Governor Hochul: “We have vaccines widely available. We have testing widely available and also my two priorities are: Protect the health of New Yorkers and also protect the health of the economy.
Governor: Mayors, communities and not-for-profits, you can apply for this [grant]. Tell us your vision, tell us where you believe the vulnerabilities are greatest in your communities. Maybe it's where farm workers gather and we need help out in those farms, maybe it's places where people congregate in senior centers, wherever you think you need this extra help to protect the vulnerable individuals.
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul thanked Healthcare Workers and updated New Yorkers on the state’s progress combating COVID-19 in Plattsburgh.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.
B-ROLL of the event is available on YouTube here.
AUDIO of the event is available here.
PHOTOS of the event, including the Governor’s stops at Samaritan Hospital in Watertown and Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Potsdam to thank healthcare workers, are available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor’s remarks is available below:
Thank you, Assembly Member Jones. We've had a longstanding friendship. As I’ve come through, I see, well we toured that site, we went to that little shop, we toured the downtown together, so I thank you for your continued steadfast leadership and your advocacy for this region and our state Capitol. You’re doing an incredible job so, our great Assembly Member Billy Jones.
Also, Mayor Rosenquest, I had a chance to spotlight Tracy, your wife, and she talked about the mask requirement we have which we thought was a good alternative to having to close down businesses, simply say, let's make sure that the customers and the employees are safe and wearing masks or having a vaccination option. So I want to thank you for the work you do in Plattsburgh but also give a special shout out to Tracy as well.
Also, we had a chance to catch up on some of the projects that I helped launch as lieutenant governor. You know I've been here many times, and the Downtown Revitalization project, I'm going to continue to come back. I might have to send my lieutenant governor sometimes too, but you know, I love coming up and so I want to make sure that those are moving on track as well, really important to be a catalyst for redeveloping our downtowns as well.
And also many of our elected officials from the legislature, I thank our chairman for being here and our leaders from the hospital system, Michelle LeBeau, President of CVPH and Dr. Rietsema, Vice President of CVPH, and also Gary Douglas is here who I worked closely with for years working on the REDC, working very hard in that space as well, and as well as our president of SUNY Plattsburgh and our sheriff and others. Thanks for coming out today.
I wanted to come by here because there's such an incredible feeling of doing the right thing when you go to a vaccination site. When the state can team up with our local partners right here in places like Plattsburgh and other places where I was earlier today across the North Country and say that these communities matter and it's our responsibility to give them all the tools they need to help fight the pandemic and setting up a pop-up vaccination opportunity for people as we've done right here today is one of those ways that we can work together.
And I want to thank everyone who's involved with us, especially from our DOH team and the other individuals who are running this site. These sites are very oriented toward making sure we let people know about them and I ask the media that's here, please let people know. If you come to this site right here at Clinton Community College, there's no parking problems. It's a beautiful day; come on out. They have over 1,000 slots available, and I think about five or 600 books. So, if I'm a parent and I'm saying the kids are home, they're driving me a little nuts today, let's take them out to get their vaccinations so when they go back to school on Monday – and let me put an exclamation point on it: back to school on Monday – that they are safe.
So parents, I'm pleading with you. This is a beautiful opportunity. If you live anywhere within the driving range of the Clinton Community College, come by here today. We also have many other sites as well. And this is a great facility, a strong nursing program here, which is why it's important to put a spotlight on there as we try to encourage more people to go into this incredible profession where you're literally saving people's lives. And that's what I spent the early part of my day doing, visiting nurses and places and hospitals like Good Samaritan and others across Potsdam and Watertown.
I really needed to leave the Capital where I’ve been very focused on our COVID response and reporting to the public and working with our health team and our operations team. But sometimes you wake up and say, I need to see the people who are on the front lines and those are the people that put on their uniforms every single day, put on the gowns, put on the masks, put on the gloves, and I will tell you, when I see in their eyes I see two things: I see their commitment to doing what's right. They want to help people. They want to be there for them, but also there's an exhaustion setting it and they never dreamed that they'd be going through not one winter, but two winters of this without a clear end in sight, because this variant has been wildly unpredictable.
So, when you see a healthcare worker, even the people that were cleaning the rooms. As I mentioned, I said I saw one of these individuals, I said, you're the ones that are keeping these places sterile and safe for people. Thank you for even cleaning the rooms. Everyone in this whole healthcare ecosystem or the people working in our vaccination sites, they are owed a tremendous debt of gratitude. And I'll be addressing this whole industry in my state of the state address in a matter of days because we saw how much we relied on them in ordinary times, but even in these extraordinary times when we're dealing with this pandemic. So, places like Clinton Community College, thank you for educating the next generation of healthcare workers, our highly ranked public college. And so, I want to thank them. I want to thank our friends at SOMOS for a great partnership. They've done an amazing job as well as everyone who's been part of this.
So, what else can the state of New York do for the North Country? You know, I've always felt that — I come from Western New York, Buffalo, and you kind of feel like you're so far away from everybody no one really pays attention to you. You get that feeling here in the north country, I know, you tell me. And that's why I try to give all my counties, all my 62 counties — which I visited all of them again this year — a little bit of extra attention to say, no, you're not forgotten. I know how important you are.
And in areas like this, it’s just beautiful. We understand the high quality of life, why people want to live here. But in times like this, access to health care gets more challenging. There aren’t a lot of hospitals down the street, there aren’t a lot of facilities to go to. So, creating this opportunity with the pop-up site is important, but also for the north country, we are also now talking about how important these enhanced masks are. The KN-95 masks and N-95 masks. We delivered over 185,000 of these masks to the north country alone this week, encouraged people to wear them, get them out to the businesses where they're fulfilling their responsibility to make sure everyone who comes in is wearing a mask.
If you have to deliver it, this is the kind you need to wear. We sent over 35,000 to Clinton County alone. So, they are here. They are very fashionable. Make sure you try these on, and they're very nicely fitted. So, make a new fashion statement with your new N-95 masks. We also believe in testing. And this, as I mentioned about getting kids back to schools, we are working tirelessly to talk to our school superintendents. I was on a call with over 500 of them just yesterday to talk about our strategy to make sure that every child gets back into a classroom. And we have tremendous respect for the teachers who have been through crazy times, is how nicely I can say it.
They've been in a very bad place with trying to deal with the struggles of kids being taught remotely. And they did an incredible job. They did the very best they could, and they care about the children in their classrooms. They want to make sure that they're getting the very best education. But also, we saw with the isolation from remote education, how much that took children down to a place of just isolation and loneliness and not having that connection with other classmates and their teachers really took an emotional toll on them.
And we're seeing that now. That's why we know we have to make sure that kids end up back in school. So we are providing over 22,000 tests for schools in the North Country. Let's get them out. There is different strategies you could employ. And one would be when children return to school, make sure they're tested. But also, what has happened before with the quarantine requirements in place. That children are in a classroom, they think they're doing well, one of their classmates test positive, everybody goes home for 10 days. Then you come back for a week. Then another one tests positive and you go home for another 10 days.
I saw this happen with people who work with me and it's absolutely maddening. It is so hard for the parents to get back to work, how they arrange for childcare, and so disruptive for the children and the teachers as well. So, we want to Institute fully, a test to stay program. And what that does is it makes sure that you have the tests available to be able to send home with the children. Put them in the backpack if someone tests positive in their class. Let the parents test them the next morning and send them back if it's negative. Test them again in a few days. We'll make sure everyone has those protocols, but that's why we wanted to have 3,000 of those test kits for Clinton County right there, and more to come.
We have ordered — no one saw how much we need test kids — but we truly were ahead of this. We ordered 37 million tests to be available. They're not all here yet, but every time a plane flies over, I'm saying, “is that the one that's got my supplies on it” because we're literally getting 500,000 here, another million here, and we're getting them out. So, they'll be there when you need them to make sure your schools have everything they need. We also have more testing sites in the neighboring Franklin County. We have another testing site going live on Thursday and one in Malone as well, in Malone is where it's going to be.
So, Clinton County was selected to be one of six counties for part of a six-week partnership with our state Department of Health and our local health departments. This is all about supporting our rural counties, make sure they get the vaccination efforts. So, we did have a couple of pop-ups already here on the 16th and 18th of December. We had over a thousand doses administered in those couple of days, which is incredible.
And our next events will be at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh on the 30th, which I believe is today… or tomorrow. Okay, it's not quite New Year's Eve. I'm really excited — I'm so excited to say goodbye to 2021. I really want it to be over. So, we have that in addition to what we're doing here today and on the 8th at the YWCA.
So thank you for working on that, but let's wait – so the word is out now. So you can plan for that. But as I'm saying, this is the day to come in, come right here, come right now, because we’re open until seven o'clock. The lines are not long. There are only a few people there. People seem really happy. It's not stressful. And so we want to make sure that we are supporting what SOMOS is doing here today and we'll also have a Queensbury site in the North Country.
So that's what we're doing here in the North Country, I do want to touch on some of the statewide numbers, it's just part of this report. Statewide, we have had an uptick in the number of positive cases, 67,000 positive cases yesterday. That's quite high. Clinton County had 9,615 positive cases. But we also look at – that's a factor of how many people are tested. And so yesterday we did 362,000 tests. Think about it. 362,000 tests in one day. That's incredible. That's incredible. That shows that we've now been able to deploy the resources to make sure people can get tested.
And that is a very positive outcome, but that does allow us to see exactly what's going on here. Statewide that's 222 per hundred thousand. North Country is only 47 per hundred thousand. So now I don't want to get you too excited. These are a little bit off numbers because of the holiday week, we’re not quite sure if there's a little bit of lag time so don't rest on your laurels here, continue to get vaccinated and do everything you can. But a lot of people are getting tested around the holidays, which we think is really smart to do.
Sadly we lost 97 New Yorkers yesterday. That is not the direction we want to go. It is heartbreaking to know that there's families that will not see the end of the New Year with their loved one, and we keep them in our prayers. And 6,700 New Yorkers were hospitalized yesterday. So still less than we had this time last year, but we know this is an area of concern, but as I always talk about – what is our hospital capacity? How are we managing this? Can we handle the COVID patients in addition to this, in addition to the normal patients?
So we have now seen, right now, again, this could change, I'm always having to qualify this, an 8% increase in our bed capacity. This is good news. As we've been circling the state and monitoring where hospitals have particular needs, we've been deploying individuals, extra staff, extra ambulances, National Guard to help keep our occupancy at a place we can handle to keep our capacity high.
So we do have cases where we had to stop elective surgery, but we did not want to do that statewide because we know how crippling that can be for a hospital system. We also have that in our tool chest if we need to create more bed capacity, we've only had 25 hospitals who will be suspending the elective surgeries.
So the North Country has about 27% of beds available. That's good, could go a little bit higher, but you're not in the danger zone, you know, 10% or under is the danger zone. And ICU beds are about 15%, so keeping an eye on that. As I mentioned, we've had to deploy the National Guard to various places, including the nursing home here. And why do we do that? If you have people who can be discharged from a hospital, creating more bed space for others, but you can't send them to a nursing home or a long-term care facility because they don't have enough staff, then you have a log jam in the hospital. So we've sent the National Guard to really free up the capacity in the nursing homes.
More people can be discharged, frees up the bed space. So all part of our larger strategy to make sure we're carefully calibrating our bed capacity and sending resources where we need to. So we're basically preparing for a January surge. We know it's coming and we're naive to think it won't. We just had, a few days ago, families travel all over the county. Driving, some are still stranded at airports if you watch the news in the morning, how sad it is, if you went to visit someone and you're still waiting for that plane to take off because of the quarantining rules, or a lot of the airline staff are not able to work, all these reasons. But people were with other people, not their usual family.
So because they're with extended family and friends, we do think there's going to be a spike in cases. That's going to continue, not just in our positive rates, but also in hospitalizations. And then we have New Years. It'd be great if everybody just stood outside and blew off some fireworks – they’re not legal don't blow off fireworks, pretend fireworks, you know, popping the champagne and having some fun, throwing some sparklers out, you know, having a couple of toasts, have a good time.
But if you can avoid the gathering indoors with people that aren’t part of your immediate family, this would be the year to do that. So, let's prepare for this. What we also want to do is make sure we're continuing to bring money to the communities to help them with their efforts. Today, I'm proud to announce $78 million in federal funds to help communities protect the vulnerable.
What does that mean? I mentioned, for example, nursing homes. What else can be done to help protect people in nursing homes? Communities, nonprofits, municipalities can apply for this to stop the further spread through a community development block grant, and it's administered by our Homes and Community Renewal. So, you can apply now, visit HCR.ny.gov/communityrecovery.
So, mayors and communities and not-for-profits, you can apply for this. Tell us your vision, tell us where you believe the vulnerabilities are greatest in your communities. Maybe it's where farm workers gather and we need help out in those farms, maybe it's places where people congregate in senior centers, wherever you think you need this extra help to protect the vulnerable individuals.
We thank President Biden for sending that assistance as well as they help of the elected officials, our members of Congress who did vote for the federal funding. So lastly, New Year's Eve is coming. I do hope we can have a healthier next year, but we're going to be smart. New Yorkers are — if we're anything, we're tough, we're tenacious, but we're also smart. And we're going to do the right thing by continuing to share the message about getting vaccinated, getting children vaccinated, getting the booster shots, wearing the mask. And I know I sound like a broken record, but I'm going to keep repeating it because we need to remind people that this is the way out of this.
We're not where we were, we're not as vulnerable as we were this time last year. We have vaccines widely available. We have testing widely available and also my two priorities: Protect the health of New Yorkers and also protect the health of the economy. So little coffee shops in downtown Plattsburgh, you don't have to worry about being shut down because we saw the impact on our downtowns and our small businesses and all the people who lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods, and how hard that was on New Yorkers. We came through it, but now we don't have to go back there — if people will do the right thing, if we can up the number of people who are vaccinated and even the number of people who have that first dose.
It is over 95%, that is one of the highest in the nation. 95% have one dose. What is keeping them from getting that second dose? Anybody vaccinated a month or more ago, come in today and get your second dose. Get the second dose because you're not fully protected against this virus and then make sure you get that booster shot. So, I do want to wish everyone a happy New Year.
Thank you for being such amazing partners, wonderful partners, whether you’re not-for-profits, SOMOS, people running this site here today, our elected leaders, our hospital leaders, and our angels on earth - our healthcare workers who are out there every day for us. So thank you very much to everyone. And I do also want to mention, you're losing John Kanoza. John, raise a hand. There you go. Thank you for how many years of service? 20 years of service. Retiring but you're sure you're going to go? I'm not sure the governor okayed that but thank you John. Thank you all.