New York’s Cuomo Says Trump Agrees to Help Expand Coronavirus Testing

President 👤Donald Trump and New York Governor 👤Andrew Cuomo, two prominent figures in the U.S. coronavirus crisis who are often at odds, emerged from a White House meeting on Tuesday with mostly positive things to say and an apparent deal on testing.

Cuomo, a Democrat whose state is the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic with nearly 20,000 deaths, said the Republican president agreed on a plan for doubling New York’s coronavirus screening capacity to 40,000 tests per day.

Under that plan, Cuomo said, the federal government will procure and furnish the test kits and related materials, including the chemical reagents that have sometimes been in short supply.

The state will be responsible for expanding the capacity of some 300 laboratories conducting the tests and hiring the necessary staff.

“That is an intelligent division of labor – let each layer of government do what it does best,” Cuomo told a news briefing after his rare face-to-face encounter with Trump, a man with whom the governor has had a testy relationship at best in the media.

He said the testing would mix diagnostic screenings used to determine if someone is carrying the virus, and serology tests in which blood samples are analyzed for the presence of antibodies, an indication of exposure even after an individual is no longer infected.

Cuomo said it will “take several weeks at best” to implement the plan.

“It’s in some ways an outrageous goal, but this is New York, and we’re used to outrageous,” he said, adding that the state’s current level of 20,000 tests a day marked the highest per-capita rate for diagnostic coronavirus screening in the world.