Gov. Andrew Cuomo again said Friday he would like to reopen New York’s shuttered economy, but reiterated once more that testing must dramatically expand before the Empire State can safely get back to work.
“You only have a very slim margin to operate on,” Cuomo said Friday during his daily press briefing, as he discussed how much and how quickly New York could return to normal.
“How do you measure this? How do you calibrate it,” Cuomo rhetorically asked, warning that ending the shutdown and social distancing orders too quickly could allow the pandemic to reassert itself.
The disease has already killed more than 11,000 people in New York City alone.
Cuomo — and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — have repeatedly said that testing must expand and have called on the federal government to help make that happen, calls which President Trump has rejected.
“You have to develop a testing capacity that does not now exist and then you test people on higher volumes than ever before,” Cuomo reiterated on Friday. “You then trace them to find the positives and then you isolate them.”
The comments immediately spurred a sharp rebuke on Twitter from Trump.
The governor also emphasized that any reopening must be done in conjunction with New York’s neighbors, including Connecticut and New Jersey.
The continued push to expand testing comes as an analysis by The Post revealed that testing in New York City is happening most frequently in zip codes that are whiter or wealthier — and frequently both — than the average across the Big Apple.
That comes as city data shows that the city’s black and Hispanic residents are dying at twice the rate of whites from the disease.
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