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Two years in and this is the best we can do?
Mayor Bill de Blasio keeps telling New Yorkers frustrated with long waits and delayed results at privately-run COVID testing sites to use the city’s public options — but his administration’s incomplete and bulky websites make that exceedingly difficult.
Lines for testing have exploded again because of the arrival of the hyper-contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which has pushed case levels in New York City to all-time highs.
Many of those frustrating shortcomings are showcased in the interactive map City Hall posted on its main testing resource page — nyc.gov/covidtest, which:
- Prominently features the very private providers that have endured waves of complaints from consumers and officials about massive delays and overcharges, while offering no feature that would allow users to quickly filter and see just the publicly-run sites;
- Does not include several rapid PCR testing locations run by the city’s Health Department — including its locations in Manhattan’s Chelsea and Upper West Side, The Bronx’s Morrisania and Brooklyn’s Fort Greene.
- Does not include any of the pop-up or mobile locations run by contractors for the publicly-owned Health and Hospitals Corporation. Instead, those are included in a giant list below the map.
Additionally, the city only reports its wait times in a bulky PDF that is not integrated into the list of locations or the map, forcing New Yorkers to open several tabs and match wait times to locations by hand.
The city doesn’t even have a comprehensive online directory of all of its testing sites, The Post found.
The Hospital system lists all of its operations on one page, meanwhile the Health Department’s roughly dozen rapid PCR clinics are listed on another website — and the two aren’t even directly linked together.
“It would be nice if there was an easier way to see where all the sites are, if there were more sites. It wasn’t clear what I should be doing,” said Louis Guerra, 28, who stood outside of the Health and Hospital system’s Cumberland facility in Fort Greene. “If I had trouble finding out, I can’t imagine about others.
“Honestly a better designed website would go a long way,” said the software engineer. “I feel like in general these municipalities are behind in terms of technology. They don’t know who to go to for the best websites and technology. It’s kinda frustrating.”
The technology shortcomings left mom-of-six Casey Moskel deeply frustrated as she tried to find testing for her family in Times Square after coming down from the Rochester-area to visit the Big Apple over the holidays.
“We spent an hour online at the hotel this morning and we walked to five other locations before this but none had the 15-minute testing,” said Moskel. “It was really impossible. My husband found this by asking people standing in line here.”
The complaints echo the problems New Yorkers encountered when city officials first rolled out their vaccine appointment registration systems this spring — prompting one big-hearted New Yorker with computer skills to create TurboVax to workaround the mess.
“We don’t have a single source of truth for all testing sites in NYC,” tweeted the programmer, Huge Ma, who was endearingly dubbed ‘Vax Daddy’ by grateful Gothamites. “Tech can’t solve all problems but it shouldn’t itself be a problem on its own.”
“While a motivated volunteer could bang this out in a day or two, our government should be capable of doing this and more,” added Ma, who is now running for a state Assembly seat in Queens.
De Blasio and his top aides acknowledged shortcomings in the sites, insisting they were more focused on promoting vaccinations than ever fixing the testing snafus..
“In the end, as much as testing is crucial, the first thing we need to do with our resources is focus on vaccination,” said de Blasio Tuesday.
“We want people to get tests. We want it to be as convenient as possible. We want it to be as fast as possible. But the number-one thing we’ve got to do is get more people vaccinated.”
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