State-Wide Restrictions On Bars, Restaurants, Gyms, Residential Gatherings To Be Implemented Friday Night

by Kassadee Bradshaw | November 12, 2020 10:23 am

OSWEGO COUNTY – Yesterday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that some state-wide restrictions will be put in place Friday at 10 p.m. due to the increase in COVID-19 cases across New York.

These restrictions include:

• Bars, restaurants and gyms or fitness centers, as well as any State Liquor Authority-licensed establishment, will be required to close from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily.
• Restaurants will still be allowed to provide curbside, food-only pick-up or delivery after 10 p.m., but will not be permitted to serve alcohol to go.
• Indoor and outdoor gatherings at private residences will be limited to no more than 10 people.

According to Cuomo’s press release[1], the limit on residential gatherings will be implemented due to the recent prevalence of COVID spread resulting from small indoor gatherings including Halloween parties. These gatherings have become a major cause of cluster activity across the state.

“If you look at where the cases are coming from, if you do the contact tracing, you’ll see they’re coming from three main areas: establishments where alcohol is served, gyms, and indoor gatherings at private homes,” Governor Cuomo said in a press release. “The reason we have been successful in reducing the spread in New York is we have been a step ahead of COVID. You know where it’s going; stop it before it gets there. And you know where it’s going by following the science. This is the calibration that we’ve talked about: increase economic activity, watch the positivity rate – if the positivity rate starts to go up, back off on the economic activity. It was never binary — economic activity or public health — it was always both.”

Within one week (November 5 to November 11), there have been 194 additional positive cases of COVID-19 in Oswego County.

“This week we have seen a dramatic increase in COVID virus activity,” said Oswego County Legislature Chairman James Weatherup. “The health department’s disease investigations show that what started out as a small community cluster started to spread very quickly through social gatherings about a week or 10 days ago.”

In his weekly briefing[2] this Tuesday, Weatherup warned at the rate the virus is spreading in Oswego County, there would soon be restrictions on public gatherings and other activities.

Oswego County’s neighbor to the south, Onondaga County, was recently declared a Yellow Zone (of the state’s Micro-Cluster Strategy), which restricts the following: social gatherings are limited to 25 people, schools must increase COVID-19 testing, bars and restaurants close at midnight, and restaurants can only serve four people at each table.

More information on the Micro-Cluster Strategy can be found here.[3]

Oswego County’s metrics for entering a Yellow Zone are: Geographic area has 7-day rolling average positivity above 3.5% for 10 days AND Geographic area has 15 or more new daily cases per 100,000 residents on 7-day average.

As of Tuesday, Oswego County’s 7-day rolling average of positive cases was 2.1%.

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/news/state-wide-restrictions-on-bars-restaurants-gyms-residential-gatherings-to-be-implemented-friday-night/

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