant. It does not have to be a broad brush, one size fits all approach. We are targeted but always have the tools to be able to deploy more widely if necessary. I know this is how we're going to come out of this with a stronger economic recovery, not to have shutdowns where shutdowns are not necessary, not to have unnecessary requirements where they're not needed, but making sure that any area that is showing vulnerabilities and we see a trajectory that is not good that we're deploying the resources intensely in a strategic way to make sure that we're doing everything that we have at our disposal and making sure that we leave no stone unturned in terms of protecting the health of New Yorkers.