Governor Andrew Cuomo expanded on preliminary results to a statewide COVID-19 antibody tested program that has found that 24.7% of New York City residents had the virus at some point in the course of the pandemic.
The Monday announcement was a follow-up to last week’s update that said about 21% of city dwellers had antibodies out of statewide pool of about 3,000. These, however, were only preliminary results, according to the governor.
The new pool consists of 7,500 New Yorkers from Buffalo to Montauk with men being more likely than women to be infected; 16.9% for males and 13.1% for females, according to Cuomo. That is with women consisting of 52 percent of the testing sample.
“Testing tells you where we are, right? And whether the infection rate is going up or going down,” Cuomo said. “[7,500] is a very significant number and it gives us a snapshot of where we are. It’s just a snapshot… but if you look at the different pictures and you have a movie at one point and you can track what is happening.”
Compare these results to the “rest of state,” which consists of 35.9% of New Yorkers in the study, to New York City, consisting of 43% of the study, the percentage of those living upstate who tested positive was 3.2%.
On Sunday, Cuomo said New York could begin to un-PAUSE in two phases starting May 15.
This came after the Centers for Disease Control advised governments that they could begin reopening after a 14-day decrease in hospitalizations, to which the Cuomo administration devised a two-phase plan.
The first phase would mean bringing construction and manufacturing activities with low risk to come back online, and after a two week period of monitoring infection rates, grant businesses the opportunity to decide for themselves whether or not to ease back into operations.
Whether or not businesses should reopen should be assessed on two planes, Cuomo said Sunday: “How essential a service does that business provide and how risky is that business.”
As of Monday, 17,303 New Yorkers statewide have died from coronavirus including 337 since yesterday alone. But the numbers continue on the downward trend.
