Cuomo presses for more federal money to states

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Friday once again asked the federal government to provide immediate financial assistance to states in their efforts to ramp up their testing capacities in the hope of being able to reopen their economies.

Cuomo said that while President Trump has said that reopening the economy up is up to the individual states, doing so won’t be possible for state governments without additional federal aid.

“Large-scale testing is a massive undertaking. We need the private sector to work with government to meet this enormous challenge. And we need the federal government to act,” Cuomo tweeted during his press conference.

Large-scale testing is a massive undertaking.

We need the private sector to work with government to meet this enormous challenge.

And we need the federal government to act.

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 17, 2020

Cuomo also announced that he would be signing an executive order directing public and private labs in New York to coordinate with New York’s Department of Health for “prioritizing diagnostic testing.” The governor said that the state has about 300 labs and hospitals that are licensed to virology testing but that they need federal aid to create an effective testing capacity.

When asked about how much money he thinks the federal government should provide states, Cuomo cited the request that was sent to Trump from the National Governor’s Association, of which Cuomo serves as vice chairman.

The collective of the country’s governors recently penned a letter to the president, asking for $500 billion of aid that would be sent to the states. Cuomo said Friday that the money should be given to states based on each one’s current COVID-19 situation.

New York has been the state hardest hit by the virus, with more than 222,000 confirmed cases and almost 12,200 deaths.

During the briefing, Cuomo said that hospitalizations and intubations in the state were down but that the state is still seeing around 2,000 new hospitalizations a day. The daily amount of new deaths fell slightly to 630, he reported.

Cuomo explained that in addition to increased testing capacity, New York would also need to drive its infection rate down before plans to reopen could start to take shape. He said that the infection rate of the virus in the state is now below one, meaning that social distancing has been effective.

However, Cuomo reiterated that New York’s infection rate was still much higher than states that are eyeing beginning to reopen within the coming weeks. If the rate rises over 1.2, Cuomo warned, the state would be in danger of another outbreak. It had previously been around 1.4.