During his daily coronavirus press briefing, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo answered the question that is most on the public's mind: when is it over?
Said Cuomo: “I have this conversation 100 times a day. … When is it over? And it's a difficult conversation because people want it to be over so badly, right? ‘I want the fear to stop, I want the anxiety to stop. I don't want to have to worry about my brother anymore, I don't want to have to worry about my daughters, I don't want to have to worry about my mother. I want it over. I want to get out of the house. I want to get back to normalcy. I've been living in this weird, disorienting, frightening place. I'm afraid to touch people.' It violates human behavior and needs. When is it over?”
“It's not going to be we flick a switch and everybody comes out of their house and gets in their car and waves and hugs each other, and the economy all starts up,” he continued. “I would love to say that's going to happen. It is not going to happen that way. It can't happen that way.”
Cuomo said that it's going to happen differently in places depending on the level of risk and infection.
“Is it going to happen in any community that has a significant issue? No,” he said. “There is going to be no epiphany. There is going to be no morning where the headline says ‘hallelujah, it is over.' That's not going to happen.”
“What will happen is there will be points of resolution,” he added. “There'll be points we can say we accomplished something. We should feel better. We should feel more calm. We should feel more relaxed, and it will be incremental.”
He did offer some good news: “We are controlling the spread. We're past that. If you isolate, if you take the precautions, your family won't get infected. Feel good about that. The worst is over. If we continue to be smart going forward. … It has not overwhelmed the health care system. We have controlled he spread.”
But Cuomo said that it will really be over once we have a vaccine, but not until then.
