NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- Dozens of National Guard members will be deployed at nursing homes in New York City to help overworked staff “exhausted” by the omicron surge, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Friday.
In all, 88 non-medical National Guard members will be deployed to support staff at nine unnamed nursing homes in the city, Hochul said during a briefing on Long Island.
Additional non-medical National Guard members will also soon be deployed to overwhelmed nursing homes upstate.
Hochul said officials have been keeping a close eye on nursing homes after COVID-19 spread “like wildfire” through them earlier in the pandemic. After the most recent surge in cases driven by the omicron variant, staff members “need some relief,” she said.
“They’ve been overworked, and we literally have to send in the National Guard to help in a number of our nursing homes,” the governor said.
The 88 non-medical National Guard members are in addition to 120 medically trained members who were already deployed to 12 nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the state in December.
“That’s just another reminder that this is not over,” Hochul said of the new deployment.
The governor also had good news, saying the state’s single-day positivity rate dipped below 10%—to 9.75% on Thursday—for the first time since Dec. 20, suggesting the post-holiday surge continues to wane.
There were about 28,300 new positive cases Thursday, down significantly from the state's single-day high of 90,132 set on Jan. 7.
“We are finally trending the direction we want to go down, and that is downward, downward, downward,” Hochul said.
Total statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations also declined by 554 patients to 11,016, while the number of patients in intensive care dipped to 1,548.
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