New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, while promoting his new book Monday, said it is "incredible" how little has been learned about the spread of COVID-19 over the past seven months, and he warned that worse times are still on their way.
"We have to get smarter and we have to get better," Cuomo said on NBC's "Today." "the game isn't over. It is halftime. We didn't lose, it's only halftime. We had some success, but we also are making a lot of mistakes. And when we go into the locker room as a nation and we talk about the first half, we better learn because if we don't learn the lessons, the second half is going to be worse, I can tell you that.”
New York state is attacking clusters of coronavirus as they pop up, said Cuomo, the author of the upcoming book "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic."
New York was once a hotspot in the nation for in the early days of the pandemic, but now the situation is "very, very good," even though there may be a rise in cases as fall and winter come and the flu season arrives.
"We're at about a 1% infection rate, which is one of the lowest rates in the United States of America," said Cuomo. "We do a tremendous amount of testing. We do more testing in one day than most states do in a week."
That allows small clusters to be targeted to control the spread, said Cuomo.
"We have a cluster in Brooklyn and in Queens primarily, which is primarily a Hasidic Jewish community that doesn't want to accept the social distancing rules," said Cuomo. "We're focusing on that 2%, and we need the ability to focus on these small clusters now. Because if you don't catch a cluster, then it becomes a contagion."
If small areas can be shut down, "then it's not inevitable that the spread gets so large that you would have to close down an entire city or a state," the governor added.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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