Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, left, speaks as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo listens during a press conference | AP Photo New York region governors plan coordinated economic restart

ALBANY, N.Y. — The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will take a regional approach to reopening the economy when it is safe to do so, mirroring the coordinated shutdown they undertook to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Even as the states each announced record death counts, with more than 1,000 people dying across the region over the past 24 hours, the leaders said it was time to start planning the best way to rollback their lockdown orders in the coming months.


“We’re working on a plan with Connecticut and New Jersey because when we go back, we go back together,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday during a daily press briefing in Albany.

Cuomo and the other governors — Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Ned Lamont of Connecticut — appear to be focused on ramping up the availability of a rapid test for the virus and a new antibody test that will show if someone already had the virus and recovered. Once widely available, such testing could allow the states to gradually open businesses back up as some social distancing restrictions remain in place.

“You’re not going to end the infection, end the virus, before you start restarting life. I don’t think we have that luxury,” Cuomo said. “This is not a light switch that you just can flick one day and go back to normal. We’re looking to restart the economy, we’re going to have to restart a lot of systems that we shut down abruptly and we need to start a plan for that.”

The three states worked together in March on a rolling lockdown of society, banning public gatherings and forcing the closure of bars, restaurants and other nonessential businesses in close succession. New York and New Jersey have recorded more cases of the virus than anywhere else in the U.S.

Now, amid signs that the spread of the virus may be nearing its peak in the region, states and the federal government are grappling with the question of how and when to begin allowing more individuals to return to work, resume normal routines, go out to restaurants, start planning trips and other activities that are on hold.

“We discussed … in a general sense a regional approach to the things like testing, tracking and the reopening — slowly and responsibility, whenever that moment comes — the reopening of businesses and schools,” Murphy said at his own press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

Murphy said he had also reached out to Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who participated in previous efforts to coordinate a regional coronavirus response, about joining their planning about how to end the restrictions.

Cuomo had previously indicated he wants to start early to plan for how and when to let people return to work. The governor has largely pinned his hopes on widespread availability of an antibody test for immunity to the virus, along with a rapid 15-minute test for the virus itself.

“I think we go back with people who have tested, that they are negative, or people who have tested that they have the antibodies which means they had the virus and they’re immune from the virus, or we go back with young people going first,” Cuomo said.

The New York Department of Health is still awaiting final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the antibody test it has developed, which requires a blood sample. DOH Commissioner Howard Zucker said production and use of the test will ramp over the next week as the state works with the FDA to make it available at other labs beyond the state’s Wadsworth Center in Albany.

Zucker said this test is specifically for antibodies that show an individual is fully recovered from the virus. For now, the state expects to be able to run 5,000 of those tests each week, according to the governor’s office.

Cuomo said that governors in the three states are interested in supporting businesses who can develop these tests at scale, saying New York will “invest” in those companies. It’s not clear how long such a ramp-up may take.

Cuomo said in late March he had tasked two of his former secretaries — Bill Mulrow, a Blackstone executive, and Steve Cohen, an executive at billionaire Ronald Perelman’s holding company — with crafting “NY Forward,” the state’s economic restart plan.

The governor has cited David Katz, a physician and founder of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, who wrote a column for The New York Times making the case for a stratification of risk rather than a broad, economy-wide lockdown.

Some public health experts have reservations about that approach, citing the difficulty in separating young people who may be exposed if they return to work from their elderly relatives or those with underlying conditions. Priority for an antibody test should be given to health care and other frontline workers, they suggested.

States will likely have to divert resources back to things like contact tracing to contain spread once the states begins seeing the number of infections fall. When that happens, or how that will be handled, remains an open question.

“Too early to tell,” Murphy said. “The house is still on fire and we're still fighting the fire.”

While New Jersey officials have begun to see evidence that the pandemic is starting to plateau — the daily growth rate in new reported cases slowed considerably over the last week — its peak in Covid-19 hospitalizations is still on the horizon.

Murphy shut down state and county parks on Monday, adding that it will likely take “many more weeks, at the least” for the state to consider removing the storm shutters from its economy.

“We are not there yet,” he said. “I repeat. We are not there yet.”

In Connecticut, Lamont said on Tuesday that it was not yet time to let up on social distancing rules and announced a new requirement for temperature checks at essential businesses.

But the governor — noting many of his residents commute to New York City for work — said he, too, wants to quickly develop regional testing protocols that will allow people to work over the coming months. The state had already been pushing to ramp up testing.

“We’re thinking hard about the nature of our testing protocols. How do we prioritize that?“ Lamont said at a late afternoon press conference. “Who is building up an immunity?“

Lamont indicated that CVS Pharmacy is planning to launch a 15-minute test for the coronavirus in Connecticut in in the coming weeks.

The testing would likely be prioritized for workers in critical areas, Lamont indicated. He emphasized that there would be a slow return to normal.

“We don’t have a vaccine yet,” he said. “That would probably get us out of the woods faster. Until then, we have to self-vaccine and we do that by testing.“

