Mayor Eric Adams "can't wait" to end COVID mandates in NYC, but continues to follow the science
NEW YORK -- After coping with the pandemic for nearly two years, some states are beginning to treat COVID-19 as an endemic, learning to live with the virus.
It's become the norm to enter New York City restaurants masked, showing your vaccine card, but that could soon become a thing of the past.
"I can't wait to get it done," Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday. "I take my hat off to New Yorkers through masks, vaccines, through social distancing. We were hit with the uncertainty, the fear of COVID, I'm just, I'm really proud of how we responded as New Yorkers."
The mayor says he's going to be unveiling plans in the coming days to begin rolling back requirements, following the science.
"Every morning I meet with my health professionals 'cause I always say that I'm going to follow the science. I'm not gonna get ahead of science because I'm ready to get ahead of all of this and get back to a level of normalcy, but they're giving us clear instructions. They gave us benchmarks, we're going to follow those benchmarks, but I look forward, in the next few weeks, of going through a real transformation," Adams said.
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The mayor says while the city is moving in the right direction, rolling back restrictions is going to be done safely.
"All of these experts will tell you one thing, we can't close down again. We can't close down again, and I'm not going to do something out of my anticipation to get back that is going to jeopardize closing down the city again. Our economy can't handle it. We don't have another $11 billion to put back in the economy, so we must do it in a smart way and people are going to look back later and say, 'You know, he made the right decisions.' We're gonna get the city back up and operated, and we're going to be rolling out some things in the next day or so on how we're going to carry that out," he said.
"Personally we'd love to go back to normal like everybody else, but we have to be careful and make sure that we just don't regress all the progress that we made," said Pawl Olczyk, manager of Westville.
Gov. Kathy Hochul recently lifted the state indoor mask mandate and said she plans to reevaluate the situation in schools early March.
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In New Jersey, the school mask mandate ends March 7, leaving the decision up to local districts.
"We do recommend a return to universal school-wide masking when conditions call for it," Gov. Phil Murphy said.
Crediting COVID cases and hospitalizations going down, Murphy also announced his final weekly COVID briefing will be next Friday.
"As we move into our new normal and transition from a pandemic stance to an endemic one, there is no longer the need for us to gather here at a set time every week," he said.
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California was the first state to formally move towards an endemic approach.
To clarify -- an epidemic is a sudden outbreak in one large population, while a pandemic is an outbreak that spreads through several countries or the world. An endemic is a constant presence of an illness with low spread.
"If you ask 100 epidemiologists when a pandemic becomes endemic, you'll get 100 different opinions. An endemic virus doesn't mean that the virus is gone or that it causes mild disease or infection. The flu is endemic, yet it kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. A virus is endemic when there's an equilibrium between the level of transmission of the virus and the level of immunity in the population," CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez said.
He says we're not there yet with COVID, especially since the Omicron variant has yet to reach its peak in many parts of the country, but we are headed in the right direction.
