NY Counties Along PA Border See Uptick in COVID-19

New York has identified new microclusters of COVID-19 in parts of Steuben and Chemung Counties, both of which share a border with the state of Pennsylvania, and will place new restrictions on mass gatherings, restaurants, and schools in those areas.

Parts of both counties will be designated as so-called ‘Yellow Zones’ by the state, meaning new caps will be placed on houses of worship, mass gatherings, and parties at restaurants.

Part of Chemung County will also be designated as an ‘Orange Zone,’ which places stricter limits on mass gatherings, houses or worship, and restaurants. Schools and some non-essential businesses are also required to close in the zone.

It’s part of the latest spread of COVID-19 in the Southern Tier, which has experienced an uptick in the virus in recent weeks. Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters in Albany Wednesday that there’s now evidence of community spread in the region, meaning it’s more difficult to trace.

Cuomo said it’s possible that those cases could be coming from interstate transit with Pennsylvania, but that the commercial ties between the two states would make restricting travel economically unfeasible.

“You would see the economy suffer dramatically," Cuomo said. "It would be enormously disruptive to the economy and I believe impossible to enforce."

Cuomo said the state doesn’t have enough resources to police every border crossing between New York and its neighboring states and that, even if it did, the strain on the economy would be incalculable.

Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut have each crossed the threshold for New York’s quarantine list, which would usually require visitors from those states to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival into the state.

Cuomo’s excluded them from that list because of the amount of interstate travel between the four states, but said this week that visitors should avoid any unnecessary travel into New York.

New York’s other microclusters of COVID-19, meanwhile, appeared to be trending in the right direction Wednesday, with some additional changes announced by Cuomo to restrictions over those zones.

Some restrictions over areas of the zones in Brooklyn and Queens will be lifted, for now, Cuomo said. But the restrictions in Orange and Rockland Counties will remain the same. Neither county’s zones have met the threshold to have those restrictions lifted, he said.

The new formula announced by the state Wednesday will require the zones to report a certain share of positive COVID-19 cases to change their status. The most severely restricted zones, called ‘Red Zones,’ can be lifted when the positivity rate is below 3% over 10 days, for example.

The state will also consider if hospitalizations are going down, or if they’ve remained the same, and if there’s adequate enforcement of the state’s COVID-19 rules by local governments, Cuomo said. If enforcement doesn’t exist, the zones will remain, he said.

The statewide positivity rate, fueled in part by an oversampling of the different microclusters around the state, was at 1.6% Tuesday, according to Cuomo.