The federal guidance from the CDC is that before you start reopening the state, hospitalization rate must be in decline for 14 days. I think the CDC guidance is right. We look at the rates across the state as well as across the regions.
We're going to reopen in phases. Phase one of reopening will involve construction and manufacturing activities. And within construction and manufacturing, those businesses that have a low risk, right? There's a range of construction activities. There's a range of manufacturing activities.
Phase two would then be more a business-by-business analysis using the matrix that we've discussed. How essential a service does that business provide and how risky is that business? We need businesses to do that analysis. They have to think about how they're going to reopen.
What precautions are they going to take in the workplace? What safeguards are they going to put in place? You normally have people in a conference room, are you going to do that? You normally have people in work stations that are right next to each other, do you plan on reopening that way? How are you going to protect your people? What are you going to be doing differently with your employees? Your actual physical space, what does the physical space look like when you reopen in this new normal? What are you doing about PPE equipment? How are you cleaning? What's the hygiene? What's the access? What's the screening? How do you move people? What's the travel and transportation? Then what processes can you put in place to make your business less risky? How can you train people? How can you communicate about this disease? Can you do testing in your workplace?
These are all factors for businesses to consider that want to reopen quickly. It's governmental decisions in partnership with business decisions. This is not a one-sided equation here. Businesses, you develop a plan on how you would reopen given everything we now know. They can't really determine how essential their service is, but they can determine how risky opening their business would be. It's very much going to be up to businesses.
We need them to be creative and think outside of the box. We've been speaking with business leaders across the state, but some people even need a new economic model. We want to bring sports back so there's an activity that people can watch on TV. What sports can you do without an audience? What sports can you make work economically where you don't have to sell a seat in the stadium or in the arena? How do you do drive-ins? How do you do different types businesses that could actually work in this environment?
We need summer activities in downstate New York. You can't tell people in a dense urban environment all through the summer months, we don't have anything for you to do, stay in your apartment with the three kids. You know, that doesn't work.
In the midst of all this, monitor the public health impact. All that progress we made by flattening that curve, we could lose that in a matter of days if we're not careful. We're going to leave two weeks between phases so we can monitor the effect of what we just did. Take an action, monitor. Two weeks, that's the incubation period of the virus so you can actually see if you had an effect where you increased the rate of infection which you would then see in hospitalizations, testing, et cetera. Everyone understands the overall risk that you start to increase activity, the infection rate goes up, two weeks to actually do that monitoring.
That's the broad outlines of the reopening plan.
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