New York state’s seven-day average COVID positivity rate was among the lowest in the country at 0.44% on Friday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced.
"The more shots we get in arms, the healthier our state becomes, and that's why we're offering exciting incentives for vaccinations," Cuomo said in a statement Saturday. "If New Yorkers who haven't yet gotten the shot do so promptly, we can defeat COVID-19 for good and rebuild our state for a brighter future."
Cuomo cited the COVID-19 tracker run by Johns Hopkins University to provide him with his ranking, though it wasn't clear how the state interpreted them.
Statewide there were 681 patients hospitalized Friday with COVID, a decline of 28 patients from Thursday. Of those, there were 169 patients in intensive care units, and of those ICU patients 96 were intubated.
There were 11 deaths from COVID-19 on Friday, including one person in the Bronx, one person in Brooklyn, and one person in Queens.
The state has administered more than 20 million vaccine doses to date, with a statewide vaccination rate of 67.2% of adult New Yorkers having received at least one dose and 60% of all adults having completed their vaccine series. More than half of all New Yorkers, 55.6%, have received at least one vaccine dose and 48.9% of all New Yorkers have completed their vaccine series. People under the age of 12 are currently eligible to get vaccinated.
Cuomo has said the vast majority of New York's coronavirus restrictions and safety measures will be lifted once 70% of adults have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine—which he estimated could happen within the next two weeks.
The updated vaccination numbers comes as the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention said Friday its advisers plan to hold an "emergency meeting"June 18th “to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines,” according to CBS News.
The agency said it has “verified 226 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in people ages 30 and younger who have received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and are investigating about 250 more reports,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports. Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports," CDC vaccine safety official Dr. Tom Shimabukuro said in news reports. The AAP said he noted “reports of myocarditis/pericarditis in young people ages 12-24 make up about 53% of the total reports after a second dose. However, these age groups only make up about 9% of the doses administered.”
“Clearly, we have an imbalance there,” Shimabukuro said.
