Governor Andrew M. Cuomo arrived at the Corona Maintenance Facility in Queens in New York City Transit on Saturday to deliver a piece of horrible news: the regular coronavirus death toll of the state increased slightly after a steady decrease in recent days. "The latest figure has stayed terrifyingly high," Cuomo revealed.
The governor confirmed that 299 more died on Saturday, 10 more compared to figures from the day before. Cuomo disclosed that 276 of those perished in hospitals, and 23 in nursing care homes, most of them in New York City.
Cuomo said that his state had now completed the country's largest antibody testing study, which could determine whether anyone had been previously diagnosed with the coronavirus.
During his daily briefing, the governor said that of the approximately 15,000 people tested in the study now, 12.3 percent tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies. He also revealed a full survey of antibody testing for transit workers would be undertaken by the state. The state's Metropolitan Transportation Authority will disinfect all trains every 24 hours in the state's subway system, Cuomo said.
Cuomo also said he directed police to impose social distancing to mitigate the ill effects of the ongoing pandemic. He spoke on a day when new deaths confirmed from the virus marginally increased to almost 300.
Cuomo said he has directed all law enforcement units to enforce the mask executive mandate on Saturday, when asked regarding a demonstration the day before on Long Island, where maskless demonstrators demanded authorities to reopen New York City. At the time, the police did not intervene. "It's careless and irresponsible," he said, pertaining to the protests.
Cuomo pushed back against what he called unreasonable demands that he reopen the state, saying that he understood people were suffering without employment but that the latest coronavirus needed more understanding.
As governors in about half of the U.S. partly reopen their economies this weekend, Cuomo said he needed even more knowledge about what the pandemic was doing in his state, the hardest hit by the virus, before loosening restrictions to curtail its spread.
Meanwhile, the number of new patients being taken to hospitals, the most reliable means to measure the rate of sickness in the state, fell to 831 after hovering in the 900s in the last seven days. Some 10,350 people remained hospitalized as of Saturday, a low from the 18,825 admitted at the peak of the outbreak in the early days of April.
