A screengrab from the live stream on New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's Twitter account shows Cuomo (Left Top) interacting with Anthony Fauci (Left Bottom), a top U.S. infectious disease expert, on Dec. 7, 2020.(Photo: Xinhua)

 
New York State has been well-prepared against the COVID-19 pandemic and is expected to carry out its plan in a smooth way during the upcoming battle, Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. infectious disease expert, said on Monday.

"Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to listen to what I found to be a very interesting plan that you have for New York. It seems really sound, and you have a lot of backup contingencies, which I like, so you're not going to get caught shorthanded on this, I'm certain," said Fauci, while joining Governor Andrew Cuomo in providing an update on the state's progress of its ongoing war on the coronavirus.

"It's painful for me to see it from a distance to my place of birth, but you guys got really slammed and then you rebounded. And you rebounded in a way that you kept your test positivity low because you did the prudent things that you need to do. I was following it from here in Washington and I was seeing that whenever it looked like things were getting a little out of hand, you'd tighten the rope a little bit," said Fauci, who on Friday accepted President-elect Joe Biden's offer to be his chief medical adviser.

"And then when things went back, you eased up a little bit. So, I'm not surprised that your infection rate is really low, because I think you were doing the right things after you had a really serious hit in the beginning (and) when you were there in the late-winter, early-spring," added the expert who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and had served for months on the White House's task force team against the pandemic.

NYS has adopted a micro-cluster strategy to supervise the virus neighborhood by neighborhood, spot small outbreaks in time, and contain them before they could spread, thus reining in its infection.

The state has had the 3rd or 4th lowest COVID-19 test positivity rate in the country, which was repeatedly attributed by Cuomo to the successful implementation of the micro-cluster strategy.

As of Monday afternoon, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University reported 34,980 coronavirus deaths in New York State, the worst in the country.

Also on Monday, the number of confirmed cases of the pandemic was 713,129 in the state, according to New York State Department of Health COVID-19 Tracker, which had the state's lastest fatalities as 27,232.