New York has begun testing healthcare workers for CCP virus antibodies and will do the same next week with transit and law enforcement workers, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on April 25.
“This will be the first true snapshot of exactly how many people were infected by COVID-19 and where we are as a population, and will help us to reopen and rebuild without jeopardizing what we’ve already accomplished,” Cuomo said.
Antibody testing can help with surveillance of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases, and, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, serve two purposes; to test if a person has been is infected, and to confirm that person has recovered.
“That person is actually protected against subsequent exposure and infection with an identical organism,” he said. However, he added that because of the novelty of the COVID-19, researchers still don’t know how long this antibody protection in recovered persons will last.
The World Health Organization (WHO) a week later also warned that those patients with antibodies for COVID-19 aren’t necessarily protected from a second round of infection.
Cuomo’s testing announcement came as new data showed hospitalizations for coronavirus in the state falling to their lowest level in three weeks.
A little more than 13,000 people were hospitalized for the disease on Friday—about the same level the state was at on April 1 before a surge of cases.
However, the governor announced 437 deaths on Friday, bringing the total number of reported deaths to 16,599 in New York.
“We are back where we were 21 days ago,” Cuomo said in a press conference Saturday. “All the numbers are basically saying the same, that we are in fact on the downside of the mountain.”
Cuomo added that he is signing an executive order to allow independent pharmacists the authority to conduct diagnostic tests for COVID-19.