Nine NYC Hospitals Will See Visitors Return, Cuomo Says

NEW YORK CITY — Some New York City hospitals will begin offering a service that would have seemed standard just months ago, but now comes as welcome news in a bitterly sad time: patients can have visitors.

Nine hospitals in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx will launch a two-week pilot program to test bringing visitors back as the novel coronavirus crisis shows signs of abating, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

"It is terrible to have someone in the hospital and then that person is isolated, not being able to see their family or friends," Cuomo said.

"This is a pilot program to see if we can now bring visitors in and do it safely."

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Sixteen hospitals statewide will participate in the study coordinated by the Greater New York Hospital Association and the Healthcare Association of New York State.

In Manhattan, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York Presbyterian in Lower Manhattan, NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital will participate.

The Bronx's Jacobi Medical Center and Montefiore - Henry and Lucy Moses Division, Brooklyn's Coney Island Hospital and Maimonides Medical Center, and Mount Sinai in Queens will also participate.

Visits will be timed and visitors, required to wear personal protective equipment, will be asked to submit to temperature and symptom checks, Cuomo said.

This news comes as six New York State regions begin slowly reopening their economies but New York City — the nation's longstanding epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis — struggles with stagnating progress fighting the disease's spread.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday two out of three of his daily indicators failed to decrease and the number of children suspected to have a potentially fatal COVID-19-linked syndrome increased to 147.

Hospitalizations for suspected COVID-19 increased to 57 on May 16 and ICU patients increasing to 492, but the percentage of positive testing decreasing to 9 percent, de Blasio said.

New York City has lost an estimated 20,806 lives to COVID-19 with 191,073 cases confirmed and 50,217 hospitalized, data from Monday show.

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