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During his daily COVID-19 briefing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and MTA officials announced that Metro-North, LIRR, and New York City subway trains and stations would be disinfected every 24 hours to curb the spread of the virus.
To achieve that, Cuomo said that the subways would be shut down every morning from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. when ridership is at its lowest, noting that ridership is down 92 percent across the board during the pandemic. There will be no service interruptions on Metro-North or LIRR lines.
The new disinfecting protocols will go into effect on the morning of Wednesday, May 6.
“This is as ambitious as anything we’ve ever undertaken, and it's going to require extraordinary effort from multiple agencies working together,” Cuomo said. “It’s a heck of an undertaking.”
Previously, the MTA had been cleaning trains and stations every 72 hours, but this week, Cuomo tasked the organization with coming up with a plan to disinfect every night, so that when essential workers need transportation, they can do so safely and without worrying about potentially contracting the virus due to unsanitized public transit.
“This is the best way to protect the health of our public transit workers, which makes sense if you want those essential workers to keep coming to work and keep the infection rate down in your society,” he added. “It is our obligation as human beings to reciprocate what they’ve been doing for us.”
Cuomo said that the MTA would be introducing a “whole new process, with new chemicals, new equipment for workers, and new methods of disinfecting.”
“Think about it. You have to disinfect anywhere a hand could touch on a subway or train … wherever droplets could land,” he said. “That’s every rail, pole, door, you have to disinfect. Anywhere a hand could touch. When you’re done disinfecting the interiors, then you have to disinfect the stations.
“It’s a massive undertaking never done before, but it’s the right thing to do. The entire public transit system in downstate New York will be disinfected every 24 hours.”
Essential workers who normally would need to use the trains and subways from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. to get to and from work will be provided alternate transportation by the MTA at no charge.
There have now been 304,372 confirmed COVID-19 cases statewide, though hospitalizations and intubations are down. There were 303 new deaths in the past 24 hours, the lowest in a week, bringing the total number of fatalities to 18,321 since the outbreak began in early March.
Said Cuomo: “Nobody said it was ever going to be easy, but nobody said it would be this hard either. We’re doing things across the board that have never been done before, and there are lessons to be learned.
“We’re going to learn from this experience and have a stronger transit system because of it.”
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