NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers would need to be tested for the coronavirus daily before city officials could start to loosen restrictions that have shuttered most workplaces and forced residents to cover their faces in public, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.
“To be able to come back you need testing to be — in our city probably hundreds of thousands of tests a day,” de Blasio said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “You need temperature checks going into workplaces. You need all sorts of things to make sure that anyone who’s sick is immediately isolated and supported in quarantine.”
But he said New York can’t start reopening its economy without widespread testing “and so far the federal government still can’t get the handle on that.”
The need for more testing comes as the daily COVID-19 death toll in New York state appeared to have reached a plateau, with Saturday’s 507 reported deaths down 271 since last Monday. De Blasio credited “everyday Americans and everyday New Yorkers who are doing this hard work of figuring out a new way of life with no warning.”