NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday the city's initiative to make testing simple, easy, quick, and free.
The city's test & trace corps will launch a $10 million media and outreach campaign.
The mayor also announced that there will be 16 new community testing sites across the city.
There will be three new testing sites opening in Manhattan, five in Brooklyn, five in Queens, one in the Bronx, and two in Staten Island.
De Blasio says the city's goal is to have 50,000 tests per day by August.
The mayor said that his goal was to have 1,000 contact tracers by June 1st, and he announced that the city has surpassed that and will have 1,700 tracers to start by that date.
There are two types of contact tracers hired. 938 are case investigators with 410 of them coming from hardest-hit neighborhoods with 40 languages spoken.
770 monitors will be hired with 331 of them from hardest-hit neighborhoods.
40 percent of these monitors speak Spanish.
There will be 100 additional case investigators conducting case interviews this week, covering patients testing positive in target zip codes.
The mayor said that the city is gearing up for the first phase of reopening and is assessing the needs of each industry for the enforcement, support, and regulations needed.
"The future is going to be mass transit," de Blasio, said adding that the city is studying transit patterns to ensure safety once people return to work.
De Blasio also reported the in daily indicators, hospitalizations remains under the threshold with 63.
Patients in ICU are at 423 and above the threshold of 375.
People tested who are positive are at 7% percent, under the 15 percent threshold, the mayor said.
"We aren't there until we're there," he added.
