I recognize that many of you want to understand the implications of the City’s COVID-19 alert levels for the NYU community. Let me try to provide some context.
During the spring of 2022, after two years of experience with the COVID-19 pandemic,
the CDC modified its guidance on determining community levels and prevention strategies: in light of high levels of vaccinations and population immunity, the CDC noted, the risk of “medically significant disease, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19 was greatly reduced for most people.” Thus the key metrics for evaluating community levels shifted to more holistic information, especially levels of medically significant illness and minimizing the strain on the healthcare system, and away from more narrowly focused case counts. That is the guidance the City uses, and that NYU is using as well.
In mid-May, New York City raised its COVID alert level to orange. However, since this time, the City’s key indicators have been improving. Most importantly, the incidence of severe outcomes, such as hospitalization from COVID-19 infection, have remained low relative to case counts and have been decreasing during this most recent period, even as there was increased transmission in NYC.
Within our own community, cases are overwhelmingly mild or moderate.
Against this backdrop, we in the NYU community maintained more restrictive prevention policies than the City at large, including:
- a mandatory vaccination policy in place, including booster shots
- a policy of required masking in certain obligatory spaces
While we will be continuing to closely monitor conditions, at the moment we do not see a need to change our current policies, given the foregoing reasons (ie, improving trends, our high rate of vaccination, and our mask policy).
Please remember:
Dr. Carlo Ciotoli, MD, MPA
Vice President for Campus Health