Cuomo says N.Y. will begin aggressive statewide antibody testing
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state will undertake aggressive antibody testing measures over the upcoming week.
Video Transcript
ANDREW CUOMO: Any plan that is going to start to reopen the economy has to be based on data, and that means it has to be based on testing. And this is a new world for all of us, testing. How do you get testing up the scale? How do you get it up to scale quickly? And how do you find out where we really are right now in terms of this virus?
You have all these scientists and all these experts who are basically trying to extrapolate from the data, but we don't really know how many people were infected, how many people had coronavirus but self resolved. We don't really know because we haven't been able to do testing on that large a scale.
But we're going to start, and we're going to start here in the state of New York with antibody testing. Antibody testing means you test the person to find out if they have the antibodies, which they would have if they were infected with the coronavirus. And we're going to do that in the most aggressive way in the nation, where we're going to sample people in this state, thousands of people in this state, across the state, to find out if they had the antibodies.
That will tell us for the first time what percent of the population actually has had the coronavirus and is now, at least short-term, immune to the virus. This will be the first true snapshot of what we're really dealing with. And we're going to be doing that over the next week, and the New York State Department of Health will be running that.
There's also another set of tests which are called diagnostic testing. Testing diagnostic testing is whether a person is positive or negative. And we're coming up the scale on this, even though it is very, very hard.
Northwell is leading the parade on this. And I just looked at some of the technology they're bringing in, all these different manufacturers who make different machines to run different tests and a number of big manufacturers, and Northwell is bringing in as many as they can.
But this has to be brought to scale. Nobody has done testing at this level ever. And we have to do this in partnership with the federal government because there's all sorts of logistical questions and supply chain questions, and people can't get certain chemicals they need to do tests, and the chemicals are made in other countries. So we have to do this with the federal government. I spoke to the head of the CDC yesterday, and he was very smart and very informed. And we talked about how we can do this together.
