While Long Island is lagging behind many other regions in the state on the path to reopening after May 15, the day New York's PAUSE order ends, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said the county now meets four of the seven criteria necessary for reopening.
"Unless there is some major turnaround in the metrics, we're not going to meet [all seven] by Friday," Mr. Bellone said on Monday afternoon. "There are some regions around the state that are meeting the metrics currently. We're making real progress. We're not going to be there by Friday."
He said the metrics not yet met include officially launching the necessary contact tracing program, and maintaining 14 days of a decline in hospital deaths and fewer than two new Covid-19 hospitalizations per thousand residents per day.
One of the factors, a decline for 14 days in the rolling average of currently hospitalized patients, is contingent upon hospitals adding elective surgeries back into the mix. Mr. Bellone acknowledged that has not occurred yet, and he acknowledged that Long Island must meet the criteria as a region.
"The new hospitalizations [number] is tougher for us to know. . . . That's the one I'm more concerned about," he said.
The Finger Lakes region, Southern Tier, and Mohawk Valley are the first three regions in New York to meet all seven reopening metrics.
Technical difficulties in the county's reporting system, first announced on Friday, continued to plague the county on Monday. Mr. Bellone announced that 153 more people have been discharged from hospitals into home recovery, and said 651 people are in hospitals across the county, 222 of them in intensive care units.
Suffolk's total positive case count reached 41,118 on Monday, and the death toll reached 1,639. Of the 2,014 test results received in the last 24 hours, there were 209 positive cases and an infection rate of just over 10 percent -- not including antibody tests, which had been lumped into the total case count for the last several days. The case count in East Hampton Town is 260; in Southampton Town 892.