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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) speaks during a press Conference at the State Capitol.
Michael Brochstein | Barcroft Media | Getty Images
Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and former mayor of New York City, will help the state develop and implement an aggressive program to test for Covid-19 and trace people who have had contact with infected individuals, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday.
“Michael Bloomberg will design the program, design the training, he’s going to make a financial contribution,” Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany. “He has tremendous insight both governmentally and from a private sector business perspective in this.”
As the state continues to ramp up its capacity to test for Covid-19, Cuomo said tracing and isolating people who have come into contact with infected individuals will be key to containing the outbreak. Health officials have said that radically increasing the current level of testing, along with tracing and isolating contacts of infected people, is necessary to prevent a resurgence of infection as states reopen businesses and social settings.
Johns Hopkins University and public health nonprofit Vital Strategies will also be partnering with New York in this effort, Cuomo said
“This is a monumental undertaking, we’re all going to do it,” Cuomo said. “You don’t have months to do this, you have weeks to do this super-ambitious undertaking.”
Covid-19 has infected more than 258,500 people across the state as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Cuomo said the task of tracing the contacts of that many people is “extraordinarily impossible.”
Bloomberg will contribute “upwards of $10 million” to the state’s testing, tracing and isolating effort, according to Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor. Cuomo added that $1.3 billion in federal funding is available to the state for contact tracing.
Bloomberg is also putting together “an organization that can help hire the people, because we have to expand this number tenfold,” Cuomo said. Representatives of Bloomberg did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
“He’s helping us to design the programmatic operational and technological components of our contact tracing program,” DeRosa said. “They in partnership with us are creating an online curriculum to train the tracers, to recruit them, to interview, to perform the background checks and then we’re going to coordinate all the counties and also with New Jersey and Connecticut.”
Cuomo said the state already has “about 500 tracers,” adding that most of them are employed by New York City and the counties of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk.
“The tracing will start — it’s actually starting now. But it has to be brought to a level that nobody even imagined before,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo announced the new testing program a day after meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington. Trump committed to working with New York to double the number of tests the state conducts each day to 40,000, Cuomo said.
Bloomberg last month abandoned a bid to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination after spending almost $1 billion on his campaign. The media mogul’s campaign never gained traction despite garnering wide-spread press attention. By the time he quit, Bloomberg had only won 46 delegates during primary and caucus contests.
