ICAP’s global director, Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA, spoke with City&State New York after New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state will allow indoor dining to resume on Friday in New York City. New York City is reporting thousands of new cases per day, and the infection rate and total hospitalizations still exceeds the thresholds cited by the governor when he shut down indoor dining in the five boroughs in December.
“Opening indoor dining in New York City is premature and risky,” Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said in an email. “With the appearance of new variants that threaten our vaccines, it is critically important to do everything possible to stop the replication of this virus.”
