Governor Andrew Cuomo says data being collected on new COVID-19 infections across New York has revealed some surprising results. Cuomo ordered hospitals statewide to begin collecting detailed information on new patients to help figure out where they're coming from and how they're getting infected.
At his Wednesday briefing, Cuomo said the surprise is that the vast majority of the 600 new patients a day, 66 percent of them, were infected at home. Authorities had assumed most would be essential workers or nursing home patients, but only 18 percent were nursing home patients or employees. Authorities had also speculated that many people would turn out to be infected while riding on public transit; hence the nightly sanitizing of the New York City subways. In fact, only four percent of the newly-infected had been on public transit in the days before they got sick.
Cuomo says this seems to reaffirm that social distancing and precautionary behavior including wearing masks in public is important.