ALBANY COUNTY — Starting on Thursday, the statewide mask-or-vax mandate for businesses is lifted, Governor Kathy Hochul announced at a press briefing on Wednesday.

She said she will re-evaluate the mask requirement for schools after students return from their mid-winter break and are tested for COVID-19. She termed it “a very strong possibility” that the mandate would be lifted in early March, but stressed it would depend on the metrics.

Governors in nearby Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey have all announced this past week that school-mask mandates will be lifted at various times in the coming month.

“So, New Yorkers, this is what we waited for,” said Hochul as she displayed a series of charts showing the peak with Omicron and then the decline of positive tests, hospitalizations, and cases per 100,000 of population and charts also showing the increase in vaccination and hospital capacity.

But, Hochul concluded, “We’re not done.”

Unlike in June 2021, when Governor Andrew Cuomo announced, after 70 percent of adult New Yorkers had been vaccinated, “The people of New York beat COVID,” and called for lit buildings and fireworks to celebrate as he lifted coronavirus restrictions, the Hochul administration is taking a more cautions, nuanced approach.

Health Commissioner Mary Bassett has said that, with such a rapidly-evolving virus and emerging new variants, herd immunity no longer has meaning.

While Hochul is lifting the state mask-or-vax mandate, she is letting counties, cities, and businesses make their own requirements if they so choose.

It is now up to individuals to make their own choices about whether to wear a mask or not based on “personal comfort level,” said Hochul. 

She urged people to be respectful of each other and of businesses that still choose to require masks. “We have to respect each individual’s right to assess their own risk,” she said. 

Hochul also said, “I will always retain the ability to make adjustments if necessary.”

A statewide masking directive remains in place in areas Hochul termed vulnerable, and also where large numbers of people gather and contact tracing would be difficult.

These include state-regulated health-care settings and adult-care facilities and nursing homes; correctional facilities; schools and child-care centers; homeless shelters and domestic-violence shelters; and buses and bus stations, trains and train stations, subways and subway stations, planes and airports.

“This pandemic is not over ….,” Hochul said. “I want to strike the right balance.”

New Winter Toolkit

Hochul opened her press briefing by going over her initiatives since she became governor in August.

She said she saw how quickly Omicron spread in other places in the world. “We said, ‘We do not want to shut down our economy,’” said Hochul. Hence, she put mandates in place.

Starting on Sept. 27, all health-care workers were required to have at least one vaccine dose, which was “controversial at the time, but we stood firm,” said Hochul.

On Nov. 26, she signed an executive order to pause nonessential elective procedures at hospitals that had a staffed bed capacity under 10 percent.

On Dec. 1, she deployed National Guard members to nursing homes and, on Dec. 10, she launched the mask-or-vax protocol. She started her Winter Surge Plan 2.0 on Dec. 31 to make vaccines and tests more widely available.

Hochul on Wednesday went over what she called her “New Winter Toolkit” to continue dealing with COVID-19. “This fight is not over,” she said, adding, “We’re not surrendering.”

One of the goals is to protect the most vulnerable such as nursing-home residents. Visitors to nursing homes will continue to be required to wear high-quality masks and to show proof of having a negative test within 24 hours.

A second goal is to continue to increase vaccination and booster doses. Hochul said she is hoping Pfizer will have its vaccine for children under 5 approved by the end of the month.

Currently just 30 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, Hochul said, and she’d like to see more. Eighty percent of 12- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated while 85 percent of adult New Yorkers are fully vaccinated.

The state will keep vaccination and testing sites open and will continue to encourage New Yorkers to get booster shots, Hochul said.

Strengthening the health-care system is Hochul’s third goal. She said the current system was “brought to its knees” by the pandemic and noted her state budget proposal calls for an unprecedented $10 billion for health care, including $4 billion in bonuses and $1.6 billion for improvements to facilities.

Empowering local leaders is her fourth goal. She spoke of all the “on-the-ground” leaders she has spoken to, ranging from school superintendents to county executives and stressed their importance.

The toolkit’s fifth and final goal is to support New Yorkers facing long-term effects of COVID. “We want the health-care industry to treat this seriously,” said Hochul.

Bassett said that it is not just patients who had severe cases of COVID-19 who can experience long COVID. It can also afflict those who had mild cases or were asymptomatic.

Their symptoms may never improve or they may recur or change, Bassett said. Long COVID, she said, “remains poorly understood but there is no question it is real.”

Bassett convened an online symposium last Thursday, which can be viewed at ny.gov/longcovidpanel. Experts on three panels discussed research, models of care, and policy for long COVID.

The health department is now making recommendations, Bassett said, on the need for more knowledge with formal case definition and the need for more provider education to increase diagnostic abilities as patients report being “bounced” from one uniformed provider to another.

As her department oversees Medicaid for New York State, Bassett said it needs to pioneer a mechanism for reimbursement of care. She stressed the importance of using an “equity lens” when looking at long COVID as Blacks and Hispanics have suffered disproportionately.

The best care, Bassett said, should be available to everyone, not just people with resources.

Masks at school

 Before she was sworn in as governor, Hochul said, she spoke with school leaders across the state and learned some districts were planning to continue with remote learning.

“I said no,” Hochul recalled on Wednesday.

She said, during the previous school year, “collateral damage” from remote learning included serious mental-health effects.

“We need to start healing,” she said.

Hence, she said, on her first day in office, she ended the era of remote learning. Hochul called that the “genesis of the mask mandate.”

Now, she said, as infection rates have declined and vaccination among students has increased, students, when they return from their mid-winter break, will be tested for COVID-19.

Based on those results and other data, Hochul said, she will decide whether to lift the mask mandate.

The process, she said, is “not reactive; it’s thoughtful.”

In talking to school leaders this week, Hochul said, she learned they prefer the state make the mask requirement on or off, rather than leaving it up to individual superintendents to decide.

The school superintendents are not health-care experts, Hochul said, “We’ll leave it to local health departments.”

Asked about the effectiveness of mask-wearing, Bassett said, “This had become a polarized conversation even in the medical community.” She advocated sticking to the facts and urged vaccination.

Hochul said she would “continue on the data-driven, metric-driven approach.”

She also said the state will continue with its appeal of the Nassau County Supreme Court decision that struck down the mask mandate as unconstitutional since the legislature hadn’t been involved.

Hochul said it is important to demonstrate that the state’s health department has the power to protect New Yorkers.

Free tests

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that Medicare recipients will by “early spring” be able to get COVID-19 tests for free.

Medicare covers about 60 million Americans; most of them are 65 or older, some are people with disabilities.

“Under the new initiative, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to access up to eight over-the-counter COVID-19 tests per month for free,” the announcement said. “Tests will be available through eligible pharmacies and other participating entities. This policy will apply to COVID-19 over-the-counter tests approved or authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Until then, people with Medicare can request four free over-the-counter tests for home delivery at covidtests.gov or they can access COVID-19 tests through healthcare providers at over 20,000 free testing sites nationwide.

Additionally, they can access lab-based PCR tests and antigen tests performed by a laboratory when the test is ordered by a physician, non-physician practitioner, pharmacist, or other authorized health care professional at no cost.

Albany County

This week, Albany County’s 100th of coping with the coronavirus, the county, with a population of about 315,000, passed the 60,000 mark in new COVID-19 cases.

On Wednesday morning, the county executive, Daniel Mccoy, in his daily COVID release, announced 173 new cases, bringing the county’s tally to 60,891.

Also this week, the county suffered seven COVID-related deaths: a woman in her fifties, a woman in her sixties, a man in his seventies, two women in their eighties, and two women in their nineties.

Albany County’s COVID-19 death toll now stands at 522.

The county’s most recent seven-day average of cases per 100,000 population is now down to 52.1 while its infection rate, also as a seven-day average, is 9.1 percent.

 For months, guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that, if transmission is high — that is, 50 or more cases per 100,000 — masks should be worn indoors in public.

Since May 2020, the World Health Organization advised governments that, before reopening, rates of positivity in testing (that is, out of all tests conducted, how many came back positive for COVID-19) should remain at 5 percent or lower for at least 14 days.

Johns Hopkins, which has tracked the infection rate since 2020, as of Wednesday, showed only New York, among the 50 states, is below the 5-percent threshold; New York’s positivity rate, as a seven-day average, is 4.36 percent.

On Wednesday, McCoy reported six new hospitalizations since Tuesday, and there are now 65 county residents hospitalized with the coronavirus — a net increase of three. Twelve of those hospital patients are currently in intensive-care units, up from 10 on Tuesday.

As of Tuesday, 80.6 percent of all Albany County residents have received at least the first dose of the vaccine, and 73.2 percent are now fully vaccinated. The first-dose vaccination rate for county residents 18 and older is 89.2 percent.