In particular, Mr. Cuomo said that if either the hospital system in an area of the state hits 70% of capacity or if the rate of transmission reaches 1.1—meaning for every person who has the virus, another 1.1 are infected—that would constitute what he called a “circuit breaker.” Currently, the statewide transmission rate is about 0.8, meaning less than one person is infected.

“We want to reopen but we want to do it without infecting more people or overwhelming the hospital system,” he said at a press conference…

Mr. Cuomo reasserted that contact tracing would be key to the state’s ability to reopen safely. The process calls for determining what individuals an infected person may have been in contact with, so such people could then go into immediate quarantine and thereby limit the potential spread.

To allow for such tracing, Mr. Cuomo said the state would need to have at least 30 tracers for every 100,000 residents, which equates to a workforce of roughly 6,000 tracers based on New York’s population of more than 19 million.