Gov. Cuomo Thanks Trump, VP Pence for Facilitating and Moving Quickly on Authorizing Labs to Do Coronavirus Testing

EXCERPT:

CUOMO: “We need obviously more testing capacity and we need it quickly. So I spoke to the Vice President about this. Vice President Mike Pence is a former governor so he understood the state’s roles, Department of Health and regulating laboratories. He said he would look at it. I said I thought it could make a tremendous difference. I spoke with the Vice President today and I spoke with the President, and they are authorizing New York State to do the testing, and allowing our labs to do the tests, and allowing the state health department to set up the protocol. That will increase dramatically our testing capacity. I want to thank the President and the Vice President for their receptivity to the idea, and I want to thank them for their quick turnaround. We have the authorization as of today. So, today the state health department will be going out to the 28 laboratories that the Department of Health works with on complex testing matters, and those 28 labs will be authorized to do testing. We are down in the boiler room now, turning all the valves. The labs will be coming on, next week we will go up to capacity of about 6,000 tests per day, which would be a dramatic increase for us. To date, we’ve done about 3,000 tests. So that is a very, very big difference. Testing is probably the single most important thing that we can be doing now. As I said, that will double. We’ll be able able to do about, in one day, all the tests that we have done to date, believe it or not. So, again, I want to thank the Vice President, and especially the President, who facilitated this and moved quickly."