New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he agrees with President Trump that people will point fingers no matter how the coronavirus situation is handled.
The Democratic governor is slated to meet with Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday and held a press conference earlier in the day to give updates on the coronavirus response.
“This is a situation that no matter however you do it, it’s going to be a blame game afterward,” Cuomo said, according to Breitbart. “I heard the president in his briefing the other day. He’s right.”
“This is one of those thankless tasks. Trust me,” Cuomo said. “It is one of those tasks when you get to the end of it, everybody is going to be able to say you didn’t do enough.”
The president and Cuomo have had a rocky relationship since the coronavirus first hit the United States. Days ago, Cuomo criticized Trump and told him to stop watching television and get back to work.
“First of all, he’s sitting [at] home watching TV. Maybe he should get up and go to work,” Cuomo said about Trump. “Second … let’s keep emotion and politics out of this — and personal ego if we can.”
Cuomo is leading the charge on one of the “most aggressive” testing plans in the U.S. as part of the first phase of reopening local economies.
“Any plan to start to reopen the economy has to be based on data and testing, and we have to make sure our antibody and diagnostic testing is up to the scale we need so we can safely get people back to work,” Cuomo said this week, adding that the testing would be done “in the most aggressive way in the nation.”
Cuomo’s announcement preceded the Trump administration approving the first at-home COVID-19 virus sample-collection kits. Additionally, one of the largest U.S. clinical laboratories, Quest Diagnostics, announced its testing capacity for the coronavirus is outpacing demand.
“We are now able to perform up to 50,000 diagnostic COVID-19 tests per day or approximately 350,000 tests per week. Our test capacity outpaces demand and we have not experienced a test backlog for about a week,” the company said in a statement.
