NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned that the flu season in combination with the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will pose a "host of complexities" this fall as students return to school and labs deal with a crush of flu and coronavirus tests.
"We're still in the first wave, but we do have in effect a second wave, which is the flu season is starting," the governor said in a call with reporters Wednesday. "You put the flu season on top of COVID, this is a very difficult situation to deal with. And that is going to be the second wave."
The governor said the state has deployed "almost all of our lab capacity to COVID tests." He warned handling flu tests would "require a reduction in the number of COVID tests or in the turnaround time in COVID tests."
Cuomo said the state Department of Health will send a letter to every county health department in the state Wednesday, asking how they plan to address the demand for flu and COVID tests simultaneously in the coming months.
"We already have issues on the turnaround time on COVID tests," Cuomo said. "We want to get ahead of this, and that letter from the Department of Health is going to do that."
Cuomo said he also wants schools that are planning for a return of students to "take into consideration what we've seen in other schools." The governor specifically pointed to the University of Notre Dame, which suspended in-person learning after 130 students tested positive for COVID in the first week of in-person classes.
"I want the schools to take this situation into consideration and answer the question, would this have happened in your school? Could you have caught the spread before it got to 130 students? And if you can't answer yes, then there's a problem," Cuomo said.
The governor said schools reopening and the start of the flu season "all happens in a matter of weeks." He said it's "going to make it much harder to diagnose symptomatic people" since testing capacity will be strained and people, including many students, will have symptoms of both the flu and coronavirus.
"On top of that, we still have states all around us getting infected; and quarantine facilities and procedures; and lack of compliance in bars and restaurants," he added.
During the call, Cuomo also announced that 80,425 COVID tests were conducted Tuesday and that 631, or 0.78 percent, came back positive.
Tuesday was the 12th straight day that the state's positivity rate was under 1 percent, the governor said.
The 631 new cases bring the state's total to 427,202.
There were six more deaths Tuesday. The state's death toll is now 25,270.
The number of patients hospitalized for COVID was 548, Cuomo said. There were 131 patients in intensive care and 60 intubated.
"The numbers are very good news. The numbers have been very good news for months," the governor said before adding "COVID is not over by any stretch of the imagination."
