NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Gov. Andrew Cuomo is warning New York City restaurants may have to cease indoor dining as early as next Monday if hospitalizations don't stabilize in the coming days.
"If after five days we haven't seen a stabilization in a region's hospital rate we're going to clamp down on indoor dining," Cuomo said. "Five days if the hospitalization rate doesn't stabilize in New York City, we're going to close indoor dining."
Indoor dining in New York City is currently limited to 25% capacity.
Outside of the city, indoor dining could be reduced from 50% to 25% capacity if the hospitalization rate doesn't improve.
Cuomo said what happens depends on New Yorkers.
"New Yorkers could change it, cause it's all a function of behavior," Cuomo said.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, who appeared at the governor's briefing, backed the idea of closing restaurants, but said schools should stay open.
"Test positivity in school is actually really low, which is really a good thing, which is one of the reasons why when we were talking about what the best strategy would be we would say something like, 'Close the bars, keep the schools open' is the best thing to do, so long as you subsidize and help the restaurauteurs and the bar owners so that they don't go down and essentially crash because of the economic strain," the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. "But if we can keep those things under control, subsidize those people, as well as keep the schools open, we'd be in good shape."
Additionally, the state's Health Department is ordering hospitals to increase bed capacity by 25 percent. The governor said, if necessary, officials can request hospitals increase bed capacity by 50%.
"We can issue up to 50%, but we're only going to go to 25% because we don't have a capacity criticality at this moment," Cuomo said.
The governor also revealed the metric that will trigger the shutdown of a region.
"If our hospital capacity becomes critical, we're going to close down that region, period," Cuomo said. "Our formula is if your 7-day average shows that within three weeks you will hit critical hospital capacity, we close you down."
Critical is considered 90% of the hospital capacity.
"If we don't get the rate under control and you are going to overwhelm your hospitals we will have to go back to shutdown," Cuomo warned.
The overall statewide coronavirus positivity rate Monday was at 4.79%. Hospitalizations jumped by 160 to 4602, with 872 in ICU. The state also reported 80 additional deaths.