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People traveling to New York from nearly two-thirds of the country will now have to undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine upon entering the state after Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that 10 more states would be added to that list.
That means travelers from 31 states will now be subject to the quarantine order, which was implemented in recent weeks to address rising infection rates in states across the country.
"Our future is in their hands," Cuomo said. "We may not be unified as a nation the way we should be, but we're going to have national unity in the trajectory of COVID. One state can not protect itself from this virus."
The states of Nebraska, Delaware, Montana, Missouri, Alaska, Washington, Indiana, Maryland, Virginia, and North Dakota were added to the list Tuesday. Minnesota was removed from the quarantine order.
The regulation applies to travelers from states where the infection rate has risen above 10% of people tested over a seven-day period, or if the number of positive cases exceeds 10 per every 100,000 residents.
New York has, in recent weeks, collected contact information from people arriving by plane. That information is then used to track the compliance of those individuals. A similar process doesn’t exist for people coming into New York by car or train.
If someone is found to have violated the quarantine order, they could be slapped with a $2,000 fine and ordered by a judge to self-isolate.
That’s one of a handful of steps New York has started to take in recent weeks to avoid another surge of the virus. While the state is well into its reopening plan, certain restrictions have been put in place over the course of the last two months to contain the virus.
One, issued last week by Cuomo, now requires patrons at bars and restaurants to purchase food if they’re also ordering alcohol. That order has been met with criticism from some business owners, who’ve said it places an undue burden on bars that serve almost exclusively alcohol.
But Cuomo pushed back on that criticism Tuesday, saying the state never gave bars permission to reopen in the first place. The state allowed restaurants to reopen, he said, but bars that don’t serve food should have remained closed.
"I think there's a basic disconnect. We never authorized bars to reopen,” Cuomo said. “Bars are congregations of people milling about, and that is exactly what we're trying to avoid.”
The State Liquor Authority, Cuomo said, is suspending licenses for four bars and restaurants downstate over violations, Cuomo said, and has brought more than 400 charges against other establishments.
On the numbers, New York reached a new milestone in its COVID-19 Monday, the latest data available. Only two people died from the disease, compared to more than about 800 at the peak of the crisis in April.
Hospitalizations ticked up to 724, an increase of eight from Sunday.