Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont on COVID-19 reopening: 'We are not Florida'

Brian Sozzi
·Executive Editor
2 min read
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Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is confident the lifting of his COVID-19 restrictions will be a process that goes better than some other states.

Earlier this month Lamont (D-Conn.) announced he would roll back pandemic restrictions starting March 19. As part of that, Lamont will eliminate capacity limits for restaurants, hair salons and churches. Movie theaters and performing arts sites will still have 50% capacity limits. The state's mask mandate will remain in place for the foreseeable future, Lamont told Yahoo Finance Live.

"I mean a lot of our small restaurants they have to keep the six foot of [social] distancing or they have the plexiglass up, so they will still be at 75%. A lot of bigger ones [restaurants] are saying let's go, we can do it. And by the way, we are not Florida — it's not like everybody's going to rush in on March 19," Lamont said.

Lamont's counterpart in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), was among the first to lift COVID-19 restrictions on restaurants back in late September 2020. Critics of the move by DeSantis — who repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic last year in a show of support of then President Donald Trump — say it led to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state into year-end as people flooded back out.

"People are cautiously going back," Lamont said. "They are looking in, they are seeing this is a restaurant that seems to be taking the health protocols seriously and I think I will come back. And finally, I am hoping we will be outside. Our main streets are open for dining, and as you move into late March and April, it's going to be pretty nice out there to eat."

Connecticut has seen 289,000 COVID-19 cases and 7,752 deaths thus far. The U.S. as a whole has seen 29.2 million COVID-19 cases and 529,000 deaths.

But as vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have begun to get into the arms of people, the average daily case counts of coronavirus have started to slow. After hitting a daily peak of nearly 20,000 on Jan. 15, the seven-day average of new infection has tallied a touch over 7,000.

That improvement has emboldened states such as Texas and Mississippi to lift COVID-era restrictions on mobility.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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