Connecticut, New Jersey and New York have all implemented a new system for handling out-of-state travelers. Starting Wednesday, people that travel out of the tri-state area will have to quarantine for 14 days. This applies only to travelers who are coming from areas with high numbers of COVID-19 cases.
According to CNN, the governors of the three states confirmed on Wednesday what criteria a traveler’s state has to meet to be quarantined. “10 per 100,000 people on a seven-day rolling average or 10 percent of the total population testing positive on a seven-day rolling average”. This now includes several Southeastern states, as well as Arizona, Washington and Texas.
The COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared by the WHO in February. The US has been struggling to respond to the pandemic in the intervening months. A combination of a slow response to the virus and a lack of adequate testing has left the US flat-footed in its ability to slow the spread of the virus. A slow, messy rollout of social distancing guidelines and store closures did little to slow the virus.
While the death toll is finally leveling off nationally, some parts of the country are still seeing intermittent spikes in case numbers. Arizona, South Carolina and Florida, for instance, have recently seen huge spikes in their cases. Thankfully, fewer are progressing to critical levels than in March and April. Most critical patients have been over the age of 65.
Typically, older patients already need to worry about things like arthritis pain treatment. Adding a deadly respiratory illness to the list of things for older patients to contend with seems unfair.
New York Governor Andrew Coumo stated that New York needs to fight to keep COVID-19 from roaring back in the region. “We have to make sure the virus doesn’t come in on a plane,” the governor stated on Wednesday. “We worked very hard to get the viral transmission rate down, and we don’t want to see it go up.”
New York was once the epicenter of the virus globally. However, over the course of months, the state managed to gradually taper off the number of active cases. As their cases fell, however, case numbers in the Southeast and other pockets of the US have jumped.
Some epidemiologists fear that COVID-19 may become endemic in the US. Given the disease’s stubbornly high numbers and the country’s inability to trace its spread, it could become a permanent fixture in the US. Short of a vaccine, COVID could become just another part of daily life.
