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WPCNR THURSDAY GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO CORONAVIRUS BRIEFING. By John F. Bailey. April 30, 2020 UPDATED 4:45 PM EDT:

The race to create the New York Tracing System to identify in  real time, any rise in coronavirus infections after any reopening occurs is on.

The Subways will be disinfected every night–beginning next week from 1 A.M. to 5 A.M. to protect essential works in a plan, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced this afternoon.

Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced Mike Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York, in a conference today, who explained the details of the tracing program Mr. Bloomberg is creating with his philanthropic organization, and Johns Hopkins Hospital, one week after the Governor named him to create the tracing program.

Mr. Bloomberg SAID in his telephone call  that tracer prospects would be drawn from medical students in New York State and health professionals. The training will be done online. Mr. Bloomberg announced reporting by tracers would be done in real time, reporting contacts with persons identified as testing positive interviewing the new cases for possible persons they may have interacted with previously to their being diagnosed. The tracer will then contact the possible contacts and quarantine them for 15 days, checking in with the contactees for symptoms.

The tracers would track down possible infectees  the positive person may have seen and send those names back to a central system via a second ap. The persons contacted by the infected individual with the coronavirus, would have an  app to impart any symptoms to the centralized system. There would be three apps created.

Governor Cuomo noted that yesterday 4,681 new positives Wednesday, to note how large a scale the tracing system had to be prepared for every day after any reopenings. Mr. Bloomberg said the system, and its manual, training materials would be available to Mayors across the country to help them use the tracing system and also made available to the world.

In an release just in from the Governor’s Press Office, the tracing system was explained in more detail:

First, labs will report positive cases of COVID-19 immediately to contact tracers on a daily basis.

The contact tracer will then interview the positive patient to identify people they may have been in contact with over the past 14 days.

The contact tracer will notify and interview each contact to alert them to their risk of infection and instruct those contacts to quarantine or isolate for 14 days to be sure they don’t spread COVID-19 to others. 

The contact tracers will monitor those contacts by text throughout the duration of their quarantine or isolation to see if the contacts are showing any symptoms.

The program is expected to have 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide depending on the projected number of cases. Contact tracing teams will work remotely with state-of-the-art software to develop a secure database of information on the spread of the infection.

To meet the nation-leading scale and scope of this program, Mayor Bloomberg and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will support the State Department of Health’s initiative to build an army of contact tracers through a three-step process: recruitment, interviewing and training. Bloomberg Philanthropies will help DOH to actively identify and recruit potential contact tracers for the program from State, City and County Health Departments.

There was no information as to when the tracing system would be ready for any possible New York re-opening or how it would be tested. Mayor William DeBlasio of New York City said New York would provide 1,000 health and employees as tracers to start.

The Governor announced a plan had been submitted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for cleaning all subway cars every day. The plan is beginning in a week, (not tonight ) subways would be closed between 1 AM and 5 A.M. (when 10,000 people ride the trains, the governor said). Transportation for  Essential Workers would be provided by the MTA free, using buses, free vans, or Uber and Lyft cars. Meanwhile the subway cars would have every surface cleaned. Police would supervise each closed station for security.

Mayor DeBlasio said arrangements through outreach to the homeless have been made in order that the problem of vast numbers of homeless sleeping on the subway would be eliminated. The condition of sleeping on the subways was dramatized by front page photos in The Daily News last weekend.

Corona virus statistical indicators resumed declines across the board yesterday, including the Hospitalization Rate.