State health director talks reopening economy, COVID-19 testing

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- With Gov. Roy Cooper expected to reveal some details Thursday about plans to reopen North Carolina's economy, State Health Director Dr. Betsey Tilson joined ABC11 on Wednesday to answer a couple of COVID-19 questions.

A partial transcript follows. Watch the video above for her full responses.

We're expecting some news Thursday from Gov. Roy Cooper on reopening plans. You're one of his advisers; what can you tell us?

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The governor and the secretary and I, we speak every day along with all the other teams at the Emergency Operations Center, so I think we've been very well aligned as we've been moving along. The governor has been always saying that we want to be looking at our trends, looking at our cases, looking at our hospitalizations ... all our trends to let us know when we think it will be safe to start reopening the economy. Nobody more than the governor wants to reopen the economy.

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North Carolina has conducted about 90,300 tests. Are we getting closer to that magic number, if there is a magic number of testing that we need to be doing every day?

Well, we are excited that we're going up, and just to remember, that is not all the testing ... we get most of the negatives but not all of the negatives. ... We're still looking at what would be the estimate of a target amount, but we know that we want to keep going up and make sure that access to testing is equitable.