New Yorkers Ordered To Wear Face Masks When Not Social Distancing

NEW YORK, NY — New Yorkers will be forced to wear a facial covering such as a bandana or face mask when they're in public and cannot socially distance themselves from others, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday. Cuomo said he would sign an executive order mandating the facial covering and give people three days to become compliant with the new rules. Cuomo said civil violations, while not enacted yet, could be in store for people who are not wearing a facial covering in public and are not at least 6 feet from others.

The order includes public transit and even busy sidewalks and intersections, Cuomo said.

"Stopping the spread is everything," he said. "How could you not wear a mask?"

Disposable N95/KN95 face mask

The latest severe measure comes as 752 more people died of the COVID-19 disease, bringing the state's death toll Wednesday to 11,586.

At his daily briefing Wednesday, Cuomo outlined steps that must happen before he will reopen the economy and emphasized the pandemic won't end until a vaccine or medical treatment is created and widely available — a major undertaking that he said will require the federal government's assistance.

"It's over when we have a vaccine," Cuomo said, noting that could be 12 months to 18 months away because the FDA must first perform tests.

Furthermore, once the government decides to reopen the economy, it won't do so all at once. Cuomo stressed it will be a "new normal," and said it will likely be a gradual phase-in of businesses favoring the "essential nature" of the company, as well as whether the company requires workers to be in close proximity to each other. Those that are deemed by the state to be more essential and don't require workers to be near each other will likely be allowed to reopen first.

But even before that happens, the nation will need to scale up testing for antibodies and diagnostics, the governor said. Specifically, finding millions of tests, places to conduct and analyze the tests, and even ramp up the availability of the chemicals in the tests.

"We're going to a different place," Cuomo said. "And we should be going to a different place."

The bottom line: The United States needs large scale testing, and only the federal government has the ability to do it.

"We can't do it yet," Cuomo said, referring to New York's state government. "That is the unvarnished truth."
So far, the state, which has about 19 million people, has performed about 500,000 COVID-19 tests total over the course of a month.

"You get a sense of the scale we need here," Cuomo said.

While state health officials developed their own antibody test — performed with a finger prick — Cuomo noted it will only be able to perform about 2,000 tests per day unless the FDA allows the state to ramp up to about 100,000 a day.

"Testing capacity to me is like what ventilators were over the past month," Cuomo said, noting that experts predicted the state would be thousands short of what would be needed.

Cuomo once again called for the federal government to pass legislation that would send funding to state governments to allow them to carry out essential functions.

The state on Wednesday continued to see its infection curve flatten.

Total hospitalizations dipped slightly to 18,335 from 18,697 a day earlier, the net change in hospitalizations fell 362 and the net three-day change in hospitalizations fell by 124. New daily COVID-19 hospitalizations, however, ticked up to 2,253.

The net change in intubations continued to improve, falling to minus 2 after peaking at over 350 earlier in the month.