Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that New York will take on an “aggressive” testing process in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, an integral step in reopening the state’s economy.
The governor said participants who are chosen for random testing will be sent to supermarkets in various regions throughout the state. Nassau County Executive Laura Curran said testing in Nassau will be conducted at an unidentified site within the county.
The program began Monday with a randomized survey of 3,000 New Yorkers to determine how many people have the coronavirus antibodies in their systems. The test of antibodies shows a person had the disease but has since fully recovered.
Cuomo made the announcement on Sunday at Northwell’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset. Prior to the press conference, Cuomo toured Northwell’s Core Laboratories with the company’s President and CEO, Michael Dowling, to see how the tests would be conducted.
Cuomo touted the antibody testing, which was first approved in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration April 2, and said it was a way to assess how to reopen the state’s economy in the best way possible.
“Antibody testing means you test the person to find out if they have the antibodies if they were infected with the coronavirus,” Cuomo said. “We are going to do that in the most aggressive way in the nation. We are going to sample people in this state, thousands of people in this state, across the state to find out if they have the antibodies.”
People who agree to take part in the study will be asked to provide a finger-stick blood sample, which will then be processed using an immunologic test at the state’s Wadsworth Labs in Albany, according to officials. Cuomo acknowledged the state’s own antibody test was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“Testing is going to require everyone to work together,” Cuomo said. “We are starting the largest antibody test ever done today in New York, the largest sample, but this has to be a multi-level government coordinative project because we have to do this on an ongoing basis.”
The Food and Drug Administration has allowed more than 90 companies to bring tests to the market while sidestepping federal approval, underscoring the urgency of the pandemic, The New York Times reported.
“Any plan that is going to start to reopen the economy has to be based on data, and that means it has to be based on testing,” Cuomo said. “How do you get it up to scale quickly and how do you find out where we really are right now in terms of this virus?”
New York remains the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic with 242,786 confirmed cases and 13,869 coronavirus-related deaths as of Monday, according to figures provided by the state’s Department of Health. Cuomo said he believes New York has made it past the apex of the virus, but acknowledged that the state is not “out of the woods just yet.”
“We have a whole second phase and in this second phase, first, do no harm,” Cuomo said. “Don’t jeopardize what you’ve already accomplished by seeing that infection rate increase. We have to be smarter, especially when it comes to the new frontier of testing and how we test and how aggressively and how we get that organized.”
Health officials said laboratory-confirmed cases only “represent a fraction of the total number of cases of COVID-19 in the population” due to an unknown proportion of cases being mild or asymptomatic.
Even though more than 13,000 New Yorkers have died as a result of the virus, Cuomo said he found some encouraging signs that the state is potentially past the “plateau” of the disease.
According to statistics provided by the state Department of Health, as of Saturday Nassau County had an 11 percent decrease in coronavirus-related hospitalizations during the past three days. The county’s 11 hospitals saw 135 fewer admissions last Friday, according to the figures.
“With this good news, we become more eager and ready to reopen society and resume whatever our new normal is going to look like,” Curran said.
Northwell Health officials announced the number of patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus throughout its 19 hospitals decreased from 3,300 a week prior to 2,629 as of Saturday.
Health officials from Long Island Jewish Valley Stream said their intensive care unit occupancy remained above 90 percent, but it was the only one of Northwell’s 11 Long Island-based hospitals that had an occupancy rate that high.
