Queens electeds blast city, state response to COVID testing crisis
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Queens residents in need of a COVID test wait on a line that snaked around the block near the Woodside Houses on Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2021. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
A group of elected officials from Western Queens gathered virtually Tuesday to demand the mayor and governor do more to increase the borough’s COVID-19 testing capacity.
Along with testing sites throughout the city, Queens sites have been unable to service the waves of residents in need of tests as the holidays begin and the Omicron variant becomes more and more prevalent.
There are fewer than 30 testing sites open in Queens, a borough with over 2.4 million people, this week, with some of the sites only being open for one or two days of the week and several others open to appointment only. The majority of sites are mobile van test sites, which often have only a few staff available to conduct the tests. Five of the sites are static.
On Tuesday around noon, the majority of NYC Health + Hospitals COVID-19 testing locations throughout the city had wait times upwards of an hour. Two sites, including Elmhurst Hospital, one of the only sites in the borough, had over a two-hour wait.
Assemblymembers Jesica González-Rojas and Catalina Cruz, State Senator Jessica Ramos, Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, Councilmembers-elect Shekar Krishnan and Julia Won and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said more must be done as Queens residents wait hours in the cold for a test.
“We've been through this, we all should be in a place where we are able to learn from our best practices, learn our lessons and really put forth the protocols and the safety that is needed in order to reduce transmissions and ensure that people are safe at home,” Ramos said.
Several of the lawmakers on the call had either been exposed to people who had tested positive for the virus, or who had tested positive themselves. Nearly 9,500 city residents have tested positive for the virus every day for the past seven days, according to city data. The city’s positivity rate is over 6 percent, well over double what it was two weeks ago.
Won said that she had recently tested positive for the virus, though confirming her diagnosis proved a massive challenge.
The soon-to-be councilmember, who is seven months pregnant, was turned away from several sites, including one site where she waited for several hours outside in the rain before being told the site was at capacity.
“It's appalling for me to even have this personal experience for the last five days,” Won said. “The most important part is that we remember that in a matter of one day or a few hours of knowing that you are COVID positive, you have now equipped and empowered every individual to decide what they're going to do next – who to call to notify that they need to get tested, and who you're going to notify that you can no longer see them in person so that you can protect them and protect the ones that they also love.”
“This is a matter of knowledge and power that we're going to give to everybody when we allow people to have access to testing,” she added.
The lawmakers drew particular attention to the fact that children under 4, an age group that is not cleared to be vaccinated, also have limited access to testing.
In Queens, five sites, including Elmhurst Hospital, Queens Hospital Center, JFK and LaGuardia Airport and the Far Rockaway Sorrentino Rec Center offer testing to children between the ages of 2 and 4.
Kisha Bari, a Jackson Heights mother whose child was infected with COVID-19, said that it was nearly impossible to find a test for her son.
“This has been an ongoing issue in our neighborhood for many, many months,” Bari said. “With a wave of Omicron, we cannot expect a 2 year old to wait for two hours in a line to get a COVID test – I can't even express how terrifying that is for us.”
“They're the most vulnerable right now, we should be prioritizing their health first and foremost, over everybody else,” she added. “The city's effort this week has been completely inadequate. We're all very angry and we want our testing sites back. At the very least we want those mobile testing sites to be able to test two year olds.”
González-Rojas, who doesn’t have a single city testing site in her district, called on Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Kathy Hochul to take action to increase the city’s testing capacity.
“I've waited on a line that took over 90 minutes after going to another line that was so long, I couldn't wait that long,” the lawmaker said. “The impact on our communities is very, very real.”
Several weeks prior to the start of Omicron, the city shut down 20 of its test sites, opting to replace some of them with mobile vans operated by contracted companies. The sites shut down included those at LaGuardia and JFK Airports, which serviced some of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the first wave of the pandemic.
This week, de Blasio announced that the city would bring back 8 permanent sites. President Joe Biden also announced Tuesday that the federal government would be shipping out free at-home test kits to people around the country.
