Cuomo: Contact tracing should start as soon as possible

Gov.

Andrew Cuomo says the state must scale contact tracing to determine who had contact with infected indviduals.

Are down statewide.

Testing is up.

And now, the governor says, is the time contact tracing needs to begin.

A huge initiative he says new york is moving quickly on as part of the reopening strategy.

There are four key steps in contract tracing.

-a lab comes back positive.

-you find out who that person was in contact with over the past 14 days.

-everyone gets notified and put in quarantine.

-and symptoms are monitored.

No easy feat when you have more than four thousand people testing positive each day...in the state.

But the governor says this initiative needs to start now.

(need tracers tomorrow) s/ gov.

Andrew cuomo/new york :23 "there is no time to go get a university to do a study, a blueprint, and then put a plan together we need it tomorrow because we're literally doing it right now we're doing the testing and we're coming up to scale on the testing you need the tracing to come up to scale to meet what we're doing on testing."

The state will hire an army of tracers.

--the people tasked with finding those who had contact with positive cases.

64 hundred to 17 thousand statewide will make up the army.

Many will come from state, city and county health departments.

There will be training and an online exam.

Going county by county