NY Coronavirus: Testing Reaches 10,000 A Day

Since the first week of New York's new coronavirus outbreak, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been urgent about expanding the ability to test people for it — so that if they are confirmed positive, they can go into isolation and their contacts can go into quarantine.

It's all about reducing the rate of the virus's spread, because at this rate the state's healthcare system will be overwhelmed with severely sick people needing hospitalization, as happened in Italy and elsewhere, he said.

Overnight, the state did 10,000 tests, Cuomo said in a midday news conference on Friday. That's a massive increase from two weeks ago.

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"We were at one time doing 200 tests per day," he reminded reporters.

It took a long time for state officials to get permission from the federal government to allow a state lab to analyze test results instead of having to send them to the Centers for Disease Control, then to allow private labs to run the tests, then to allow automated analysis.

The priorities for getting tested remain the same as on March 8, when the state only had 105 cases: anyone who's traveled to countries of concern on the CDC's list, anyone in contact with someone who tested positive, and anyone currently hospitalized who has tested negative for other viruses.

As of midday Friday, New York had a total of 7,102 confirmed cases, most in the Hudson Valley, New York City and Long Island. To date, 32,427 people have been tested. The state has opened drive-thru test sites in Westchester, Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk counties.

"The number of cases is relative to the number of tests," Cuomo said. "We have done a great job of ramping up the number of tests, but when you ramp up the number of tests you're going to get more positive cases."

Cuomo estimated that New York is now testing more people per capita than South Korea, a country that built a swift and aggressive test capability as word of the outbreak came from China.

Its aggressive testing program is probably the reason New York has so many more confirmed cases than other states, he said.

"Does New York have seven times more infected people than California? You don't know," Cuomo said. "The tests are just demonstrating what was."

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