(Photo Provided).
Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo will issue an Executive Order allowing the state to redistribute ventilators and personal protective equipment, or PPE, from institutions that don't currently need them and redeploy the equipment to other hospitals with the highest need. The National Guard will be used to transport the ventilators and PPE across the state. The equipment will be returned to the hospital or the hospital will be reimbursed for the equipment in the future.
Governor Cuomo also announced the launch of www.ny.gov/covid-19tracker, which will provide New York State's comprehensive coronavirus testing data to the public. The website, which will be updated daily with the latest data, presents visualizations of statewide and county-level testing and results. The public can also access the testing data through Open NY at data.ny.gov, New York State's open data portal, which offers machine readable datasets in downloadable standard formats that can be sorted, searched, analyzed and applied to new uses.
"We have taken extraordinary measures to build our stockpile of ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment, but we still do not have enough," Governor Cuomo said. "Our greatest challenge has been ventilators - we are running out of them in our most stressed regions of the state, and there are hospitals in other parts of the state that have ventilators that they are not using and I will not be in a position where people are dying and we have several hundred ventilators in our own state somewhere else. I am signing a new Executive Order that will allow the state to redistribute these ventilators from institutions that don't need them now and send them to hospitals in other parts of the state that do need them. And when our curve is over, New Yorkers are going to take our equipment, our personnel and our knowledge and we will go to any community in this nation that needs help, because that outpouring has been there for us."
Finally, the Governor confirmed 10,482 additional cases of novel coronavirus, bringing the statewide total to 102,863 confirmed cases in New York State.
