State officials are meeting with downstate health departments and school officials, backtracking the movements of a Westchester County attorney who tested positive for the novel Coronavirus.
Governor Cuomo said in a media briefing Wednesday that the man’s wife, son and daughter have now tested positive for the virus, as did a neighbor who drove the man to the hospital when he began to feel sick. The son is 20 and attends Yeshiva University; the daughter attends a private high school. Both those institutions are closed today and making plans for the future.
Governor Cuomo says both SUNY and CUNY are now calling back their students from study abroad programs in the five countries on the federal Coronavirus watch list. The governor says those students will be brought back on charter flights to Stewart Airport, and they will be quarantined for 14 days in dormitories near there. There are about 300 students and associated faculty, and they will be kept in dormitories selected by the state near Long Island, in Western New York and in the Utica-Rome area.
A network of private and hospital-owned labs is now joining the state’s Wadsworth Lab in gearing up to administer the Coronavirus tests.
On a positive note, Governor Cuomo says two families in Buffalo who recently returned from Italy have tested negative for the virus. So did people who recently returned to Oneida and to Suffolk Counties.
The husband of New York’s first confirmed Coronavirus victim tested negative. She’s a health care worker who recently returned from Iran, which has an outbreak of the virus.
Cuomo says we have an epidemic of the virus, but he cautioned against what he called a “pandemic of fear” he says is caused by the spread of wrong information.