Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that New York City will start creating its own coronavirus testing kits.
Beginning in early May, New York City-based manufacturers, laboratories and 3-D printers will produce 50,000 coronavirus test kits a week.
“We said, well if people can make them around the world, why not us?” said Mayor Bill de Blasio during his daily coronavirus briefing. The city recently received news that components to 50,000 test kits would be donated to New York City from Aria Diagnostics in Carmel, Indiana.
During his April 14 briefing, the mayor said that an additional 50,000 test kits per week will be sent from Aria to New York city every week, beginning April 20, bringing the total number of available tests in the city to 400,000 a month.
Recently, the mayor touted progress on the battle against the novel coronavirus as the number of cases continues to fall. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported that there are 106,813 cases of the novel coronavirus in the city as of 9:30 a.m. April 14.
In order to ensure that the number of cases continues to decline, de Blasio emphasized the importance of testing in order to appropriately quarantine people.
The mayor emphasized that although the soon to be available tests were good news, the city would not “let its foot off the gas.” New York City would keep social distancing and shelter in place strategies active in order push the number of new novel coronavirus patients further down.
As capacity in city hospitals opens up medical personnel will be freed to help more with testing New Yorkers, de Blasio added.
This story originally appeared on amny.com.
