New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will require people from other states with a high percentage of new COVID-19 cases to self-quarantine for two weeks upon entering the three states, their governors announced Wednesday.
The travel mandate goes into effect at midnight and affects travelers from states with a “positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a 7-day rolling average or a state with a 10% or higher positivity rate over a 7-day rolling average,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) at an afternoon press conference.
The states meeting that criteria on Wednesday were: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Utah and Texas. States can be added or removed from this list based on their infection rate, Cuomo said. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said later on Wednesday that his state was “erroneously included” on the list and that “we were told that we can expect that to be corrected shortly.”
The announcement comes as coronavirus cases in New York are steadily declining. According to the governor, the state now has the country’s lowest infection rate.
“We did a full 180-degrees,” Cuomo said. “We worked really had to get the viral transmission rate down; we don’t want to see it go up because a lot of people come into this region and they could literally bring the infection with them.”
Several states, including Florida, enforced a similar 14-day quarantine for people traveling from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut at the start of the pandemic. Those states are now among more than two dozen others that are now seeing a rise in new COVID-19 cases as the tri-state area’s new cases drop.
Florida’s health department reported a record of 5,508 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday — 1,400 more than the previous daily record of new cases. Also on Tuesday, Texas reported more than 5,000 new cases in a single day, an all-time high for the state.
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will have their own ways of enforcing the quarantine. In New York, people found violating the quarantine risk fines ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 as well as a judicial order and a mandatory quarantine that the violator must cover the costs of, Cuomo said.