New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has recently begun publicly questioning whether he made the correct decision when he ordered a quarantine in the state, the New York Post reports.
“We closed everything down. That was our public health strategy,” Cuomo said during a press conference in Albany on Thursday. “If you re-thought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say ‘Quarantine everyone.'”
He said in a press conference on Wednesday, “I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people, [it] was probably not the best public health strategy. The younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection.”
On Tuesday, the governor defended his decision after criticizing President Donald Trump for saying that businesses could be reopened by Easter.
“Why all of this? Because it’s 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. It’s lives, it’s grandmothers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers,” Cuomo said. “And you start to see the cases on TV. It’s a 40-year-old woman who recovered from breast cancer but had a compromised immune system and four children at home. That’s what this is about. It’s about a vulnerable population.”
He said on Wednesday that the Food and Drug Administration would have to approve a test to determine if patients have immunity to the coronavirus before businesses can reopen.
“Younger people can go back to work. People who have resolved can go back to work,” Cuomo said. “People who — once we get this antibody test — show that they had the virus and they resolved can go back to work.”
He added, “That’s how I think you do it. … It’s not [that] we’re going to either do public health or we’re going to do economic development and restarting. We have to do both.”