Governor Cuomo: “Testing is the best way to inform and educate yourself as you go through the reopening process so you can watch not just hospitalizations … but also testing so you can look at the infection rate across the state and see how the infection rate is increasing.”
Cuomo: “To quantify that situation in the State of New York, we now do, on average, about 20,000 tests per day. … our goal is to double the 20,000 to get to 40,000 tests per day. We need several weeks to ramp up to that, but it is a very aggressive goal. … That’s our goal and it was a very productive conversation.”
Cuomo: “To have a real progress you have to sit down and go through the various steps of testing and actually decide who does what and that’s what we did this afternoon. We agreed that the state government should be responsible for managing the actual tests in their own laboratories.”
Cuomo: “The problem with testing and bringing testing up to scale has been the national manufacturers of the equipment who make the testing kits that they have to send to the state labs so the state labs can actually perform them. Those are done by national manufacturers. The national manufacturers have said they have a problem with the supply chain to quickly ramp up those tests. … That is where the federal government can help. … Let the federal government take responsibility for that federal supply chain for the national manufacturers. That’s what we agreed in this meeting.”
