Indoor dining in New York could be barred soon, says Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York [US], December 8 : Amid a worrying increase in hospitalisations due to Covid-19, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday announced new criteria for rolling back the state's reopening and reintroducing shutdown restrictions by region.
Under Cuomo's plan, the state health department will use hospitalisation rates as thresholds for a shutdown and for restricting indoor dining, which he said could be barred in New York City as soon as Monday, though it was not certain, reported New York Times.
"If you're going to overwhelm the hospital system, then we have no choice but to go to close down," he said at a news conference in Manhattan.
During his press conference, the New York Governor announced that 4,602 people were hospitalised across the state.
In an attempt to avoid coronavirus-related restrictions, the state's health department will order hospitals statewide to increase their capacity by 25 per cent, a strategy it used in the spring as hospitals in and around New York City began to fill, New York Times reported.
"If after five days, we haven't seen a stabilization in a region's hospitalization rate, we're going to clamp down on indoor dining," he said on Monday.
The state will look at the seven-day average rate of increase in a region's hospitalisation rate. Restrictions will be implemented including closing of non-essential businesses, limiting restaurants to takeout and delivery, and prohibiting nearly all gatherings, if projections show that a region will hit 90 per cent within three weeks.
Under Cuomo's new plan, several regions of the state will be forced to shut down if they appeared to be on track to hit a 'critical' level of hospitalizations, which Cuomo said was 90 per cent of their total capacity. However, he said that none of the regions of the state had yet approached the threshold for a shutdown.
On the other hand, in contrast to Cuomo's statements, New Jersey Governor on Monday said that the state was not ready to suggest indoor dining should shut down, reported New York Times.
"If we saw explicit waves of transmission coming out of the indoor dining experience, obviously we would have a different approach," he said.
Last week, Cuomo announced the state would focus on hospitalisations and warned of a 'nightmare of overwhelmed hospitals.'
The US continues to the worst affected country by the pandemic. According to Johns Hopkins University, there are 14,888,471 COVID-19 cases in the country and 283,326 deaths due to the virus.