WPCNR CORONAVIRUS REPORT. From the Governor Cuomo Press Office. April 16, 2020:
Wednesday night, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was a guest on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time to discuss New York’s ongoing effort to combat the corona virus. The program revealed that apparently the Federal Government at this time is unwilling to fund the amount of money to pay for increasing the ability of private labs to process an exponential volume of tests. Here is that discussion:
Governor Cuomo: That’s a legitimate issue. I knew you would get to one sooner or later. Look, the way I think of it is, when is it over, over? It’s over, over when you have a vaccine. Then people know the virus is dead. That’s 12 to 18 months, so the question is how do you get from here to 12 to 18 months? Well, maybe they’ll come up with a medical treatment, convalescent plasma, et cetera. Yeah, maybe. Otherwise, we have to get from here to 12 months, 18 months. We have to start to phase in the opening of the economy while we’re watching the public health consequences and the number of hospitalizations, et cetera.
Testing is the best mechanism for you to get through this 12 to 18 months. Now, why doesn’t the President want to go near testing? Because testing is a quagmire. No one can do it. No one can bring it up to scale quickly. It is very complicated. I have spent days and days on this. Government doesn’t really do testing, it’s really a private lab function. To now take testing and ramp it up to where you have to bring it, Chris, is an impossibility.
Chris Cuomo: Help me understand, because when people hear you say, “nobody can do it,” why? Why is it so hard? Is it about not having enough tests? Not enough people? Not enough labs? Why can’t America do it when we can do everything?
Governor Cuomo: It’s all of the above. It’s all of the above. Can we do it? Yes. Can you do it in one month? Well, no. So everybody’s reaction is hands off because this is now going to be the blame game. Well, there wasn’t enough testing. Who’s to blame? That’s why the President said 11 times, after I said 11 times, the states can’t do the test. You’ve never heard me say, “I’m not capable. I give up.” I don’t like to say it. It’s not who I am, it’s not what I believe. I said it because I want to make sure we’re clear: I can’t do it. I can’t bring it to scale. This gets very complicated. It was all of the above. They don’t have enough manufacturing equipment, they don’t have enough vials, they don’t have enough swabs, they don’t have enough machines. The private labs don’t have the capacity. They need testing agents that don’t even come from this country. There’s a whole international supply chain to this.
To grab hold of this is very problematic and we just went through this situation of how do we build ventilators in 14 days. That turned out to be very complicated. This testing is now what ventilators was in this new phase. I said I can’t do it. President said the states must do it. The states are saying, “we can’t.” This has to be justified, this dispute. It’s not even a dispute. The truth is nobody can do it well. You can’t bring that industry to this volume, this scale, nationwide. We can’t have 50 states – what’s happening now, is I’m competing against all the other states for those private sector companies that have some capacity.
I’m trying to buy tests. I called Governor Pritzker. There’s a company in his state that does these tests and they’re one of the leading companies. I said, “How do we do this? I don’t want to compete with you.” But every state is now competing and the federal government. This is madness. We did this with ventilators. It can’t be 50 states scrambling and bidding for the same product from the same 10 companies in the country. It can’t be.
