Rudy Giuliani called for health officials to implement contact tracing to ward off noncontagious but deadly health issues.
President Trump’s personal attorney, along with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, mocked New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for their plan to identify and isolate possible coronavirus infections.
Earlier this week, it was announced Bloomberg will foot the bill for a $10 million plan to test and trace coronavirus infection rates across the state.
In a riff about the plan on her show Thursday, Ingraham said, “Michael Bloomberg is going to handle the tracing. Army of tracers in New York we learned today.”
Giuliani responded by calling the proposition “totally ridiculous” and quipped, “Then we should trace everybody for cancer.”
“We should trace everyone for cancer, and heart disease, and obesity and — I mean, a lot of things kill you more than COVID-19. So we should be traced for all those things,” Giuliani said without noting these conditions are not infectious. “Your life possesses a certain degree of risk, and we have to be willing to live with it.”
Contact tracing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, happens when a public health official works with a patient who has been diagnosed with a contagious disease, in this case, the coronavirus, to help them recall everyone who they’ve been in contact with while they may have been infectious in order to warn people about their exposure.
The CDC calls contact tracing “a key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID-19.”
