NYC Reported Lowest Number of New Coronavirus Cases Nationwide

Throughout the entire reopening process, New York has not seen any uptick in coronavirus cases and is seeing the lowest numbers across the country, officials said Thursday.

According to Dr. Ted Long, the head of the city’s Test and Trace Corps, the city has the capacity to conduct up to 50,000 tests per day at its 50-plus NYC Health and Hospital sites, with results taking an average of two days.

“I’m proud to say that today our rates of new cases of the coronavirus through all of those phases of reopening have not had an uptick whatsoever, they’ve been completely stable. That is good news,” Long said at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daily press briefing.

Long explained a method that New York is now using to cut the average citywide processing time for test results from four to two days, known as “pooling”.

“Pooling is where you have multiple different samples of coronavirus tests from patients. You run them all at the same time and if the overall sample is negative, you don’t need to run each one individually because you know each one individually is negative,” Long said. “So, it saves a tremendous amount of time.”

The city is determined to reach at least 90 percent of all new diagnoses and to make sure at last 75 percent of those cases complete intake and isolation.

The Test and Trace Corps have potentially prevented more than 5,000 new coronavirus cases, since the program began on June 1, by identifying 17,383 new cases and tracing 17,137 contacts who may have been exposed.

 Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.