Very happy to hear that our partners in the movie theater, sports and entertainment industry will soon be among those groups permitted to increase capacity.
New York is ready to ease COVID capacity restrictions for museums, movie theaters, large arenas and other businesses as the city’s positivity rate dipped below 5% for the first time since November.Gov. Cuomo announced Monday that museums and zoos can go to 50% next week, while indoor sports venues will go from 10% to 25% capacity on May 19.
In a sign that vaccination efforts are having the intended effect, Mayor de Blasio said that the 7-day average positivity rate for the five boroughs as of Friday stood at 4.91% — a milestone he described as “a profoundly good sign.”
“Everyone’s been working really hard. Let’s keep working. Let’s just run COVID out of this town once and for all,” the mayor said at his morning press briefing. “Things are really starting to change.”
The last time the positivity rate in the Big Apple dipped that low was Nov. 29.The rate the mayor cited Monday is taken from preliminary data and is subject to change, one city health official noted, but it’s also backed up by the relatively rapid pace at which vaccines have been administered in the city since January.
Coronavirus variants, which have accounted for more than half of new cases in recent weeks, have kept the positivity rate higher than health officials would like to see, but since the beginning of April that rate has seen a steady decline, according to city health stats.
Cuomo, meanwhile, has continued to relax restrictions in recent weeks as the state’s coronavirus numbers decline. The seven-day average positivity rate for the state was 2.85% on Sunday, the lowest figure since Nov. 13.
“We’re actually back to where we were before we hit the holiday increase,” Cuomo said Monday during a press briefing from his Manhattan office. “So that’s very good news.”
