New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Saturday that the state had expanded its testing eligibility criteria to allow for more people to get tested.
The new criteria will include more health-care workers including direct care providers, nutritionists, psychologists, first responders including firefighters, paramedics, police officers, correctional officers and other essential employees.
The governor also announced that the state has boosted COVID-19 lab capacities, and that it now needs more collection sites and therefore he will be signing an executive order to allow independent pharmacists to be collection sites for testing COVID-19.
Cuomo said that he agreed with the federal government to increase the testing capacity to 40,000 tests per day in New York state.
New York currently conducts an average of 20,000 tests per day.
The state reported a total of 1,100 new hospitalizations from COVID-19 as of Saturday.
Cuomo said the number of hospitalizations now is the same as the hospitalization rate on April 1st, saying the state is on the downside on COVID-19 curve in his opinion.
There were 437 new deaths from COVID-19 reported in New York state bringing the total number of deaths to 16,162.
The total number of confirmed cases in New York is 271,621 cases.
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