Audio & Rush Transcript: Governor Cuomo is a Guest on MSNBC With Yasmin Vossoughian

AUDIO is available here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's interview is available below:

Yasmin Vossoughian: Governor, thanks so much for joining us on this. There's a lot of people that are anxious right now in hearing this news - this containment area in New Rochelle. So walk us through the decision making that you took in order to take this step forward and what exactly this means to the residents of that area?

Governor Cuomo: Thank you very much, Yasmin. I think the word scares people more than anything. Here's the situation, we have 173 cases in the entire state. We have 108 cases in New Rochelle. New Rochelle has just about three times more cases than New York City. New York City is 100-times the size of New Rochelle, okay. So this really is the most dense, concentrated location of our positive cases. And they're increasing exponentially in that area because when you get a lot of positive cases in a dense area they multiply very quickly. So, what we're doing is focusing on that location, focusing on those positive cases. The containment area means closing the schools, closing the places of large gatherings, because it's the density that's the problem. That's when it's transmitting. So, close the schools, close large gatherings, we're bringing in a testing facility right there on site, a satellite testing facility so people don't have to leave, and just focus our resources there. It's not like China or Italy where people are quarantined. Anyone can go wherever they want to go. It's just the schools and the large gathering places and bringing in satellite testing.

Yasmin Vossoughian: But from what we have heard governor, there are people that could feasibly be asymptomatic, literally walking around with coronavirus and not even know it. So, how confident are you that there aren't folks in New Rochelle that live in this area that may have contracted the coronavirus, are asymptomatic and are going in and out of this containment area and infecting others?

Governor Cuomo: It's very possible, but that's very possible in any community across the country right now. That is what we have. That's the situation that we're in. There are - you can asymptomatic and you can transfer the disease, we know that. We know that we don't even have any statistical data on how many people have the disease, right? Our testing is so far behind the reality that there is probably is no connection between the two. We started testing at a period of time many experts say the virus was already here already and already spread. We're doing a very small sampling and we tend to be testing people who already tested positive and may have been in contact with those people. So when people hear these test results, you know we have 173 cases, that's not statistical representative. And yes, I have no doubt that people have coronavirus and are walking around. I have no doubt that people had the coronavirus, never knew they had it, and resolved it.

Yasmin Vossoughian: So why not, Governor, then, especially in this hot zone that you guys are cordoning off, why not quarantine that area if there are people walking in and out who may be asymptomatic? Would that further decrease the spread or at least slow the spread of this thing?

Governor Cuomo: Yeah, well, that's the China strategy. That's the Italy strategy. We're not there yet in New York. We're not there yet in this country. I don't want to limit people's mobility. We're not there. I do want to say don't gather in dense places when you know a lot of people in your community are positive. Don't all put 300 people in a gymnasium to watch a basketball game. That's what we call containment. You know you have a high concentration of positive people. Don't put them in a very dense setting and get the testing done so you can isolate those people who are actually positive. Whether or not you ever have to go to quarantine, I hope we never have to get there, and if we do get enough testing we will not have to. You look at China and Korea, you can either quarantine or you can do a lot of testing, find the positives, and isolate the positives. That's the better track. Then we have to get our testing capacity way, way up quickly because we don't have the testing capacity to do the numbers. China was testing about 10,000 per day. The federal government says in all of this we tested about 5,000 people. Just think of that.

Yasmin Vossoughian: All right, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Governor Cuomo: Thanks.