New York will roll out the most aggressive statewide antibody testing in the nation starting on Monday.
The governor says this new anti-body test, just approved by the FDA, will give New York a snapshot of the coronavirus pandemic in the state or how many people were infected by COVID-19 and now have the anti-bodies.
The state is planning to test 3,000 of its 19.5 million population. To put that in perspective, Germany just conducted 3,000 tests among a population of 83 million people. So, you can see how aggressive this test will be in New York.
The governor says any plan to reopen the state needs to be made based on the data and determining how many people have been infected. This test, he says, will provide a baseline.
“So we’ll have the first real statistical numbers of where we are as a population,” Cuomo said. “They talk about herd immunity, we talk about infection rate and we’re all trying to extrapolate where we are, but we have not had hard data on that.”
The governor says the tests will be given at random, but he didn’t say exactly how the process will work.
— WHEC