New York is planning to roll out antibody testing this week to determine who has been infected with the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday.
The state is conducting the “largest survey of any state population that has been done,” Cuomo added.
Cuomo also announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the greenlight for the state’s antibody test, which is designed to detect whether a person has developed the antibodies to fight coronavirus and indicates they may be immune against the disease,
He said the state would conduct “thousands” of tests this week.
“We’ll take thousands of tests, antibody tests, over this next week all across the state to give us a real snapshot, a real baseline, of exactly how many people were infected by coronavirus and have the antibodies,” Cuomo told reporters.
“So we’ll have the first real statistical number on exactly where we are as a population.”
The antibody tests will give New York its “first true snapshot” of how many people in the state have been infected with the virus, Cuomo said.
Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, later said in a tweet that the state antibody testing would begin on Monday and would sample 3,000 people.
The number of deaths in New York, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., has been on the decline in the past week. Yet, to date – the state is still recording more than 500 deaths a day, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
