GOVERNOR’S BRIEFING/Monday, April 27

Cuomo To Business:

You Prepare Plans

To Reopen May 15

Contractors, Manufacturers Told:

Use Your Expertise To Ensure Safety

ALBANY  – In his daily briefing, Governor Cuomo underscored his intention to open, not all, but “many parts of the state” when the un-PAUSE deadline arrives May 15.

“You know your business,” Cuomo said today, addressing construction firms and manufacturers that are first in line to reopen. “I don’t know your business … How do you incorporate into how you do your business and where you do your business, the precautions that we want to take going forward?

“How do you do social distancing, how do you do monitoring, are you going to take the temperature of people who walk in the door, et cetera, and that’s for government but it’s also a question for business.”

Here’s a related excerpt from today’s briefing:

“Know what you are doing before you do it. Those are words to live by. I don’t know who said it but it is a true axiom. We want to un-pause. May 15 is when the pause regulations expire statewide. I will extend them in many parts of the state. But in some parts of the state some regions you could make the case that we should un-pause on May 15.

“But you have to be smart about it. We all have to be smart about it. As we said there is no light switch where you flip a switch and everybody goes back to doing what they are doing. We have to take these circumstances into consideration. We have to learn the lessons, we have to move forward and we have to be smart because if you are not smart you will see that infection rate go right back to where it was. We will be right back to where we were 58 days ago and nobody wants to do that.

“So what I want to say to my regional colleagues is, be smart. Well, we want to reopen. Well, have you thought through reopening? And we have a couple of weeks, but start thinking through what it means to reopen. First question is, do we meet the CDC guidelines that say you reopen when you see a decline in numbers for 14 days?

“Second, we talked about on the reopening bringing back construction and manufacturing as the first two industries, but how do you bring them back and what precautions are going to be in place? What precautions do you want those businesses to institute when they start? And part of this is on business. You know your business. I don’t know your business. I don’t know how you do business. How do you incorporate into how you do your business and where you do your business, the precautions that we want to take going forward? How do you do social distancing, how do you do monitoring, are you going to take the temperature of people who walk in the door, et cetera, and that’s for government but it’s also a question for business.

“Healthcare capacity – you want to reopen a region. What is the healthcare capacity in that region? How many beds will you have available if that number goes up? How many ICU beds will you have available? Are you contemplating what’s going to happen when the flu season kicks in in September where we could potentially now be dealing with COVID cases on top of flu cases – you have to test for both and possibly have hospital capacity for both.

“Do we have testing in place? Is testing ready to go because testing is one of the main monitors, right? Do we have a tracing system in place? We all talk about testing tracing, isolating – that has to be in place. Test people, you then trace the contacts, you find the positive people and you isolate them. But you need a tracing system and this is something we have never done before, right? So that system has to be in place.”