New York has cancelled its Democratic presidential primary initially scheduled for June 23 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Democratic members of the State’s Board of Elections voted on Monday to cancel the primary, but the congressional and state-level primaries will continue on June 23 as planned.

New York Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs earlier said the cancellation would result in lower turnout and a reduced need for polling places.

"It just makes so much sense given the extraordinary nature of the challenge," Jacobs said last week.

Both the state's Democratic Party and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have said they didn't ask election commissioners to make the change, which is allowed thanks to a little-known provision in the recently passed state budget that allows the New York board of elections to remove names of any candidates who have suspended or terminated their campaign from the ballot.

New York is the epicenter of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak, having registered 17,280 deaths.

The total COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. have surpassed 55,000, making the country the worst affected by the disease globally.

On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced said New York City-run health clinics will soon take a new tack on COVID-19 testing, using a procedure that lets people collect samples themselves at a health care worker's direction.

Up to this point, testing has mainly been done by health care workers inserting a swab deep into a person's nostrils.