Any person who has left New York City and the New York Metro area should self-quarantine for 14 days since the time they left the area to minimize the risk of spreading COVID-19 throughout the country, White House officials announced Tuesday.
“We remain deeply concerned about New York City and the New York metro area,” White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Debbie Birx said. “About 56 percent of all the cases in the United States are coming out of that metro area and 60 percent of all the new cases are coming out of the metro New York area, and 31 percent of the people succumbing to this disease.
“To everyone who has left New York over the last few days, because of the rate of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left New York ... Everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure that the virus doesn’t spread to others, no matter where they have gone, whether it’s Florida, North Carolina, or out to far reaches of Long Island.
“We are starting to see new cases across Long Island that suggests people have left the city.
“This will be very critical that those individuals do self-quarantine in their homes over the next 14 days to make sure that they don’t pass the virus to others based on the time that they left New York. So if they’re already 4 days out then it’s just 10 more days.”
Vice President Mike Pence said that everyone in the United States should be heeding the guidelines which recommends to avoid non-essential travel. He called New York City metro area a “high risk area.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, concurred with Birx’s assessment and called New York’s situation “very serious.”
“It’s a very serious situation, they’ve [New Yorkers have] suffered terribly through no fault of their own,” he said.
“If you look at the statistics, it’s disturbing, about 1 per 1,000 of these individuals are infected, that’s about eight to ten times more than in other areas,” he said, and noted that New Yorkers are “understandably” wanting to leave the city for other areas in the United States.
“When they go to another place—for their own safety, they’ve got to be careful, monitor themselves, if they get sick bring it to the attention of a physician, get tested,” Fauci said, and again reiterated that a self-isolation of two weeks since leaving New York “will be very important because we don’t want that to be another seeding point for the rest of the country wherever they go.”
Confirmed cases of the CCP virus continue to rise in the United States as testing and access to it improves and as more people are becoming exposed to the virus.
New York’s case count appears to be doubling every three days, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo. New York surpassed 25,000 cases on Tuesday and has logged at least 210 deaths due to the CCP virus.
The United States confirmed more than 10,000 new cases on Tuesday, the highest number of new CCP virus cases reported in one day in the country so far.
