New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that reviving the economy will depend on increased antibody and quick-turnaround coronavirus testing.
“How do we restart our economy and get everything up and running as quickly as possible? My personal opinion: It’s going to come down to how good we are with testing,” Cuomo said in his Tuesday press briefing from Albany.
The New York Department of Health has authorized a lab in Rochester to deliver newly-developed antibody tests, which look for a person’s antibodies, or proteins that the immune system makes to attack the virus. The test determines whether a person had the infection and is recovered, in which case, they may be immune. Unlike the test that requires a sample from a nose swab, the antibody test does not look for a current infection.
Cuomo said the test “has to be brought to scale, and the Department of Health is going to be working with the [Food and Drug Administration] to do just that.”
Dr. Howard Zucker, New York’s commissioner of health, said Tuesday that the body often creates antibodies to fight off a viral infection, leaving the person immune to future infection from the same virus.
People who are determined to be immune from the virus could safely leave their homes and return to work sooner, jump-starting the economy. Antibody tests have to first become more common, however.
Cuomo said Tuesday that new cases in New York might be plateauing, and total growth is starting to flatten. Daily admissions to the intensive care unit and intubations are also down, Cuomo said.
“What we do will affect those numbers,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “This is not an act of God that we’re looking at, it’s an act of what society actually does.”
However, Cuomo said that 731 more people had died in New York as of Tuesday, the largest single daily jump in deaths since the outbreak began. The state had previously seen two days during which new deaths were “effectively flat” and dropped below 600.
There are now 138,836 confirmed cases in New York state, and 5,489 have died.
