New York reports record-low COVID-19 infection rate, stays below 1 percent
Will Fudge | Staff Photographer
New York state’s testing capacity has been steadily rising since the outbreak began.
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New York state reported a record-low coronavirus positivity rate Sunday and has conducted more tests per capita than nearly any other state in the country.
Sunday’s 0.66% positive testing rate was the state’s lowest, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a press briefing Monday. New York is also conducting 4.1 COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people, a testing ratio that ranks fourth in the country after Rhode Island, Alaska and Washington, D.C., according to Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s not just that the .66 as one day is great news,” Cuomo said. “It’s consistent with what we have been seeing all along. If you’ve been looking at our infection rate over the past couple of weeks, it has been below 1%.”
New York’s testing capacity has been steadily rising since the outbreak began. The state conducted 98,000 diagnostic tests on Thursday, marking the first time that the single-day testing number surpassed 90,000 since the outbreak began in March.
“This is the success story, right? That is the key number that you want to look at, the positivity rate in the community,” said Brooks Gump, a public health professor at SU’s Falk College. “New York state followed the guidelines. If you followed the guidelines, you can then hope and have more expectations of going into fall without having a major outbreak.”
New York state has been in the fourth and final phase of its reopening process since mid-July and is allowing schools to reopen this fall under state-issued guidelines. Gyms in the state were allowed to reopen at 33% capacity starting Monday with rigorous safety protocols and a mask mandate in place.
“If you followed the guidelines, the CDC guidelines, the positivity rates, the social distancing, you can reopen,” Gump said. “You obviously want to keep monitoring, be really vigilant. And if you find any outbreaks, you deal with them aggressively and quickly.”
Published on August 25, 2020 at 11:13 pm
Contact Francis: btang05@syr.edu | @francis_towne
