New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined his plan to get New Yorkers to a new phase under the pandemic where transmission is at a low level.
The mayor said testing would need to ramp up drastically — ideally hundreds of thousands per day — so that all residents could easily get tested. De Blasio said along with testing, tracing would follow to include all individuals who came in close contact with a person who tested positive.
He said a plan of this size would take hundreds of thousands of people working on it, more testing, more protective personal equipment for medical personnel and more location sites for testing sites to happen.
De Blasio said that while these aspects are not in place right now, he expects them to be in place next month.
When asked how viable a program like this would work, de Blasio said, “we have to do it. To borrow from Apollo 13, failure is not an option. We have to find a way to do it.”
He continued to say that progress is being made in the city.
The number of people admitted to ICUs in hospitals went down from 857 to 821 and the percentage of people who tested positive citywide decreased from 35% to 33%, according to de Blasio.
However, he did say that the number of people admitted to the hospital with a suspected case of COVID-19 increased from 204 to 252.
On Tuesday, de Blasio announced that many staple events in the city during June, including the Pride Parade and Puerto Rican Day Parade, would be canceled. He said Wednesday that New Yorkers would have a Fourth of July celebration, though it would look different from previous years.
“There’s definitely gonna be fireworks. How we do them, where we do them? There’s a lot of questions between now and then,” de Blasio said.
