State Brief

On Aug. 7, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced that based on each region’s infection rate, schools across the state are permitted to open this fall. Every region’s infection rate is below the threshold necessary by the State’s standards to open schools. 

The Department of Health will review submitted reopening plans from school districts and was expected to notify districts of their status on Monday. Out of 749 school districts across the state, 127, at the time of this reporting, have not yet submitted plans to the Department of Health, and another 50 are incomplete or deficient, according to the governor’s office.

The determination of how individual districts reopen – in-person vs. a hybrid model – will be made by local school districts under strict Department of Health guidelines. The Department of Health’s guidance is available at https://www.governor.ny.gov/. 

The Governor also announced that school districts must post their remote learning plan online as well as their plan for testing and tracing students and teachers. Schools must also have three to five public meetings prior to Aug. 21 with parents – who will be allowed to participate remotely – as well as one meeting with teachers to go through their reopening plan. 

“Based on our infection rate, New York State is in the best possible situation right now. If anybody can open schools, we can open schools. We do masks, we do social distancing, we’ve kept that infection rate down, and we can bring the same level of intelligence to the school reopening that we brought to the economic reopening,” Governor Cuomo said.” 

Also last week, Governor Cuomo announced that two additional states and the Virgin Islands meet the metrics to qualify for the travel advisory requiring individuals who have traveled to New York from those areas, all of which have significant community spread, to quarantine for 14 days. 

The newly added states are Hawaii and South Dakota. Alaska, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island have been removed. 

The quarantine applies to any person arriving from an area with a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a 7-day rolling average or an area with a 10 percent or higher positivity rate over a 7-day rolling average. 

“New York went from one of the worst situations in the country, to an example for the rest of the nation to follow,” Governor Cuomo said, adding, “Our numbers continue to remain low and steady, which shows this virus will respond to an approach based on science, not politics. In order to protect this progress, we must keep up our efforts – we cannot go back to the hell we experienced a few months ago, which is why we are adding Hawaii, South Dakota and Virgin Islands to the travel advisory.” 

The full, updated travel advisory list includes Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, the Virgin Islands, and Wisconsin.

Alaska, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island have been removed from the travel advisory. Individuals in quarantine after traveling from a state that has been removed from the advisory should continue to quarantine for the full 14 days.