MANHASSET, NY — New York state will start testing residents for the antibodies that show whether they have been infected by the new coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday.

"We're going to do that in the most aggressive way in the nation," Cuomo said at his briefing. "The FDA has approved the state's antibody test. We're going to be rolling it out to do the largest survey of any state population that has been done. We'll take thousands of antibody tests all across the state to get a real baseline of how many people were infected and have the antibodies. So we'll have the first real statistical number on where we are as a population." Cuomo made the announcement at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research on Long Island. Before the announcement, he toured the Northwell Health Core Laboratories.

Cuomo had visited the Northwell lab in March, when there were 105 cases of COVID-19 in New York (most in Westchester County) and the outbreak was spreading rapidly. At the time, the federal government had just loosened controls on testing, allowing states' public labs to do their own testing instead of having to send tests to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for results. Cuomo was still waiting for federal officials to answer his request to let private labs help and to allow automated test analyses instead of requiring manual analysis of test results.

As of Saturday, 242,786 people in New York have tested positive for the new coronavirus. This past week, Cuomo repeatedly asked for private companies to help create and manufacture antibody tests, and he called on federal officials to get large-scale testing going so the economy can reopen. Antibody testing is essential to check for people's immunity to the new coronavirus, which is still moving through the population.

Northwell will start this week, aiming to do 10,000 antibody tests a day and then double that, said Michael Dowling, Northwell's CEO.

"We're working with all the other big health care systems in the region," Dowling said. "Our expectation is hundreds of thousands of tests across the state."

In addition, diagnostic testing for COVID-19 will ramp up. "Nobody has done testing at this level ever," Cuomo said.