Westchester Health Care Workers Less Likely To Contract COVID-19

VALHALLA, NY — New testing at hospitals in New York shows that health-care workers on the front lines are not more likely to have contracted COVID-19, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at his daily briefing.

Speaking from New York Medical College in Westchester County, the governor said that antibody testing of healthcare workers in the hardest-hit areas of the state found they were less likely to be infected with the new coronavirus.

"The infection rate is lower than the infection rate among the general population," he said.

He singled out Westchester in particular, where health care workers have half the infection rate of the general population. While just under 14 percent of the county's residents have antibodies in their blood from having been infected, only 6.8 percent of health care workers tested positive for the antibodies.

He called it "really good news."

He also said it proves that it works to take protective measures like wearing a mask.

The governor also announced a 60-day extension of his moratorium on evictions. The rule applies to both residential and commercial tenants.

New York has shown how to deal with the pandemic, he said, exhibiting a slide taken from the New York Times that shows the progress of the outbreak in the state versus the rest of the country.

It's essential to act on facts and not emotion and politics, he said. "Principles matter," he said, calling the argument that it's OK for some people to die in order to re-open the economy "absurd."

He said the facts show that the new coronavirus spreads most rapidly in places where people are densely congregated — citing the outbreaks at the meat-packing plants in the midwest and the large greenhouse in upstate New York.

"It's the density. That's what happened in Westchester, in New Rochelle," Cuomo said. "It had nothing to do with New Rochelle."

A New Rochelle resident who was New York's second COVID-19 case had been to several large gatherings at a synagogue. In the first 10 days of March, New York went from 2 to 173 cases, most of them in Westchester, and the state had imposed a virus containment zone in New Rochelle in a 1-mile radius around the synagogue to try to slow the transmission. SEE: Coronavirus: 1-Mile Containment Area In New Rochelle

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