The Mohawk Valley, the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes regions are ready to end stay-at-home orders on May 15, Cuomo announced Monday in Irondequoit. Those regions, which include cities like Rochester, Ithaca, Utica, Rome, Binghamton and Elmira, have met all seven requirements to “restart” their economies and begin opening some non-essential businesses.“This is the next big step in this historic journey,” Cuomo said during a press briefing on COVID-19. “We’re now on the other side of the mountain … Let’s just remember where we were before we take the step forward.”
Cuomo said Central New York, which includes Syracuse, and the North Country are one benchmark away from being ready to open. Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon said Monday that CNY could be ready to reopen by the weekend as the state may have old umbers on testing, the final requirement under Cuomo’s Un-PAUSE plan.
Number of COVID-19 Patients Drops by Half at UW Medicine Facilities
The number of patients undergoing treatment for COVID-19 in UW Medicine’s four hospitals has dropped to about half the level seen at the peak of the outbreak, officials there said.On Friday, UW Medicine had 59 coronavirus-positive patients, down from an average of about 120 per day a month ago.
“Things have been slowly getting better,” said Dr. Eileen Bulger, UW Medicine’s chief of trauma. “We still have a lot of very sick patients, but the numbers are slowly coming down.”The COVID-19 intensive care unit at Harborview Medical Center has condensed and is down to just 18 beds. On Friday, 12 of those beds were occupied with the most critical patients.
Pfizer Optimistic About Creating a Fall 2020 Vaccine for COVID-19
Companies around the world are working on vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus, and that includes the Pfizer lab in Groton. They’ve already started human clinical trials of a vaccine they believe could be available as soon as September.”We were able to discover molecules having activity against that virus and potentially being effective,” said Pfizer Connecticut Laboratories Site Director John Burkhardt. “There are great similarities in the virus and in the way we would treat it, so we have been able to pick up on the research that had been done years ago and quickly get a project into a later stage and to clinical study very rapidly.”He says the IV treatment could potentially be available to patients in 2021 and the oral treatment year after that.
The big news this week from Pfizer came from their work on a vaccine in partnership with a German company. It would instruct cells to make the viral protein without making someone sick, hopefully forcing the immune system to create antibodies to fight off the virus.A human clinical trial is now underway. A woman at NYU is one of the first healthy Americans to receive it.