New York state, the epicentre of the United States’s Covid-19 outbreak, will allow pharmacies to execute tests for the virus, the governor Andrew Cuomo says.
Andrew Cuomo said some 5,000 pharmacies would be ready to perform testing, with the aim to provide 40,000 per day.
The US has over 938,000 confirmed cases. Almost a 3rd of the 53,751 deaths happened in the New York City alone.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump failed to hold his daily briefing, saying it absolutely was not worth his “time or effort”.
Speaking on Twitter on Saturday, he accused the media for asking “nothing but hostile questions”. He was heavily criticised after suggesting at Thursday’s White House press conference that disinfectant could potentially be used as a treatment for the virus.
His remarks are condemned as dangerous by doctors and makers, as disinfectants are hazardous substances and might be poisonous if ingested.
In NYC, calls to the hotline for exposure to certain household chemicals quite doubled within the 18 hours after Mr Trump’s remarks – 30 cases compared to 13 for the identical time-frame last year.
New York’s governor says the goal is to provide 40,000 tests per day
The briefings with Mr Trump and also the coronavirus task force could run quite two hours. But Thursday’s performance caused embarrassment even among a number of his supporters, BBC North America correspondent Peter Bowes says.
Mr Trump’s tweet appears to substantiate reports that the conferences could also be coming to an end because polls suggest they need not bolstered the president’s popularity among voters, our correspondent adds.
On Friday, the president’s briefing was unusually short – lasting just over 20 minutes – and he took no questions from the media.
Governor Cuomo announced on Saturday that antibody screenings would be expanded at four hospitals, beginning with frontline medical workers.
He also said independent pharmacies would be allowed to gather samples for diagnostic tests.
It is a part of a drive to search out out how widely the virus has spread across the state of 20 million people.
“Twenty-one days of hell, and now we are back to where we were 21 days ago,” he said. “Testing is what we are compulsively or obsessively focused on now.”
Healthcare staff and essential workers – like law enforcement officials, firefighters, bus drivers and shop assistants – would be able to get tests whether or not they didn’t have any symptoms of infection, he said.
This was important not only for their own safety but also to safeguard the general public, he said.
“Since we now have more collection sites, more testing capacity, we are able to open up the eligibility for those tests,” Mr Cuomo added.
Hospital admissions within the state have also begun to fall, Mr Cuomo said, in what he described as an indication the crisis was commencing to subside. However, the amount of deaths announced on Friday increased slightly to 437 – the primary time it had risen in four days.
Earlier in the week Mr Cuomo said nearly 14% of three thousands people in an exceedingly study had tested positive for the presence of antibodies, suggesting the virus had spread widely throughout the population.
Meanwhile NYC’s Independent Budget Office said the lockdown would end in the loss of 475,000 jobs and leave NYC with a deficit of nearly $10bn (£8.1bn).
