Elective surgeries and ambulatory care can recommence in Nassau County hospitals, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today. Suffolk got the go-ahead on elective surgeries and ambulatory procedures Saturday.
The governor today also announced a two-week pilot program in 16 hospitals across the state to start to bring visitors back to hospitals.
“This is getting visitors back into the hospital with the right precautions, with the right equipment… to see if we can do it safely,” Cuomo said.
The only hospital in Suffolk selected for the pilot program is Huntington Hospital. Plainview Hospital in Nassau is the only other Long Island hospital on the list. Both are members of the Northwell Health System.
Other hospitals in the pilot program are: Lenox Hill Hospital, New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan, NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan; Jacobi Medical Center and Montifiore— Henry and Lucy Moses in the Bronx; Coney Island Hospital and Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn; Mount Sinai Hospital in Queens; and Westchester Medical Center. The other four hospitals in the program are in upstate counties.
Cuomo also announced that the Capital Region is now eligible to begin a phased reopening.
With the Capital Region cleared to begin reopening, that leaves only the three downstate counties still under full restrictions: Long Island, New York City and the Mid-Hudson regions.
The state has established seven benchmarks for reopening. The Long Island region still falls short on two of them. One is a 14-day decline in hospital deaths or fewer than five deaths per day on a three-day rolling average. The other is the requirement for hiring 30 contract tracers per 100,000 residents.
Long Island has made great progress, the governor said.
“On Long Island, we were losing about 100 residents per day. Now it’s down to about 13 per day,” Cuomo said. “If we didn’t do what we did, we would have lost many more.”
The coronavirus has claimed the lives of 3,832 Long Island residents as of yesterday, according to data published today by the State Health Department.
Overall, the number of new deaths in the state continues to decline. Cuomo today reported 105 additional deaths yesterday. In contrast, for 10 days in mid-April, at the peak of the crisis more than 700 New Yorkers died every day.
New York’s COVID-19 death toll currently stands at 22,843.
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