I would say that 30,000 a day, if thats your goal, that will give you just a flavor of what the cases look like, said Dr. Michael Mina, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But I really dont believe that that testing is doing anything to stop the spread of the virus right now.
On most days, Mayor Bill de Blasio reports the number of new infections and the daily positivity rate for New York City in a news conference. Often soon after, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo holds his own news conference, where he shows the numbers on slides that have become popular on social media.
But the numbers the two men show are almost always different.
The discrepancy is usually small but occasionally can be significant, as it was last week when Mr. de Blasio announced a positivity rate for the city that was above 3 percent the highest in months while on the same day, Mr. Cuomo reported a rate of 1.3 percent for the city.
When you get a diagnostic test for the coronavirus in New York, state law requires that the results be reported to the states Department of Health.
Both the city and the state use the same database of coronavirus cases, but report the numbers differently.
The daily state data is, for the most part, simply the results that came in over the past 24 hours. Thats why the state can share its data so quickly.
The citys health department takes the results received each day and matches them to the dates when peoples samples were taken. For example, if a person took a test on a Wednesday, and the result came in on a Friday, the city would still record that result on Wednesdays statistics. The state would record it on Fridays statistics.read more
How Will We Know a 2nd Virus Wave Has Arrived in N.Y.C.?
