New York state has been well-prepared against the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to carry out its plan in a smooth way in is ongoing battle with the health crisis, Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, said.
“Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to listen to what I found to be a very interesting plan that you have for New York. It seems really sound, and you have a lot of backup contingencies, which I like, so you’re not going to get caught shorthanded on this, I’m certain,” Xinhua news agency quoted Fauci as saying while joining Governor Andrew Cuomo in providing an update on the state’s progress.
“It’s painful for me to see it from a distance to my place of birth, but you guys got really slammed and then you rebounded. And you rebounded in a way that you kept your test positivity low because you did the prudent things that you need to do.
“I was following it from here in Washington and I was seeing that whenever it looked like things were getting a little out of hand, you’d tighten the rope a little bit,” said Fauci, who has accepted President-elect Joe Biden’s offer to be his chief medical adviser.
“And then when things went back, you eased up a little bit. So, I’m not surprised that your infection rate is really low, because I think you were doing the right things after you had a really serious hit in the beginning (and) when you were there in the late-winter, early-spring,” added the expert who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and had served for months on the White House’s task force team against the pandemic.
The state has adopted a micro-cluster strategy to supervise the virus neighbourhood by neighborhood, spot small outbreaks in time, and contain them before they could spread, thus reining in its infection.
New York has had the 3rd or 4th lowest Covid-19 test positivity rate in the country, which was repeatedly attributed by Cuomo to the successful implementation of the micro-cluster strategy.
According to the Johns Hopkins University, the state currently accounts for 34,980 coronavirus deaths and 713,129 cases.
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