Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that New York will extend the window for child abuse survivors to file lawsuits under the Child Victims Act for another five months.

Courts have been at a relative standstill since the COVID-19 pandemic began, severely limiting survivors' ability to meet with lawyers and judges.

This extension will move the deadline survivors have to file to until January 14, 2021.

Governor Cuomo, who held his daily press briefing in Poughkeepsie on Friday, also announced that hospitalizations and new COVID-19 cases have held relatively flat.

"We would have hoped that we would have come down very quickly. That's not what is happening," he said.

In the past 24 hours, 216 people passed away from the coronavirus in New York. While it is a decline from 231 the day before, the death toll has been in the 200-person range for the last several days. Forty-five of the people that passed away were in nursing homes. More than 21,000 people have died in total in New York.

A troubling new development with the coronavirus has been a rare, but severe illness in children that is similar to the Kawasaki disease and toxic shock-like syndrome. There are 73 reported cases in New York and on Thursday, a 5-year-old boy passed away in New York City from these COVID-19 related complications.

The governor said that the state will be launching an investigation into many of these deaths.

However, as the state looks to start the Phase One reopening in parts of upstate New York in a week, things are looking brighter for the hardest-hit state in the country. 

"The good news on the overall is we're finally ahead of this virus. For so long, we were playing catch-up," he said.