NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday that 783 more people had died from the coronavirus in New York state, bringing the death toll statewide to 8,627 as the number of cases hit 180,458.
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Cuomo said the rate of hospitalizations, ICU admissions and intubations continue to stabilize.
He said the rate of deaths is also stabilizing, "but it is stabilizing at a horrific rate."
Still he said "all the numbers are on a downward slope" and "the curve of the increase is continuing to flatten."
Cuomo also responded to Mayor Bill de Blasio's Saturday announcement that public schools will remain closed through the end of the school year.
The governor said that was the mayor's "opinion."
"There has been no decision on the schools," Cuomo said.
He also said there's been no decision on when to open businesses.
"I understand the mayor's position is also that busineses will probably open in May," Cuomo said. "Again, no decision has been made on whether or not business will open."
Cuomo said it's his legal authority to close or re-open schools. "That's why when we closed them, we closed them statewide," he said.
"It will be a metropolitan-wide decision," Cuomo added. "It will be coordinated with the business decision. It will be coordinated with the rest of the state," Cuomo said. "It will definitely be coordinated with New Jersey and Connecticut."
De Blasio's press secretary, Freddi Goldstein, issued a swift reaction to Cuomo's press conference, saying the schools will remain closed.
"The Governor's reaction to us keeping schools closed is reminiscent of how he reacted when the Mayor called for a shelter in place," Goldstein wrote. "We were right then and we're right now."
"Schools will remain closed, just like how we eventually - days later - moved to a shelter in place model," Goldstein continued.
The governor said there have been hotspots on Long Island, specifically Suffolk County, but "overall, we are flattening the curve."
"We've been very aggressive in suburban communities jumping on hot spots," Cuomo said.
The mix of encouraging and grim news from Cuomo has become familiar this week as people hospitalized in previous weeks die. Well over 3,000 deaths have been recorded since Monday.
Cuomo said that if the hospitalization rate stays flat, New York might not need the overflow field hospitals they have been scrambling to construct recently.
Cuomo said restarting the outbreak-stalled economy will require a massive expansion of testing to cover millions of workers.
Public health experts hope that mass screening with antibody tests could help identify who might have built up immunity to COVID-19. Cuomo said the state's health department is developing an antibody test.
The governor said that while the state lab will soon be able to process about 2,000 tests a day, New York has 9 million people needing to get back to work.
"It's not enough if you want to reopen on a meaningful scale and reopen quickly," Cuomo told a state Capitol news briefing. "We need an unprecedented mobilization where government can produce these tests in the millions."
Cuomo said the federal government should use its leverage to scale up testing and that New York could work in a coalition with neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut.
The governor did not provide a timeline, but described the economic restart as a "gradual, phased process."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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