NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- Mayor Bill de Blasio held his daily press conference outside the city's new pandemic response lab.

The lab is dedicated to processing COVID-19 tests for NYC Health + Hospitals within 24-48 hours.

The laboratory, located at the Alexander Life Sciences Center in Manhattan, is now operational.

The mayor said the lab will expand its capacity to process about 20,000 tests per day by November.

“New York City’s infection rates and hospitalizations are at their lowest points since the beginning of the pandemic, and we know our strategy of widespread testing and tracing is working,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “PRL will solidify our city’s role as a Reputation as a world leader in testing services for everyone.”

"New York City must become a center for public health research," de Blasio said. "We have to do this because we can't rely on anyone else to do it."

The mayor also announced a rapid test design competition in an attempt to provide the fastest, most accurate test to New York City.

The effort to open the lab is being led by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and uses technology licensed from NYU Langone Health.

It is based on research led by Jef Boeke, Ph.D., a geneticist and founding director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone. Brooklyn-based Opentrons is a robotics company focused on life sciences and Partner with diagnostic experts at P4 Clinical, Health + Hospitals and the New York City Test + Trace team.

An added benefit of faster turnaround and increased test processing capacity is that the lab already employs nearly a hundred employees, providing high-paying jobs to New Yorkers—clinical lab technicians, customer success representatives, automation engineers, and scientists wait. That number will climb to about 150 by November.