Governor Hochul: "We're going to continue to be vigilant. I want all New Yorkers to know that we have a very experienced team here. People know what they're doing. They are pulling every single lever available to us, and we're committed to getting this done and doing everything we can to help save lives.”
Earlier today, Governor Kathy 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 is available below:
Governor Hochul: Good morning and thank you for joining us today. To all the members of the press corps you're welcome for giving you Christmas Day off, I did not do a COVID briefer on that day and thought of all of you, but also I do want to thank the incredible team that is a part of the Executive Chamber who did work through the Christmas weekend, all through Christmas Day and making sure that we are continuing to be vigilant as we address this pandemic.
I'm joined today by our Health Commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, who will be presenting some additional information, as well as our Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jackie Bray, who was on the front lines in New York City, dealing with the first wave of the pandemic. So what I have to acknowledge is that the numbers are continuing to climb.
This has not been a surprise to us, particularly since we started taking precautions, warning about the winter surge as early as early October, taking a major step with an Executive Order on November 26th we’ve gone the holiday of Thanksgiving, but also knowing full well that this could be a very vulnerable time given how quickly this mutation, Omicron, transmits.
And so, again, not March of 2020, we have tools at our disposal and the question is how we're deploying them. And I think people will be very confident – I know people are very confident in how we've done it. So we're continuing to work on our winter surge plan, making more testing available. And reminding everyone we have ordered and are starting to receive 37 million testing kits, which are critically important to make sure that people can ensure they're safe before they gather with individuals or go to their jobs.
So that's important to make sure that that testing is wildly available. So let's take a minute and go through some of the latest numbers. Positive cases, we had a low number on the 26th because there's usually less on Sunday. So I don't want to get too much excitement around a 26,737. We did have 36,000 positives on Christmas Day, but our numbers again are a little bit off.
We'll have a full number, more accurate numbers tomorrow, once we calculate in the reduced testing over the weekend. So we did administer tests, 168,000 tests. That's just down slightly from 257 we did literally on Christmas. So we are looking at different numbers just because of the holidays. A lot of people are getting tests around the holidays, we're grateful for that, you answered our call to make sure that you're safe before you traveled, before you had your dinners.
And also I just want to remind everybody, we have seen a major uptick in cases all around us. This is a Northeastern phenomenon right now. Washington on up, the Atlantic seaboard, New Jersey, all around us. Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland. They're all being hit hard, almost equal numbers as we are.
So we're seeing cases per a hundred thousand statewide up to 180, which is high. You can see where we're trending there. Not a surprise, not something we weren't preparing for, not something we're not ready for, but it's always disturbing to see those numbers continue as they do.
Hospitalizations, this is what we focus on. Over the last two days on average, about 165 deaths a day, 132 total over two days, our HERDS data was off on Christmas. So we don't want to give you an inaccurate number, but anyhow, this is just a devastating time to lose a loved one over the holidays. And you read the reports in the newspaper, individuals who literally had 48 hours’ notice when their loved one first contracted the virus and then succumbed to it.
And I just can't imagine the pain that these families are going through, so let's always keep them in our prayers. We had 5,526 New Yorkers hospitalized yesterday. We had 7,183 hospitalized this very day last year. You can see though, the hospitalizations are continuing to spike upwards. You get some comfort in seeing we're not where we were in April 2020, we're not where we were in January of 2021, but it is going upwards. And that is something that we are very cognizant of and have been anticipating and preparing for.
So some of our hospital actions, as you know, we've been laser focused on this, we warned about this. We've taken major action to increase bed capacity and also protect critical services as part of our winter surge plan and it's been working right now. We required hospitals to scale up their capacity. This was not done this week or even last week. This was talked about at the end of October and through November. So we did pause non-essential elective surgeries in hospitals with limited capacity, which we defined as having 10% or less capacity at the time.
Some have rolled off, some have gone back on. So right now we still average about, I think it's about 25 are on that list, down from 32. We've made it easy for hospitals to bring in additional workers, activating their surgeon flex plans. As I mentioned, we signed that Executive Order to suspend elective surgeries. Working with hospitals to get more staff in. The communication with individual hospitals is ongoing. It's intense, being very responsive to their needs and being as helpful as we can. As you know, in some cases we even deployed the National Guard to help with their discharges.
And knowing that there are people who could be discharged from hospitals but were not able to be taken by a long term facility or by nursing homes, we deployed the National Guard to those facilities to take some of the pressure off. So this continues intensely ramping up, but this has already been in place. And what we've seen, as I just mentioned, we've seen an increase in our bed capacity, which is good.
Something we've been working on, 8% increase in our hospital bed capacity. I'm not going to rest on our laurels here because this could change in a moment's notice. So this is just a snapshot of where we are right now. But I do thank the hospitals who've made progress in getting us down to 25 who we're working closely with. We are preparing our strategy, which we'll be announcing later this week for our winter surge 2.0.
So, those of you who want to join me on New Year’s Eve, I anticipate being right here. We'll bring some festivities and make it a little more fun than it probably would ordinarily be. But this is where I'll be New Year’s Eve. We're preparing for all scenarios, including the worst case scenarios, which we're not at, but I've said from the very beginning, I want to have the ability to deploy whatever actions need to be taken if we get to a crisis situation and we are not there yet, but I'm going to be continuing everything we do.
In fact, I'll be speaking with President Biden when he addresses other U.S. governors in about half an hour or so, 45 minutes, I'll be on that call with President Biden. And I spoke with him separately last week before he did his national press conference. And I will be talking – Commissioner Bray will be giving an update on what our specific asks are to the federal government and how we're having to rely on them for some of the work. But also everything we have control over we're handling here, and that means vaccines and boosters.
We've had more than 3.2 million vaccines administered just since December 1st. Doses, over 33 million just as of 11 a.m. yesterday. 4.3 million booster shots, and you see the gap, we are very excited to hit the 90% of one dose, that is very high. We're proud of that, but this gap between the one dose and the fully vaccinated is still too large, 82.3, there is a lagging number because there's a little time between the first dose and the second dose, but we should be catching up with that. So I'm urging everybody – if you had the one dose, be aware you're on a process you're a step on a process. You're not there yet. You're not protected, particularly against Omicron, which is just breaking through, in some case to people who are vaccinated.
That's why you need to get to the booster stage. With respect to our young people, parents I’m calling on you. This is the time you have the kids home from school. There's plenty of vaccination opportunities, from your pediatrician to a site set up by the State of New York, our urgent care centers. So many places, drug stores, where you can go get your child vaccinated before they get back to school, please do this for them.
Now we know that children, five to 11 year olds, using this time to get this done is really smart. And children five to 11 have been approved since November 3rd. So we're almost up to two solid months where we've had this opportunity to get children in that age category vaccinated.
So I'm going to ask Dr. Bassett to address this in a couple of minutes as well. Here's our numbers we just talked about, we're going up with the five to 11 year olds, two weeks ago we were at 11%. But we're just not where we need to go today, we’re at 16.4%. So we're going up, trending upward, but there's just no reason, we have the supply, we have the capacity, we have the staff in place for every child to be vaccinated who's eligible and we’ll talk about that shortly.
So, also concerned about pediatric admissions and I want Dr. Bassett to speak in particular about what we're seeing and some information she released on Friday. Dr Bassett?
Dr. Bassett: Thanks very much Governor. So on Friday, the health department released a communication to health workers, principally pediatricians, called a health alert and it pointed out that we'd observed an uptick in pediatric admissions, concentrated in the New York City area, where there was an increase of about four fold. And those data reported on Friday, among the children who are aged five to 11, none had been vaccinated.
Although as you saw in the governors slide just now, in this group we have about 27% have received at least one dose. And this group that was hospitalized, none had been vaccinated. And then the older group, about a quarter had been vaccinated, even though in the general population, we are up to 75% having received at least one dose.
The data that you see in the slide here are more complete than the data that we released on Friday. And they show admissions for between the ages of zero and 18. You can see from these data that beginning from the week of December 5th to 11th, when there were statewide 70 pediatric admissions, we've gone up two and a half fold, but New York City has gone up nearly fivefold up to the week of December 19th – not a complete week, we'll update those data later.
We're releasing this data because we want pediatricians to be alert to making the diagnosis of COVID and children and we also want parents to be alert to the diagnosis. Many people continue to think that children don't become infected with COVID. This is not true. Children become infected and some will be hospitalized. The immunization coverage in this group, the vaccination coverage, remains too low. And that's the second reason that we released these data to alert people to the fact that we need to get child vaccinations up. We need to get them higher than they are, particularly in the five to 11 year old age group. And pediatricians can play a role in this, advising parents. And parents can play a role in this, understanding that their children may become infected and may become sick.
Additionally, we released on Friday new guidance on isolation for people who've been found to be infected with COVID. As you're aware, you've seen the numbers, the last, probably truly accurate figure that we had was up to nearly 50,000 new infections. We know that the testing went down over the holiday weekend and possibly reporting of those tests as well. So we know that there are many, many people who are infected. We released this guidance the day after the Centers for Disease Control released its guidance update. Ours differed in some ways from the Centers for Disease Control I want to outline to you what the New York State guidance does and then point out the ways in which it builds on the Centers for Disease Control guidance.
The New York State guidance covers only people who've been fully vaccinated. The return to work after a shortened isolation is available only to people who've been fully vaccinated. Additionally, these are people who test positive or who have very minor symptoms, whose symptoms are resolving, and have not had a fever for 72 hours. They will wear a mask on return to work and it should be a quality well-fitting mask, meaning not a cloth mask. The Centers for Disease Control has guidance that applies only to health workers. Their guidance applies to all workers who test positive regardless of their vaccination status.
Our guidance is analogous to the Centers for Disease Control guidance for what they call “contingency conditions”. That's when contingency measures are being put in place to protect the health care capacity. That is currently going on in New York State. We allow people to return to work after five days of isolation, without testing. Testing is not required, and this is consistent with the Centers for Disease Control guidance for contingency. So the key way that we differ is limiting this to people who've been fully vaccinated and extending the shortened isolation guidance beyond health workers to include other critical workforce participants.
So I just want to be really clear that this is not about sending people back to work who are sick. Having symptoms is probably your best test. People who are sick at all times should not be at work. And in these times in particular, people who are sick should not go to work. This guidance is for people who either have no symptoms or very mild symptoms that are resolving.
I thought I would also say a word about nursing homes before moving on to the next slide, I apologize. We have 608 nursing homes across the state. We're currently seeing about a third of those nursing homes with at least one resident who has COVID infection. We have done pretty well on getting the nursing home residents vaccinated, nearly 90% are fully vaccinated, but we're not doing as well as we would like and getting people boosted.
And this seems to be particularly important in protecting against adverse outcomes of Omicron infection. When we do the math, about two thirds of nursing home residents have been fully vaccinated and boosted. We’re working hard to get that number up. We're doing it by focusing in a very granular way, county-by-county, looking at the local health department activities.
Commissioner Bray is working with county executives. And so we're going down to the data and nursing home by nursing home, to get these most vulnerable people of our population fully protected with boosters. The facts are clear. We know that three quarters of the lives we've lost in this pandemic have been among people who are over 65. So being fully vaccinated and boosted is critical in this very vulnerable population of nursing home residents. Thank you, Governor.
Governor Hochul: Thank you, Dr. Bassett for the reminder about nursing homes, as you spoke about. We have been very aggressive providing the booster shots to our nursing home population. But again, you cannot get a booster unless you've been vaccinated. And we've been trying to, ever since we required all nursing homes to make boosters available back around Thanksgiving, and if they had been successful, we wouldn't even have a problem right now, but they did their best efforts and we're continuing to touch base with them.
And Jackie Bray, our Commissioner, will be talking about that a little bit, but finding out that there are barriers, where someone has dementia and cannot knowingly consent to getting a vaccination or a booster shot, or family members declined the opportunity to get approvals for them. And that is the only reason we're seeing barriers right now. It's not access, it's not availability, it's not the fact that they weren't required to bring boosters to the nursing homes, but it's an area we want to continue focusing on and we'd love to get those numbers up even higher.
We also know that yes, it is a break. Well, not a break for parents, your kids are home. And I remember the days very well and all the chaos returns and all the excitement over the holidays. But the kids will be going back to school and all of us agree, we have a strong public interest in keeping our kids in school. We went through the social experiment of keeping them isolated, and what teachers had to go through and parents and the children was extraordinary. And the results are now showing that the learning did not continue the way it should have, that we had hoped it would, as well as the emotional effect and the toll it's been taking that is manifesting itself as we see in our young children, all the way up to our teenagers now.
So, parents we’re encouraging to get them vaccinated during the break, and school districts, encouraging you to do your best efforts to help limit the transmission. And what we're talking about is an outreach, which has been very intense, to all 731 school districts through the Boards of Education Cooperative Education, BOCES, as it's known and we've been ordering tests, we've anticipated this date.
We want to make sure that we have at least three to three and a half million tests out to our schools, dedicated schools, were for children in schools, and we're working to get those out there. And in fact, we are deploying over 2 million test kits to the City of New York schools so they can be in hand for these school districts to be able to deploy them the way they choose, whether it's sending them home with children after the first day, whether they can institute testing in schools, we will leave that up to them, but it is our responsibility to help them with their amassing the necessary number they require.
And that is why we're having 2 million to New York City by Friday, and also to have 3.3 million available to the rest of the state. So Commissioner Bray will give more details on that, but that is something that we are deploying our state team to help us out with. And I'll be working and talking about that in a couple of minutes, but we want to make sure that these schools stay open. As Dr. Bassett said, most cases are not being transmitted in schools. Children are wearing their mask and we want more vaccinated. We want them boosted at some point, as soon as possible, but we understand that it is not a good option to say children are going to be returning home again, subject to possible changes in the future.
But right now, that is absolutely where our position is, it’s unwavering on this date with respect to looking at a date of January 3, we want to get the children back to school. We're doing a call with all 500 superintendents tomorrow. I'll be having conversations with them directly with myself in addition to the ongoing conversations that are being conducted by our team. So at this point, I'd like to turn it over to Commissioner Bray, to give an update on our testing and other operations, and she can give you the real nitty gritty details of what she has her hands in.
Commissioner Bray: Thank you, Governor. Thank you. As the governor said, it's really an all hands on deck operation to keep kids in school and you know, it's our responsibility to supply as many of our districts as we possibly can so that they can supply as many kids as they possibly can with kits. So I just want to reiterate some of the numbers. It's about 6 million tests, 3 million kits that will go out this week. Of that, 2 million tests going directly to New York City.
There's 731 end points, those are our districts. We'll be supplying them through 60 different hubs throughout the state. Those will include the BOCES, some direct to school districts and some county hubs. Planes with these kits begin arriving tomorrow. They will be landing in the state every day this week.
We've got over a hundred trucks on the roads from warehouse to warehouse to our hubs. And I want to thank our state partners, DOT, Corrections, the national guard, Thruway Canals, the Port Authority and of course our team at Homeland Security and Emergency Services that are making this operation this week possible.
We'll be prioritizing delivery based on case rate by district so that we make sure that the kits get to the districts that are seeing the highest level of transmission, as early as possible in the week. I also want to remind everyone that that's not the only way that we're expanding access to testing. Pharmacies and urgent cares across the state continue to offer testing, including walk-in testing. Last week we delivered over a million over the counter tests to county, local health departments outside of New York City.
Last Wednesday and Thursday, we delivered 600,000 over the counter tests directly to New York City. We watched as those tests went out to community members and to relieve pressure in the lines in New York City. Any county that wants additional testing sites is able to request staff and supplies from the state. And we've been supplying those as counties step up their work. There are 13 new state sites opening this Wednesday. Those will not be the last of the state sites that open. Those will be the sort of first wave this week. The MTA opened two walk-in testing sites in Times Square and Grand Central last week. We expect five more transit hub testing sites to come online this week.
Our over the counter orders and our over the counter deliveries this week will not be our last. We're going to be doing rolling deliveries every week, every other week, to all of our counties, both to our school districts, but also to communities, to make sure that folks are prepared. In addition to our testing, I wanted to give an update on our work with FEMA and the federal government.
A FEMA Incident Management Assistance Team arrived today in Albany. They'll be embedding as of 11:00 AM in our emergency operations center. They are helping us secure and make good on the asks that we've made for clinical staffing, for additional ambulances, for additional mobile testing. Six mobile testing teams arrived last week in New York City, we expect more to be coming from the federal government.
The federal government sent 30 ambulances now about 10 days ago to help us relieve transport and transfer pressure in central New York. 10 of those teams were redeployed down to the city on Friday where they remain. In addition to those resource asks, the governor has been very clear that it's important that New York State receive the monoclonal antibody treatment that continues, the one that continues to work against Omicron and the oral treatment that Pfizer is preparing and is making available.
Obviously, those are on federal allocation. So New York wants to make sure that we get our fair share, but in addition, when they become commercially available, we'll be first in line and ready to make sure that our pharmacies and our hospitals have what they need. Thank you, Governor.
Governor Hochul: Thank you, Commissioner. And just to make sure there's no confusion, when we say a million testing kids, there's two tests in every kit. So that is 2 million tests going to the city of New York. But thank you for all the work that you and your team are doing. I know you worked all through the Christmas weekend, and we appreciate your dedication to the cause.
One more note, and I will be traveling a little bit around the state, and we'll be announcing now where I'll be shortly. But we'll be back here in Albany for New Year’s Eve. I'll be here doing a press conference in the afternoon to make sure everyone knows what we're doing to head into the weekend. But here's the last thing we can offer as you're heading into the festivities to wrap up and finally say goodbye to 2021.
I remember this time last year, we were so excited to say goodbye to 2020. Anticipating that we were also saying goodbye to COVID and the pandemic. And no one could have foreseen that we would be experiencing this one year later and we're going to continue to be vigilant. I want all New Yorkers to know that we have a very experienced team here. People know what they're doing. They are pulling every single lever available to us, and we're committed to getting this done and doing everything we can to help save lives. But we have power that we just were beginning to tap this time last year when the very first vaccines were becoming available. Now they're widely available.
Vaccines are the way we can get through our holidays safely. So, if you want to be attending your parties, please make sure that people are vaccinated and boosted. You wear your mask, possibly stay outdoors, a little chilly, especially upstate New York, but it'll be worth it when you have a chance to be together with your loved ones and friends this time again next year. So talk to all your hosts and your friends and everybody. And if you're sniffling, if you're not feeling good, just stay home, watch the ball drop on television, get a nice glass of champagne and know that you're doing the smart thing.
So, our New Year's resolution is we'll get through this winter surge together and we'll regather again on the other side of the beginning of 2022. So, thank you.