Bloomberg to design, bankroll NYS coronavirus tracing program

A familiar face help will design and bankroll the Empire State’s coronavirus tracing program: Michael Bloomberg.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that the former New York City mayor, failed Democratic presidential candidate and media billionaire would step in to ramp up the initiative in the span of weeks — as deaths statewide eclipsed 15,000.
“Mayor Bloomberg will help coordinate the entire effort,” Cuomo said during an Albany press briefing. “He has tremendous insight, both governmentally and from a private-sector business perspective.”
The tracing initiative will start with a person who has tested positive for the coronavirus, and painstakingly identify those with whom they’ve crossed paths, to find previously unknown cases.
“This has to happen,” said Cuomo. “You don’t have a month to plan and do this. You have weeks to get this up and running.”
Bloomberg will help make it happen, both through a contribution which Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa said was “upwards of $10 million,” and through the Bloomberg-backed public-health program at Johns Hopkins University.
“He’s helping us to design the … operational and technological components of our contract-tracing program,” said DeRosa. “And they, in partnership with us, are creating an online curriculum to train the tracers, to recruit them, to interview, to perform the background checks.”
Cuomo revealed Bloomberg’s role hours after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city’s own expanded tracing initiative, set to launch in May.
The governor could not provide an exact timeline for when the effort — which will be coordinated with New Jersey and Connecticut — would be fully operational.
The next step was announced as another 474 deaths were announced in the 24-hour period ending at midnight Wednesday, bringing the overall state death toll to 15,302.
Total hospitalizations, however, continued their gradual decline, now down to 15,508 from 16,044 on Tuesday.
While the battle continued to trend in the right direction, Cuomo urged caution.
“I get the pressure but we can’t make a bad decision,” he said, asked specifically about calls to re-open New York’s economy. “Frankly this is no time to act stupidly.”
https://nypost.com/2020/04/22/bloomberg-to-help-new-york-state-develop-coronavirus-tracing-program/