MANHATTAN (CN) — As New York reels from successive record-high deaths related to the novel coronavirus, officials called it urgent Friday that the president employ the Defense Production Act to streamline testing.
Saying the state needs both diagnostic and antibody testing "in a matter of weeks, not months,” New York Governor Cuomo said private-sector companies need help producing Covid-19 tests on a massive scale.
“In New York, 30 million tests you could use,” Cuomo estimated, calling the act “a very powerful tool for the federal government to use.”
There are more confirmed cases of the virus in New York than in any other country outside of the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. At more than 170,000 confirmed cases, the Empire State has three times as many as any other state in the U.S. The other countries in the triple digits are Spain, Italy and Germany, followed then by France, China and United Kingdom.
New York just on Wednesday announced a record-high 799 deaths from virus-related complications, only to see another 777 the next day, Cuomo said, bringing the statewide total to 7,844 deaths by late Friday morning.
Delivering his daily briefing from the state Capitol in Albany, Cuomo explained that the deaths over the previous week were mostly coronavirus patients who had been treated during a period of peak hospitalization in the state earlier this month.
“What’s happening is the number of people who came in two weeks ago when we had those very high hospitalization rates — either you get treated and you get better and get discharged or you stay in the hospital and probably wind up on a ventilator,” Cuomo said Friday. “[And] the longer you’re on a ventilator, the less likely you will come off a ventilator, and that’s what's happening now.
“The number is lower than yesterday, for those who can take solace in that fact,” he added. “As someone who searches for solace in all this grief, the leveling-off of the number of lives lost is a somewhat hopeful sign.
Despite what he called the "tremendous" number of lives lost, the governor said he is “cautiously optimistic” about other data that suggests statewide efforts to flatten the curve have slowed down the infection rate of the virus.
Cuomo noted that the state saw a negative change in admissions to intensive care units for the first time since the pandemic started.
“The change in total hospitalizations is down, not relative to yesterday, but ... the three-day average on the hospitalizations, you see a dramatic decline in those numbers, and that’s obviously very good news,” he said.
“I believed 9/11 was the worst situation I was going to deal with in my lifetime,” Cuomo said. “So in terms of lives lost, that this situation should exceed 9/11 is still beyond my capacity to fully appreciate, to tell you the truth.”
The death toll from the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11 was 2.606.
Cuomo warned New Yorkers on Friday that returning to any sense of normalcy is going to be a gradual, phased process.
“Let's make sure we study the waters ahead and proceed with caution before we set off on the next journey,” he said. “When we talk about reopening, let's study the data and let's look at what has happened around the world.”
Cuomo this morning offered a full partnership with U.S. government as part of states' continued efforts to bring mass Covid-19 testing to scale; New York will partner with neighboring states Connecticut and New Jersey to create a regional testing partnership.
The governor’s speech was followed this afternoon by a briefing from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, where a temporary field hospital was built last week, near a cluster of Queens neighborhoods that have been hard hit by the virus.