ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg will help create a “tracing army” that will help find people infected with the coronavirus and get them into isolation, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday.
New York will work on the massive effort with neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut. Wide-scale testing, tracing and isolation are considered crucial to taming the outbreak in the hard-hit New York City region.
“It all has to be coordinated. There is no tracing that can work with one jurisdiction,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing.
The governor said that “we will literally need thousands” of people to trace the contacts of infected people.
The state currently has just 225 tracers with almost 500 more in New York City and its suburbs, and their efforts to contain the virus by finding people who had contact with the sick fell apart quickly as huge numbers of people in the region fell ill.
Cuomo said they will start to build a greater force of disease detectives by drawing from 35,000 medical field students at state and city universities.
The governor offered few details, but said Bloomberg would design the program and Johns Hopkins University also would be involved. Bloomberg will also contribute at least $10 million, Cuomo said.
Speaking shortly before Cuomo outlined his tracing plan, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined what he called a test-and-trace plan that he said would be run by the city. The mayor said once widespread testing for the virus is available the city will need as many as 5,000 to 10,000 contact tracers including city workers and employees of nonprofit groups that work with the city.
With 474 COVID-19-related deaths on Tuesday, New York state has now recorded more than 15,000 since the outbreak began last month.
The state figures do not include another 4,865 “probable” deaths in New York City that haven’t been confirmed by a lab test.
