Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Updates COVID-19 Guidance for Schools

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced updated COVID-19 guidance that aligns with new CDC recommendations as children, teachers and faculty across the state prepare to head back to school in the coming weeks. With increased access to COVID-19 information, vaccination, testing, and treatment, New York State is updating its response to ensure all students, teachers and faculty can make a safe return to the classroom next month. Read the updated guidance and frequently asked questions here.

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.

PRESENTATION SLIDES from the event are available here.

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

Good morning, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for saying good morning. Yeah, the press crowd is happy and in a good mood today. It's summer - summer in New York.

Well, I'm joined by part of the all star dream team that I'm blessed to work with every single day. And it starts with Kathryn Garcia, our Head of State Operations, and Dr. Mary Bassett, the Commissioner of Health. And today we're here to talk about New Yorkers' health. And I think I'm going to morph from calling this a COVID briefing to just a virus briefing because we have other viruses to talk about. But I also just want to just make sure that we're focusing on what's important. New Yorkers continue to be concerned, especially as we approach the final days before kids get back to school.

So, we want to give more information. Let's first of all talk about the latest numbers and then we'll focus on our back to school strategy. You can see our seven-day average is about 22 cases per hundred thousand. A little bit down from last week, which is about 22 cases per hundred thousand and a month ago, we were at 35. So, that is a good trend. Just to give you perspective, last January, Omicron peak we had over 381 cases per a hundred thousand. So, being around 22, 23 is progress, but it's been steady. You can see that it's been very steady over the last few months. Regionally, you know, you can see again where we're coming from. Not a big variance for the first time in a while, although we're seeing some higher numbers on Long Island.

Hospitalizations continue to be low, relatively stable. Last week, we had 2,300 people hospitalized. That's still a lot of New Yorkers. 2,365 people in the hospital from contracting COVID, but that's down a little bit from the week before. And from our peak, we're down still again quite a bit. Nothing unique about the regional variances right now, which is good. Vaccination, 40 million doses, extraordinary, but there's more to be done. So, this is a time to just have that wake up call, say, "What have you been waiting for? Everybody I know has been vaccinated." So, to those who have not, we encourage you - especially get your children vaccinated as we're heading into school. Our numbers are better than most states, but we never rest on our laurels here.

But today, I'm here to talk directly to parents, and yes, schools are ready for their children to burst through those doors with eager anticipation of another school year. And what a difference a year makes from where we were announcing our back to school strategy. I was brand new on the job, but I also knew we had kids going back to school within a matter of days. And so we had to ramp up our efforts immediately. And we had a lot of rules last year. You know, we had social distancing, we had quarantine after exposure, we had test to stay. So, there's a lot of rules that parents and teachers and administrators had to be familiar with. And, it was confusing, very frustrating, stressful, the unknown, fear of the unknown because, this was the first fall when our expectation was that everybody went back to school.

And so because parents - I'm a parent, now a grandparent, we know our primary responsibility is to protective the health of our children. I want parents to know as Governor, I share that responsibility. It is my responsibility to do everything I can to protect your families as well. So, I'm grateful that this year we have a different scenario - different landscape, so to speak. And we're expected it to be a much, much easier year for parents and for schools.

You heard last week that the CDC issued guidance. We've been analyzing the guidance, and they relaxed their guidance with respect through K through 12 schools and early childhood education programs. Here in New York, we want to be fully aligned with the CDC, but we wanted to take a little bit of time to process what that actually meant before we released data. And later today, the Department of Health and the State Education Department will be releasing a letter to schools to reinforce our support for the CDC guidance and to have frequently asked questions, so they will be apprised of everything we expect for this fall. So, that information is coming out later today.

But the big news is no more quarantining, no more test to stay, and the days of sending an entire classroom home because one person was symptomatic or test positive, those days are over. We've been through that experiment. No longer are we going to be sending kids home, keeping them away from that essential experience of being together in a classroom because we are now still dealing with the fallout of those decisions made when we had less information and there was concern in classrooms, but we now have two years of experience to know that children are safe in classrooms. And when they're not in a classroom and the learning stops, the traditional learning stops, it can be devastating for the wellbeing of those children. We're seeing it in the mental health challenges we're facing now. Suicide rates, depression, real mental health issues that were not there before for many of these children. And that is deeply troubling to us.

So, we're aligning ourselves with the CDC. We're getting this information out to parents, into schools, and making sure that our children are where they need to be this fall. Because we know there's no replacement for in-classroom learning and we're going to make sure that this year is a very different year.

Let's go into some of the guidance, so everyone's clear on this. As of last Thursday, August 11th, the CDC is no longer recommending quarantining due to exposure. So, let's lay this out. If a student or teacher is exposed, has a close contact to someone who is exposed and they don't have symptoms, they no longer have to go home. They will stay in school. And the CDC does recommend the wearing of a mask for about 10 days if someone's been exposed. So, no more test to stay. What that means is if a classmate tests positive for COVID and your child doesn't have symptoms, your child can stay in school as long as they would wear a mask under those circumstances. That's what we're recommending.

So, that's good news. If a child does get sick, we still want to make sure that there's a smart approach, and if there's symptoms you always want to be tested and students should stay home - recommend that they stay home for about five days and wear a mask as well. And if they have no symptoms after five days and test negative, they should go back to school. Let's get them back in school as soon as possible.

So, that's what they're recommending. That's what we're recommending. And we're no longer recommending - and the CDC and Department of Health are aligned with this - no longer recommending the screening testing, which is randomly testing people who have no symptoms. That was important a year ago, before that, but in certain circumstances, schools may want to opt for doing screening testing in high-risk activities. For example, let's think about choir where children are close together, wrestling team. So, we'll leave that up to individual schools to make that determination, but it is no longer recommended from the CDC or the Department of Health that there'd be this random screening.

So, now that we've covered, that is a change. That is how we'll be approaching this school year. We are going to be also talking about our overall Fall Action Plan, and we've been able to identify patterns. I spoke about this when we gathered in July, when I said we're putting together our fall plan, even though it was a beautiful day in July, we're getting closer to that time. What we've seen in the past is a trend that we cannot lose sight of. The number of cases per a hundred thousand really went up dramatically in the fall after seeing major declines in stabilization over the summer months. So, will that happen again? We don't know, but our policy has always been for the last year straight has been to be prepared for the worst. That is why we're going to continue looking at those patterns and make sure that while these numbers tend to spike in the fall, the weather gets colder, people congregate more, and this fall we're really hoping the doors are open, not just to schools, but to offices after Labor Day.

We get more people back, I walk the streets of Midtown literally every day, almost five days a week, you don't see me, but I see all of you and I know. There's a lot of tourists, restaurants are crowded, people are coming back, enjoying our social life and we'd love to see everybody going back in their offices or at least on a hybrid situation. So, we're encouraging the employers who are encouraging that as well. So, what we're going to see also, that of more people in congregate settings working together in offices. So, we're going to be vigilant, we're going to remain prepared, and, of course, the best way to do it, I sound like a broken record but that's okay, the music hasn't changed: Get a vaccination, get a vaccination. And make sure your kids are vaccinated. So again, if you waited to see how it plays out with your friends, you want to make sure everybody's doing well, we've now had a long enough history to realize that these vaccines are safe.

So, we've launched our Vax-to-School campaign last week again. It's aimed at increasing COVID vaccination rates among school-aged New Yorkers, and again, breaking down barriers to vaccine access. This is something we track and monitor, make sure that there are no disparities, especially in communities of color for access to vaccines. So, we're partnering again this year with community organizations, popup vaccination clinics, encouraging families to take advantage of this. And there's the website to check out the closest site to all of you.

So, our Fall Plan that we mentioned before, focus on the schools. We're going to get the test kits out there though. We have been very good at this last November when Omicron had just literally just been identified as a variant, our state sprung in action. And I thank Kathryn Garcia and her team for scouring the Earth when there was a short supply of test kits, at a time, it was November, December, and we knew we had to make sure that kids got back to school last January. This was a great sense of stress on families. Are the kids going to be able to go back there safely? And we knew if we had a testing strategy where we can get tests in the hands of every single school, every single student, that we could be successful in getting the kids where they belong.

So, the strategy, again, this year is making sure that we have ample supply. We've done a masterful job in terms of amassing more than other states, getting ahead of the game. And to the extent that last year, last winter, other states were asking us - federal government was talking us about our supply. We have used it, we've gotten it out. We were able to get kids back to school. This year, we're going to be distributing once again to schools. One test kit per child at the start, but schools can request additional kits. We're in a good position to meet that demand and we have over 14 million kits in inventory and we procured another 6 million. So, that is a good strategy, again, best strategy is get vaccinated. Number two is make sure that we have the test kits available. Also, we want to make sure every New Yorker has access to medical assistance and treatment should they contract the virus. Therapeutics are critical. I had to take advantage of them a few months ago and they work very well. So, we make sure that we have access to that, so people can call and find out where they can get them and make sure they're available. So right now, 40 percent of our pharmacies receive from the federal government, their supply of therapeutics, as well as our 44 sites, but there has to be equitable access to this or this system doesn't work.

So, we have a hotline, as I mentioned, phone number to call, and since we launched the hotline, we've had over 1,700 calls. Over 1,100 visits for treatment as a result of people being able to make that phone call, find out where the treatments are available, and make sure that people take advantage of that as well.

Threw a lot of information at you. It's important. Parents, it's a very different year. It's a very different year, especially if your kids are vaccinated. We do have test kits. We're trying to just draw down the anxiety associated with sending your children off to school this year. And it is a much better year. I am concerned about the trend, but if we can just regroup it about a month, we'll be able to assess the numbers and see whether or not those trends of the past are no longer, which would be a good dynamic that we came through the Adventist School and people coming indoors more safely.

So again, we took a lot of precautions with our Fall Action Plan. We're continue to roll this out and look forward to the day when I'll be talking about our Winter Plan because maybe we won't need a winter plan. Maybe we'll continue to be in a far better place.

But I want to talk to Dr. Bassett now, who's going to give an update on both monkeypox, this is very much top of mind for people, something that we put out the early warning signal about before any other state did. Declared a State of Emergency before any other state did. And we one-quarter of all cases are occurring in New York State; the vast majority of which are occurring in New York City. So, that is a concern and we are very fortunate to have a top medical mind focused on this nonstop. And she'll also address the issue of polio in the State of New York. So, Dr. Bassett.

Thank you, Dr. Bassett, particularly for your transparency in providing information very publicly. And that is why we've identified that there are racial disparities. And so, we're addressing that with your equity investigation into that. So, I thank you for making sure that these are allocated in a way that is appropriate. And also, we are going to continue focusing on our efforts to get more doses from the federal government. As you know, they have promised us a certain allocation, but now with the administration of being able to take one vial and have five doses from it, our hope is that we can get the same number of vials and not be limited. And that's not how they see it exactly right now, but we're going to continue those conversations at earnest as a matter of equity and as the epicenter of this in the state - not just in the State of New York, obviously, but in the United States of America.