New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that a survey showed that a "shocking" two-thirds of patients recently hospitalized for coronavirus became infected despite largely staying at home.
Hospitals were asked to document where their most recent COVID-19 patients had been staying before admission, Cuomo said, and 66 percent came from their own homes.
About 18 percent came from nursing homes, 4 percent from assisted-living facilities, 2 percent were homeless, 2 percent had been at other "congregate" settings, fewer than 1 percent were prison or jail inmates, and 8 percent were classified as "other."
"This is a surprise," the governor told reporters at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York. "Sixty-six percent of the people were at home, which is shocking to us."
The data came from 113 hospitals reporting information on patients being treated over three recent days, according to state health officials.
"They're not working; they're not traveling," Cuomo said of these recently hospitalized coronavirus patients. "We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That's not the case. They were predominantly at home."
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