NEW YORK — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has finally had to admit what a lot of us have known for a long time: His coronavirus travel quarantine is utterly unenforceable.
It’s actually been a joke.
The charade finally crumbled when our Northeast neighbors, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, recently met the threshold for the quarantine.
Each state had a seven-day rolling average of 10 new cases per 100,000 people. Pennsylvania, in particular, has seen its virus positivity rate jump in recent weeks.
So set up the barricades, right? Wrong.
Cuomo said that it would be “impractical” to enforce the quarantine on those three states. Those travelers will not have to quarantine for 14 days if they come to New York, unlike travelers from 40 other states.
“There are just too many interchanges,” the governor said. “There are too many interconnections.”
Hey, are we in the middle of a national health crisis or not? How can any state be excluded if the pandemic is so grave?
No explanation other than because Cuomo says so. Or because maybe the pandemic isn’t all that dire after all.
But we know the real reason: Cuomo has always been reluctant to point the finger at Democratic blue states that have had a rough ride with COVID-19.
Recall how Cuomo thundered when cases spiked around the country during the summer, heaping particular scorn on red states Florida and Texas.
They followed the politics and reopened too soon, Cuomo said. They followed the lousy advice of President Donald Trump and got everything wrong. We in tough, loving New York followed the science, Cuomo intoned a million times, and we got it right.
Rarely did Cuomo mention blue California during the summer surge, even though coronavirus the Golden State got positively crushed.
And when you look at the overall pandemic scorecard today, which states have the worst coronavirus records? California has the highest number of cases in the nation. New York, by far, has the highest number of deaths.
So who got it right and who got it wrong?
Texas and Florida are also near the top of the bad list, no doubt. But they are by no means there alone, despite what Cuomo would tell you. Blue New Jersey has been slammed as well.
And can we talk about Pennsylvania? The positivity rate there right now is 10.5 percent, according to methods used by Johns Hopkins University and media outlet lehighvalleylive.com.
When was the last time you heard Cuomo rail about the Keystone State blowing it? Never. Because blue Pennsylvania isn’t on the governor’s personal political hit list.
Cuomo in recent days has talked about scrapping the travel quarantine entirely. He’s talked about giving rapid tests to travelers instead. But even Democratic lawmakers say that there aren’t enough rapid tests to go around.
Cuomo has also advised that people should travel between the northeast states on essential business only. The whole idea of a quarantine on travelers was laughable even before all this.
How does randomly pulling every tenth vehicle over on the highway keep anybody safe? How can the state and city follow up with travelers in order to ensure that they are indeed quarantining? It’s like counting sand on the beach.
But the joke isn’t really funny. Because the travel stricture did allow cars to be pulled over without cause, a violation of civil liberties that hit Staten Island particularly hard. It allowed the state to collect data from travelers for purposes of contact tracing.
What’s happened to all that info? Where is it stored? Who has access to it? We’ll never know. The whole thing has been a joke. And a dangerous one. At least now Cuomo admits it.
(Tom Wrobleski writes for the Staten Island Advance.)
October 28, 2020 at 01:37AM
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Now even Cuomo sees that travel quarantine is a joke - Olean Times Herald
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