Testing capacity gradually expands in Southeast Queens
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A medical worker sticks her head outside a COVID-19 testing tent in Elmhurst. AP Photo/Kathy Wilkens
By Rachel Vick
The Joseph P. Addabbo Family Health Center has begun providing COVID-19 tests to residents of Far Rockaway, as access to testing gradually expands in Southeast Queens.
On Tuesday, a pop-up testing site opened in the parking lot of the medical center located at 1288 Central Avenue. Testing is available by appointment two days a week.
“Testing is crucial for moving us forward as a society during this pandemic. Our community residents deserve to know their status so they can become empowered to take all necessary mitigating steps,” Addabbo CEO, Dr. Miriam Y. Vega told The Wave. “It is proven that interventions and testing work to lower the pace of the epidemic significantly.”
The tent is one of a small number of new non-hospital testing sites in Southeast Queens. The state established testing outside a field hospital at the Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park and will open another location in Jamaica, likely in health center on Sutphin Boulevard.
The city has also planned to introduce a testing site at York College, according to multiple people familiar with the plan.
The coronavirus has had a disproportionate impact on people of color, including residents of Southeast Queens. Black and Latinx New Yorkers die at almost twice the rate of their white and Asian peers from complications of the novel coronavirus, according to demographic reports published by the city’s Heatlh Department.
The region is served by just two hospitals — Jamaica Hospital and St. John’s Episcopal Hospital.
Zip codes in Southeast Queens and the eastern portion of the Rockaway Peninsula are among the places with the most COVID-19 cases in the city, according to data published April 1 and analyzed by The New York Times.
Zip code 11691, which includes Far Rockaway, had 436 cases as of April — the 11th highest caseload of any zip code in the city, according to the data. Zip code 11432 in Jamaica had 405 cases, the 15th highest total in the city.
Earlier this month, Councilmembers Donovan Richards and Adrienne Adams urged the city and state to build testing sites in Southeast Queens, which had lacked a single non-hospital testing site until last week.
Richards proposed developing the sites at Roy Wilkins Park, a parking lot at York College and an beachfront expanse from Beach 32nd to Beach 56th Street. Adams also suggested using empty parking lots.
“People are dying out here and we don’t have time to waste,” she said.
