ALBANY, NY — Go. Andrew Cuomo announced at a press briefing on March 11 that all SUNY and CUNY schools will be moving to distance learning, including Sullivan County Community College.

The change begins on March 19, and it’s due to the spread of the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. Cuomo said the school will not be evicting students who live in dorms that may be in a hardship situation, but the goal is to reduce the density at all of the state-owned campuses.

The campuses will essentially be closed for the rest of the semester, with some exceptions.

In the area of testing for the novel coronavirus, Cuomo said that what allowed other countries to bring down the rate of infection began with massive numbers of individuals being tested for the virus.  In China, for instance, officials were testing 200,000 people a day. Officials isolated those infected and tracked people they might have come in contact with.

Cuomo said, “In this country, we’ve 5,000 to date, according to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.  So our testing capacity is nowhere near what it needs to be… New York State is going to take matters into its own hand and we’re going to start contracting with private labs in the state to increase our testing capacity.

"We started several weeks ago. The Centers for Disease Control said they would do all the tests and they would send them to Atlanta. We said that was too little, too late.  They allowed the state laboratory to do testing.  That capacity was several hundred. We said that’s too little too late. We have great labs in this state.  Why the federal government wouldn’t avail itself of the labs, why they wouldn’t have had protocols and tests ready… The NY Department of Health routinely works with about 28 labs which are experts in this kind of testing and virology, and where the DOH has a pre-existing relationship with these labs, where they’re confident of the labs work product… there’s still some complexities that the FDA has to sign off on … but this will greatly increase our testing capacity.”