New York could see its coronavirus numbers tick upward as the pandemic surges in the south and west in the United States, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Friday in a WAMC interview.
"You're going to see our numbers and the Northeast numbers probably start to increase because the virus that you see now in the south and the west — California has real trouble — it's going to come back here," he said in the interview. "It is going to come back here. It's like being on a merry-go-round. It's totally predictable. And we're going to go through an increase. I can feel it coming. And it is so unnecessary, and so cruel."
The state, along with New Jersey and Connecticut, have placed a 14-day quarantine in effect for people who travel from states with high infection rates, including California, Texas, and Florida.
But Cuomo also acknowledged that stopping every person from the nearly two dozen states now under the travel advisory is difficult, if not impossible.
"I mean, it's very very difficult. It's trying to catch water in a screen," Cuomo said. "And there's a certain inevitability to it. It was in China, got on a plane, went to Europe; people in Europe got on a plane, came here. Then it went down south, down west, and it's going to come back."
Testing over the last several weeks in New York has shown an infection rate of around 1 percent out of tens of thousands of tests that are conducted.