(Reuters) – The percentage of people in New York state who are testing positive for the novel coronavirus is the lowest in the United States, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Friday, citing data from Johns Hopkins University.
Cuomo said the 7-day average of the percentage of positive tests in New York was at 1.3 percent, a big improvement from an earlier peak in the state of 50 percent.
(reporting by Gabriella Borter in New York and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut, Editing by Franklin Paul)
By John Whitesides
(Reuters) – Kentucky, New York and four other states face another possibly messy day of voting on Tuesday amid the coronavirus outbreak, as officials try to balance a crush of absentee mail ballots with a reduced number of in-person polling locations.
That combination has led to long lines, delays and confusion during primaries in other states, including Wisconsin and Georgia, offering a preview of possible problems if the Nov. 3 general election is conducted under the threat of COVID-19 infections.
Kentucky and New York, which are conducting statewide primaries, encouraged mail-in balloting as a safe alternative to in-person voting during the pandemic, resulting in record numbers of absentee ballot requests. Both also encouraged early voting, while cutting back on polling locations as a safety precaution.
But officials and activists are concerned about the potential for trouble in Kentucky, where polling locations statewide were cut to fewer than 200 from more than 3,000 normally, leaving one each for the biggest counties of Jefferson and Fayette.
“It’s just a recipe for disaster. I fear there will be a lot of people who want to vote but won’t,” said Jason Nemes, a Republican state legislator who joined an unsuccessful lawsuit trying to force the largest counties to open more polls.
A competitive Democratic U.S. Senate nominating battle between progressive Charles Booker and establishment choice Amy McGrath has driven up voter interest in Kentucky. They are vying to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.
Nearly 900,000 absentee ballots were issued, or about 27% of registered voters, the Kentucky secretary of state’s office said.
Fayette County Clerk Don Blevin said Kentucky officials pushed mail-in voting in hopes of keeping the numbers down at polling places.
“We have warned people from day one – please don’t do this. It’s not safe,” Blevin, a Democrat, said of voting in person on election day.
New York has seen a similar explosion of interest in absentee ballots, issuing nearly 1.9 million, the board of elections said. In the 2016 primary, about 115,000 absentee ballots were cast.
The board did not provide the number of polling places closed across the state, but activists said consolidations had not been as widespread as in Kentucky and some other states.
There are also primary elections for some congressional, state and local offices in areas of South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia.
(Reporting by John Whitesides; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Cooney)
By Maria Caspani and Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The two most populous U.S. states took markedly different approaches to reopening on Monday with New York scolding local governments for not enforcing social distancing and California encouraging counties to restart economies if they met criteria.
Scenes of merrymakers gathering outside bars prompted the governor of New York, the state hardest hit along with New Jersey by the coronavirus pandemic, to urge local officials and businesses on Monday to strictly enforce reopening guidelines.
“To the local governments I say, ‘Do your job,'” Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters. Over the weekend he criticized New York City street crowds outside bars and asked people to adhere to six feet (two meters) of distance from others.
Both Cuomo and neighboring New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said they were keeping open the option of reimposing restrictions if officials fail to stop large public gatherings that risk leading to a second wave of infections.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has left it up to individual counties on when to reopen once they meet state guidelines. He reminded county officials of the risks of not restarting economies, as well as reopening them.
Newsom told a news briefing on Monday people could not be “locked away for months and months and months,” especially those among the 5.5 million Americans who have lost their jobs since mid-March. He said some had also lost health coverage and were among the many people suffering severe mental and physical health problems during the pandemic.
In enforcing coronavirus restrictions, he said the state and counties could not “see lives and livelihoods completely destroyed without considering the health impact of those decisions as well.”
“As we mix, as we reopen, inevitably we’re going to see an increase in the total number of cases; it’s our capacity to address that that is so foundational,” said Newsom.
NEW FORECAST
California is one of four states that is projected to see the biggest spike in deaths in the months ahead, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
Its new forecast on Monday forecast over 200,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States through the beginning of October, mainly due to reopening measures underway.
The IHME, whose estimates are cited by many health experts, projected Florida will see its deaths nearly triple to 18,675 deaths from 6,559 on June 10, while California can expect to see deaths increase by 72 percent to 15,155 from 8,812, it said.
Georgia and Arizona also have sharp increases in deaths forecast by the institute.
New York and New Jersey between them account for more than a third of the nearly 116,000 U.S. deaths, but deaths and hospitalizations have been on the decline of late. Both have followed strict health guidelines for reopening businesses when all measures of infection drop – new cases, deaths, hospitalizations and positive rates among those getting tested.
Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration director who has advised the White House on the coronavirus, said on Monday that flare-ups needed to be addressed with aggressive contact tracing and targeted responses.
“We’re not going to be able to shut down the country again this summer. We’re probably not going to be able to shut down the country again this fall,” he said on CNBC.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington, Jonathan Allen and Maria Caspani in New York, Lisa Shumaker in Chicago, Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Writing by Sonya Hepinstall and Andrew Hay; Editing by Howard Goller, Bill Tarrant and Cynthia Osterman)
By Sharon Bernstein
(Reuters) – Two Buffalo, New York, police officers were suspended without pay on Thursday after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd continued into their tenth night.
The video taken by a reporter from local public radio station WBFO and posted on its website and Twitter account shows the white-haired man approaching a line of officers in riot gear. One officer pushes him with a baton and a second one with his hand. The sound of a crack is heard and then blood trickles from the man’s head. The man, who is white, is not identified.
“I was deeply disturbed by the video,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said in a statement. “After days of peaceful protests and several meetings between myself, police leadership and members of the community, tonight’s event is disheartening.”
The incident drew widespread condemnation on social media as protesters returned to the streets of several U.S. cities to demonstrate against police brutality.
Floyd died in Minneapolis on May 25 after former police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest.
The video in Buffalo shows the majority of the officers march past after the man falls, though the officer who pushed him with a baton starts to lean over him before he is motioned away by another officer. Someone is heard calling for a medic.
The radio station reported that two medics came forward and helped the man into an ambulance. Police later said that a man was injured after tripping and falling, the radio station said.
But after viewing the video, Buffalo Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood ordered an investigation and suspended the two officers, Brown said.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Twitter that he spoke with Mayor Brown and agreed that the officers involved should be suspended, pending a formal investigation.
He wrote,”Police Officers must enforce – NOT ABUSE – the law.”
The 75-year-old victim was in stable but serious condition at Erie County Medical Center Hospital in Buffalo, Brown said.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
By Jessica Resnick-Ault
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Target Corp and Walmart said on Sunday they shuttered stores across the United States as retailers already reeling from closures because of the coronavirus pandemic shut outlets amid protests that included looting in many U.S. cities.
Protests turned violent in places including New York and Chicago following the death in Minneapolis of a black man, George Floyd, seen on video gasping for breath as a white police officer knelt on his neck.
In Los Angeles, protests led to the looting of the Alexander McQueen clothing store on Rodeo Drive, and a Gucci store on the vaunted strip was marked with the graffiti slogan: “Eat the rich,” according to local media reports.
In the nearby Grove Shopping Center, which houses 51 upscale stores, Nordstrom, Ray Ban and Apple were broken into. Nordstrom Inc temporarily closed all its stores on Sunday, it told Reuters in an emailed statement.
“We hope to reopen our doors as soon as possible,” the statement said. “We had impacts at some of them and are in the process of assessing any damage so we can resume serving customers.”
Apple Inc said in an email statement it also had decided to keep a number of its U.S. stores closed on Sunday. The company did not specify how many stores were closed, or if the closures would be extended.
The violence was widespread, and Minnesota-based Target said it was closing or limiting hours at more than 200 stores. It did not specify how long the closures would last.
The company told Reuters it was beginning to board up its Lake Street store in Minneapolis, near where Floyd was killed, for safety and to begin recovery efforts. The company said in a statement that it would plan to reopen the store late this year.
“There is certainly potential for the resulting social unrest to hurt certain businesses like retailers and restaurants, and for it to further dent consumer and business sentiment,” said Robert Phipps, director at Per Stirling. “It is even possible, particularly if the unrest continues and spreads, that it would, all other things being equal, have a significant impact on investor psychology and the markets.”
Walmart closed some stores in Minneapolis and Atlanta after protests Friday, and closed several hundred stores at 5 p.m. on Sunday, a spokesman said. “We’ll look at them each day, and at how each community is impacted and make decisions then,” the spokesman said.
Online retailer Amazon said it was monitoring the situation closely. “In a handful of cities we’ve adjusted routes or scaled back typical delivery operations to ensure the safety of our teams,” the company said in an emailed statement.
U.S. retail sales have posted record declines as the novel coronavirus pandemic kept Americans at home, putting the economy on track for its biggest contraction in the second quarter since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
(Reporting by Jessica Resnick-Ault; Additional reporting by Sinead Carew and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Peter Cooney and Diane Craft)
(Reuters) – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he would sign an executive order on Thursday authorizing businesses to deny entry to anyone who does not wear a mask or face covering, stressing masks were critical to preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“We’re giving the store owners the right to say if you’re not wearing a mask, you can’t come in. That store owner has a right to protect themselves, that store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store,” Cuomo told a daily briefing.
(reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut and Maria Caspani in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
By Shannon Stapleton and Clare Baldwin
NEOSHO, Mo. (Reuters) – The coronavirus pandemic has restricted almost everyone’s freedoms in America but for Meghan Lindsey it has done the opposite. This is the freest she has ever felt.
Traveling to New York City at age 33 to work as a COVID-19 nurse was the first time that Meghan, a married mother of two, had ever left southwest Missouri.
“It was my first time on a plane,” she said, describing how she came to work 12-hour shifts in the intensive care unit at NYU Winthrop Hospital.
“Flying into New York was the first time I’d ever seen the ocean.”
There are many stories about the lonely coronavirus deaths in the city’s hospitals and the traumatic work of the nurses who staff them.
Meghan’s story is about unexpected opportunities. It’s a story of how the pandemic gave a woman the chance to strike out into the world, confront danger and make a difference, and how her husband stayed home to care for their daughters. It’s a story about new beginnings.
“I always wanted to do something for my country,” said Meghan. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something meaningful.”
Meghan’s first nursing shifts in New York were a shock.
There are a lot of sick people in Missouri with chronic diseases like diabetes, where the progressions are slow and the declines are familiar.
COVID-19 patients are stunned by a virus that turns their lives upside down and in many cases ends them.
“One of my patients had her toes done up all nice and pretty and still had her jewelry on,” said Meghan.
Because they were coronavirus patients and visitors were banned, it was Meghan who would hold their hands as they died.
“Once you FaceTime and you meet their family and you hear them crying and sobbing, you know their cute little nicknames and you start to know them, it just gets to be really personal,” said Meghan. “You have a hard time separating yourself and not truly grieving for them as well.”
Despite all of the death, Meghan’s time in New York City’s COVID-19 wards was unexpectedly affirming. The pandemic gave Meghan something that her life in Missouri so far had not: a feeling of everything sliding into place.
When Meghan graduated from nursing school, it wasn’t like she imagined. It turned out to be just a job. She mourned.
“Now for once, it’s actually something important,” said Meghan. “This is the first time since I’ve become a nurse that it’s like, ‘yes, this is why.’ I can make a difference, and I can help, and I am strong enough for this.”
Her kids, she said, are proud. “They know that what I’m doing is hard and that I put my life in danger.”
Meghan is from a small town in Missouri. Most Sundays, she goes to church. Her mom was a manager at Walmart and her dad worked construction. Before he lost his job to the pandemic, her husband Aaron sold fire suppression systems to small businesses.
Meghan is the first in her family to finish college and has long held her family together. As thrilling as it was to be in New York, it was also hard.
Meghan often wondered if she should come home. Her husband Aaron told her no. He and the girls were fine, what she was doing mattered and he was proud of her. He sometimes called her superwoman.
“If he wasn’t such a good dad and there for my children, I could never do this,” said Meghan. He deserves credit too, she said, “but I guess you could say the limelight’s on me.”
Being a COVID-19 travel nurse isn’t glamorous. Meghan had to wear protective gear during her shifts and there was a lengthy decontamination process when she got home each night. She lived in a hotel room with another nurse and had to find a laundromat every few days to wash her scrubs.
But sometimes it did feel like a grand adventure. She saw the Statue of Liberty. She heard someone speaking Russian. She learned how to fold a slice of pizza.
Restaurants sometimes gave her and her friends free food “because we’re nurses,” she said with a bit of awe. She took selfie after selfie standing in the middle of empty New York City streets and no cabbies honked at her.
Her husband Aaron said he was sometimes a little jealous (it’s New York), occasionally worried (again, New York), but mostly he was just really proud. “Meghan hasn’t been out there in the world,” he said. She nailed it.
Now, at the end of her contract, Meghan is unsure of what the future holds.
She is back in a small town in the Midwest. She no longer has a job and she is coming off the biggest high of her life. She sometimes asks herself, will I have the desire to go back to this life?
Something about New York stood out to her: people there had aspirations to make something of themselves.
(Reporting by Shannon Stapleton and Clare Baldwin; Editing by Kieran Murray and Lisa Shumaker)
By Nathan Layne
(Reuters) – As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their workdays at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.
The idea, then and now, is to spread riders through the day to avoid the kind of crowding health experts fear could turn the subway into a breeding ground for the novel coronavirus which has killed over 20,000 people in the city.
Talks over staggered hours and days for offices are still at an early stage, a member of the New York state’s reopening panel told Reuters. Coordination could prove complex in a city of 220,000 businesses, most of them smaller firms.
But Patrick Foye, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been making the case to business leaders, signaling that he sees it as key to restoring confidence in the tangled web of 665 miles of track that ferried 5.5 million people a day before the lockdown in March.
Foye told a May 6 call organized by the Association for a Better New York that he sees staggered work hours and days as “part of the answer” to congestion, citing the 1918 response.
Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City and a member of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reopening committee, said businesses would support coordinated start times.
“It’s the expectation of employers that something like that will have to be worked out if they are going to get their people back on the trains,” she said.
During the 1918 pandemic, the New York City health commissioner, Royal Copeland, staggered starting and ending times for most businesses by 15-minute increments. While it is unclear what impact the move had, New York ultimately fared better than other cities – it had a death rate of 4.7 per 1,000 residents, far lower than Philadelphia at 7.3.
New York City is unlikely to reopen in a meaningful way until the fall. Even then, workers will likely return in phases, if at all. Employees of technology firms Twitter Inc and Square Inc, for example, have been given the option to keep working at home.
“As we try to reopen the economy the use of buildings is obviously going to change. We should be talking about implementing staggered shifts,” said Kyle Bragg, president of service workers union 32BJ SEIU.
MORE TRAINS
Last month Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and physician Jeffrey Harris published a paper titled “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City” that pointed to a parallel between rider patterns and virus spread in early March.
But some officials have said they are not convinced the subway is a root cause. One skeptic is Cuomo, who has cited data showing transit workers with below-average infection rates and a hospital survey indicating most patients had not used public transit.
Sarah Kaufman, associate director at New York University (NYU) Rudin Center for Transportation said the notion that subways spread the virus was inaccurate. “It was a failure to quickly make people stay home.”
Even so, transit and health experts say the MTA needs to go beyond disinfecting cars at night, the mandating of masks and other steps already taken. One common proposal is more frequent trains, especially on lines where people stand shoulder-to-shoulder during peak times.
“That’s the only way to help with the social distancing so that you clear the platforms quickly and there are fewer riders on the trains,” said Elodie Ghedin, a former professor of global public health at NYU who is now at the National Institutes of Health.
That would require money the MTA doesn’t have. It received $3.9 billion in emergency federal funding but is asking for $3.9 billion more to compensate for the 93 percent drop in subway revenues.
For now, companies are making their own plans. Marsh & McLennan Cos, a Manhattan-based insurance and risk management group, said it instructed office leaders to make plans for staggered teams at the office and to determine whether commuters should travel at off-peak times.
Authorities were looking at how best to use technology, including apps that could direct commuters to use trains or subways at certain times based on capacity, Wylde said, a tool that did not exist in 1918.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Frank McGurty and Grant McCool)
By Maria Caspani and Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Some New York City neighborhoods have seen death rates from the novel coronavirus nearly 15 times higher than others, according to data released by New York City’s health department on Monday, showing the disproportionate toll taken on poor communities.
The data shows for the first time a breakdown on the number of deaths in each of the city’s more than 60 ZIP codes. The highest death rate was seen on the edge of Brooklyn in a neighborhood dominated by a large subsidized-housing development called Starrett City.
Civic leaders had been pushing for the more granular data, which they said would show stark racial and economic disparities after New York City became the heart of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world in March and April.
In the wealthy, mostly white enclave of Gramercy Park in Manhattan, the rate is 31 deaths per 100,000 residents, the data shows. A long subway ride away in Far Rockaway in the borough of Queens, which is more than 40% black and 25% Latino or Hispanic, the death rate is nearly 15 times higher: 444 deaths per 100,000 residents.
“It’s really heartbreaking and it should tug at the moral conscience of the city,” Mark Levine, chairman of the City Council’s health committee, said in an interview. “We knew we had dramatic inequality. This, in graphic form, shows it’s even greater than maybe many of us feared.”
Poor black and Latino New Yorkers are much more likely to do low-paid, essential jobs that cannot be done remotely, putting them at higher risk of exposure, Levine said. They are also more likely than rich, white New Yorkers to live in smaller, more crowded apartments.
Due to inequalities in access to healthcare, they are also more likely to have underlying health conditions, such as diabetes or hypertension, Levine said.
The city had been releasing a daily update of cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, by ZIP code, but only gave a breakdown of deaths for each of the city’s five boroughs.
The coronavirus has killed at least 20,800 people in the city so far, according to health department data.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Maria Caspani in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
By Chris Canipe and Lisa Shumaker
(Reuters) – Most U.S. states reported a drop in new cases of COVID-19 for the week ended May 17, with only 13 states seeing a rise in infections compared to the previous week, according to a Reuters analysis.
Tennessee had the biggest weekly increase with 33%. Louisiana’s new cases rose 25%, and Texas reported 22% more cases than in the first week of May, according to the Reuters analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.
(Open https://tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR in an external browser for a Reuters interactive)
Michigan saw new cases rise 18% after five weeks of declines. Michigan was hit hard early in the outbreak and has seen more than 4,800 deaths.
Nationally, new cases of COVID-19 are down 8% in the last week, helped by continued declines in New York and New Jersey. Nearly all 50 U.S. states, however, have allowed some businesses to reopen and residents to move more freely, raising fears among some health officials of a second wave of outbreaks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended states wait for their daily number of new COVID-19 cases to fall for 14 days before easing social distancing restrictions.
As of May 17, 13 states had met that criteria, down from 14 states in the prior week, according to the Reuters analysis.
WHERE NEW CASES ARE FALLING
Kansas and Missouri saw the biggest declines in new cases from the previous week, after an outbreak at a St. Joseph, Missouri meatpacking plant resulted in over 400 cases in the first week of May. St. Joseph sits on the Kansas-Missouri border, just north of Kansas City.
Washington D.C. saw a 32% decline after several weeks of growth.
Georgia, one of the first states to reopen, saw new cases fall 12% in the past week and now has two consecutive weeks of declining cases.
Globally, coronavirus cases top 4.5 million since the outbreak began in China late last year. On a per-capita basis, the United States has the third-highest number of cases, with about 45 for every 10,000 people, according to a Reuters analysis.
(Reporting by Chris Canipe in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lisa Shumaker in Chicago)
