NY School Funding May Be Halved Without Federal Cash, Cuomo Says

NEW YORK CITY — New York may need to halve its funding to schools if the federal government doesn't provide immediate coronavirus-related aid to states, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday.

New York, facing a $15 billion deficit, would also need to decrease aid to hospitals without the $500 billion that the National Governors Association — a bipartisan group of U.S. state leaders — has requested from President Donald Trump's administration, Cuomo said.

"How ludicrous would it be to now cut state funding to hospitals in this environment?" Cuomo said. "Government matters today in a way it hasn't mattered in decades."

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New York officials' anger over federal funding erupted in the past few days as Cuomo launched into a tirade against Trump during his Friday press conference and Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday morning, "Are you telling New York City to drop dead?"

Cuomo issued his funding plea as he announced that New York's Health Department will begin this week to test thousands of New Yorkers for COVID-19 antibodies in an attempt to better estimate how many people have been infected and recovered.

New York's various health care institutions hope to conduct hundreds of thousands of tests across the state in the months ahead, said Michael J. Dowling, chief executive officer of Northwell Health.

"This will be the first true snapshot of what we're really dealing with," Cuomo said.

On Saturday, 507 New Yorkers lost their lives to COVID-19, and 1,300 entered the hospital system — 63 percent in New York City — with a positive diagnosis, Cuomo said.

Cuomo noted that numbers of intubations, hospitalizations and ICU admittances continued to drop, suggesting New York might be past its apex.

Hospitalizations dropped to about 16,000 from a high point of about 18,000, the governor said.

"If this trend holds, we are past the high point," Cuomo said. "We just pray to God it goes down the other side."

New York is prepared to send 400 ventilators to Massachusetts should that state's case count continue to spike, fulfilling a promise Cuomo made earlier in the outbreak that New York would not hoard its ventilator stock.

Said Cuomo, "New York never forgets."

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