New CT Quarantine Order For Certain Travelers

CONNECTICUT — The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut announced a mandatory 14-day quarantine for travelers coming into the region from states with high rates of coronavirus infections. The quarantine mandate will go into effect at midnight Wednesday.

“We are announcing today a joint travel advisory people coming in from states with a high infection rate must quarantine for 14 days,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.

The list of states subject to the rules will be updated depending on infection rates. Currently they include Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Utah and Texas, Cuomo said.

Any state with a positive coronavirus test rate of 10 percent or greater over a seven-day period will fall into that list; another measure used will be the rate of daily new cases per 100,000 people in a state. The list of states subject to the rules will be updated weekly, said Acting Connecticut Department of Health Commission Deidre Gifford.

The rules will also apply to Connecticut residents who travel to hard-hit states like Florida and Texas.

“If you are coming back from Miami Beach you have to quarantine just like anyone else,” Gov. Ned Lamont said.

Lamont is working with the governors of New York and New Jersey to see if a negative test result shortly before travel would allow a person to forgo the quarantine.

The tri-state area was the hardest-hit area of the country at the beginning of the pandemic. Infections and hospitalizations due to the coronavirus have been dropping since about mid-April. Connecticut has seen its hospitalizations drop 90 percent from its peak.

“You look at where we are now we did a full 180 degrees,” Cuomo said. “We went from the highest cases, the highest viral transmission rate to some of the lowest rates in the country.”

The big lesson learned in the tri-state area was that the virus likely arrived with infected people on planes.

“We had some of the highest infection rates because we had people coming from Europe who brought the virus,” Cuomo said, adding that by the time the federal government figured out the virus was being transported mainly via Europe instead of China, it was too late. Around three million Europeans came into the tri-state region between January and March.

The decision to implement the quarantine was difficult, Lamont said.

“We reluctantly came to the conclusion that this is what we have to do so our region stays safe,” Lamont said.

“I’m also looking over my shoulder and I’m seeing what’s happening in other state in this country right now and Connecticut is not an island and our region is not an island,” Lamont said. “We can’t put up a wall, we can be careful.”

For now the measure doesn't have a strict enforcement action, but one can be considered down the road if there isn't compliance, Lamont said.

Connecticut has a strong testing program and high compliance with mask use and social distancing, Gifford said. Unfortunately that isn't true in many of the states that are currently being hit by the virus, she said.

"We need to deploy every tool in our tool belt to make sure we don’t have a second wave in Connecticut … this is another tool that will help us lower the odds,” Gifford said.