MANHATTAN (CN) — Partnering with the state on its Covid-19 war, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed Wednesday to put his personal fortune into testing and contact tracing.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo detailed the effort at his daily press briefing, saying the billionaire Bloomberg volunteered to help develop and implement the tracing program. The project involves both the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and Vital Strategies, a public health nonprofit funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Fresh off a three-and-a-half-month presidential bid that cost him $1 billion, Bloomberg’s commitment to public health in New York is beginning with a donation “upwards of $10 million,” Cuomo’s administration says.
“This is going to be a massive undertaking,” Cuomo said, explaining the tracing would be conducted on a regional basis in the tri-state area.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who succeeded Bloomberg in 2013, has plans, but few public details, about plans for his own contact-tracing program.
“No, all those pieces are not in place today, but they will be in place next month,” de Blasio said at a press conference this morning where he laid out a vague, sweeping plan to provide citywide Covid-19 testing; tracing; and hotel room, laundry, food, pharmaceutical and telehealth services to those who test positive.
Like the governor, de Blasio has made frequent calls to the federal government for help on testing. Both say they can coordinate logistics but needed the government to keep the supply chain steady.
“And as we fight to get all of the testing we need, we're going to be building this apparatus every single day,” de Blasio said Wednesday. “And again, we don't know the exact number yet of people it will be serving. It's going to start in the thousands — I'm not going to be shocked at all of it goes into the tens of thousands — but we will build an apparatus that can grow with the need.”
On the heels of his meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, Cuomo announced an agreement Tuesday afternoon to double the state’s testing capacity to 40,000 per day.
“To have 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,” Cuomo said Tuesday after the White House meeting.
Diagnostic Covid-19 testing could help the state reopen the economy with more certainty about who is positive and who is negative for the virus, but the success of such a plan depends on the state drastically ramping up its testing capacity.
The Big Apple alone, with its population of 8.6 million, could need up to hundreds of thousands of tests per day, de Blasio said Wednesday. De Blasio could not put a number to the city’s current capacity Wednesday morning, and a follow-up to his office was not immediately returned.
“We need several weeks to ramp up to that [40,000], but it is a very aggressive goal. ... That's our goal and it was a very productive conversation,” Cuomo said in a statement after the White House meeting.
There are about 300 labs in the state that can process the tests, he said.
Cuomo said he also emphasized to Trump that state funding is crucial during the public health crisis. State governments are “broke,” he said Tuesday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday it would pay $45 million to fund an additional 650 contact-tracing experts, including epidemiologists and lab technicians, at state health departments.
New York City currently has 200 so-called “disease detectives,” who track down everyone an infected person may have had contact with. It plans to contract or hire more, the mayor’s office said in a press release Wednesday afternoon, without specifying numbers.
During his remarks Wednesday morning, de Blasio noted that many city employees aren’t able to do their regular jobs right now and could potentially be recruited for tracing, as could certain nonprofits.
As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, the city had 138,435 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 14,996 deaths — 9,944 confirmed and 5,052 probable, deaths presumed to have been caused by Covid-19 but were not confirmed with testing.
The state, which does not yet use “probable” Covid-19 fatalities in its official data, passed 15,000 confirmed deaths yesterday with 15,302, according to data from the state department of health. There are 257,216 confirmed cases in New York state.
The city’s legislative branch, the New York City Council, held its first-ever Zoom meeting Wednesday afternoon. In a press conference before the meeting, Speaker Corey Johnson expressed support for the council’s proposal to close 75 miles of city streets to cars so New Yorkers can safely be outside while socially distancing, a prospect the mayor has shot down by saying it’s unenforceable.
“We’ve seen other cities around the country and around the world that have done this successfully,” Johnson said Wednesday. “We think that we can do this in New York City.”
If the bill passes, New York City’s would be the first legislative body to initiate such an action.
The council also introduced protections for renters and an Essential Workers’ Bill of Rights, which would provide premium pay for essential workers, paid sick leave for gig workers, and protect them from being fired without just cause.
Though the city lacks concrete plans for Covid-19 testing and tracing, as well as outdoor exercise and other relief needed for apartments that lack air-conditioning as the weather gets hotter, de Blasio in recent days has announced he wants to hold a ticker-tape parade to honor health care workers and will coordinate with Macy’s on a version of the city’s annual July 4 fireworks show. Macy’s has furloughed most of its 125,000 employees because of the pandemic.
“We have to mark it in a very meaningful way,” the mayor said of Independence Day 2020.
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