Despite encouraging signs that New York is showing declining numbers of hospitalizations caused by COVID-19, the state’s economy can’t reopen without more testing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday.
“If you look at the past three days you could argue that we’re past the plateau and we’re starting to descend,” Cuomo said. “Hospital numbers are down. Good news. Emergency rooms have fewer people in them. … ICU admissions are also down. Incubations are down, which is very good news,” explaining that incubations are patients on respirators.
On a more sobering note, Cuomo announced 540 new deaths.
“It’s not as high as it was, but 540 people died yesterday,” he said.
To end stay-at-home orders and allow businesses classified as nonessential to fully reopen, the state needs to be able to test more people with symptoms and those who have been in contact with individuals who tested positive for COVID-19. Some health officials said testing needs to triple the current amounts being done.
To do that, New York needs help from the federal government, including $500 billion in new funding for all states, the governor said.
“If you want us to reopen, we need funding,” Cuomo said. “We need $500 billion from the federal government for the states so we can reopen.”
Cuomo said most of the testing is being done by private-sector businesses. The problem is that there isn’t enough chemical reagents being produced to ramp up testing.
“Testing is the single most important topic for us to understand,” he said. “We’re doing a lot of testing, but only a fraction of what we need to be comfortable to open everything up.”
When working with the private sector businesses about ramping up testing efforts, “most of them are talking about they can’t get the reagents,” Cuomo said.
Testers need to get the chemical reagents from the manufacturer who created the testing machines. But the manufacturers are saying they either can’t get the reagents because they’re made in China, or the federal government is telling them where to direct the reagents. Cuomo made a similar point at Friday’s press briefing.
“We need two things from the federal government,” Cuomo said. “We need help on the manufacturing, and we need help with the coordination.”
New York City has 126,368 coronavirus cases, with 33,079 hospitalizations and 8,448 confirmed deaths, according to the latest available data.
A day after getting into a back-and-forth verbal fight with President Donald Trump, Cuomo said that emotions in this country are “as high as I recall” and that politics need to stay out of COVID-19 response.
