People traveling to New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut from states with active coronavirus outbreaks will be required to quarantine for 14 days after their arrival in the area, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and Connecticut governor Ned Lamont said Wednesday.
“It’s only for the simple reasons that we worked very hard to get the viral transmission rate to go down,” Cuomo said. “We don’t want to see it go up because a lot of people come into this region and they could bring the infection with them.”
Cuomo said visitors from a state with an infection rate of “10 per 100,000 on a seven-day rolling average, or 10 percent of the total population positive on a seven-day rolling average” would be subject to the quarantine. As of Wednesday, that includes people coming from Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Utah, and Texas. The list of states will change as the circumstances in those states change, he said.
The order marks a major reversal from several months ago, when people from the three states, and especially New York City, were discouraged from entering other parts of the country. In March, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order requiring visitors from the three states to fill out a form to more easily track them once they entered the state. Rhode Island briefly had a quarantine order in place for visitors from New York before expanding it to anyone from any part of the country. And President Trump in March told reporters he was “thinking about” putting a quarantine in place for New York State, given the severity of the outbreak.
The nationwide dynamics have changed dramatically since then. While Florida set a record with 5,500 new cases on Tuesday, New York reported just 600 positive tests Monday.
