NYC Coronavirus Exit Strategy Relies On Tests City Does Not Have

NEW YORK CITY — New Yorkers won't be freed from the coronavirus stay-at-home order until the federal government provides mass testing the city cannot produce, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday.

"It is not a beautiful straight line, in truth," de Blasio said. "It's incredibly challenging and frustrating and difficult."

Even though de Blasio's exit strategy hinges on COVID-19 testing, the mayor warned tests provided no "silver bullet" because asymptomatic people might test negative and still spread the disease.

"None of it is perfect," de Blasio said. "Regular testing doesn't guarantee what will happen tomorrow."

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Increasing testing capacity also presents a large challenge because of the complicated process and limited supply that de Blasio said he's been pleading with the federal government to increase since Jan 24.

"If we could get widespread testing it would change the entire strategy," de Blasio said. "Availability ... can only happen with a federal intervention and we've never had that."

De Blasio went on to detail an exit strategy that relied on solutions to testing problems he said he could not solve.

The current stay-in-place order will not be relaxed until three metrics show steady decreases for at least 10 days: COVID-19 hospital admittances, ICU admittances and percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19, de Blasio said.

The city will begin releasing that new data on the Health Department website Monday.

Once testing was supplied and the metrics showed improvement, New York City would then rely on disease tracking to relax restrictions for people not at risk for spreading the disease.

Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot also floated the idea of allowing limited sets of businesses to reopen, but did not detail which businesses.

"There is no set cookbook for this," said Dr. Oxiris Barbot. "We don't know exactly what that new level of normal will look like."

Finally, the city would amp up its quarantine capacity in New York hotels to isolate COVID-19 patients.

"We'll need a lot of hotel rooms," de Blasio said. "We're going to be doing that on a really big scale."

The mayor warned New Yorkers not to expect restrictions to relax until late May or June.

"I don't see anything getting easier in the month of April," de Blasio said. "We still have widespread transmission."

As of Wednesday evening, 4,260 New York City dwellers had lost their lives to COVID-19, 20,474 were hospitalized and 80,204 tested positive, Health department data show.

De Blasio also warned New Yorkers to expect even stricter social distancing policies if the city failed to contain the spread in the weeks ahead.

"If we're not tight, tighter restrictions are an option," de Blasio said. "Eight million of us have to earn our way out of this."

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