New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that state officials will collect location and contact information from visitors from coronavirus hot spot states in an effort to enforce the state’s quarantine mandate.
“The airlines will hand it out on the plane. It will also be available on the web. You fill it out electronically, or you have to fill out the piece of paper on the airplane,” Cuomo told reporters Monday. “You must give officials at the airport your form as to where you came from and where you’re going before you leave the airport.”
The mandate applies to states that are experiencing the most severe coronavirus outbreaks, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Though Cuomo announced the order was imminent, the state Department of Health has not detailed which states will be included in the order. However, a June mandate from Cuomo as well as Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy required that visitors from any state that has an infection rate above more than 10 people per 100,000 be forced to self-isolate for two weeks.
“If you leave the airport without providing the information, you will receive a summons immediately with a $2,000 fine,” Cuomo said. “Not only can you have a $2,000 fine, you can then be brought to a hearing and ordered to complete mandatory quarantine.”
He went on to say that “none of this is pleasant, but we’ve gone through this before.”
New York was previously the epicenter for the coronavirus and reached the record for the most single-day new confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 12,274 in early April. Meanwhile, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported that no one died from COVID-19 in the city on July 11, exactly four months after the state’s first death was reported on March 11.
The outbreak has worsened in states that had been relatively spared, especially those in the south and the west. Florida, for instance, reported over 12,000 new cases Monday, one day after its 15,000 new cases passed the daily record for any state since the pandemic began in March.
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States now sits at about 3.3 million, and over 135,200 people have died.
