Southeast Queens is at the bottom of available COVID-19 testing sites

Queens Chronicle 

When Gov. Cuomo designated Ozone Park as a yellow zone, it served as a warning sign to the borough that the virus was traveling into the area south of Forest Park.

But while positivity rates of the yellow zone in the whole Central Queens area have stayed relatively low — hovering below 3 percent for the past seven days — another problem has revealed itself, which precedes the recent rash of positive cases.

South Queens has exceedingly low rates of COVID testing. Five neighboring ZIP codes in South Queens are among the 10 areas with the lowest rates of COVID testing in the whole city. Lawmakers and community leaders say their efforts to set up more sites in the area have met bureaucratic resistance.

“This is nothing new,” said Councilwoman Adrienne Adams (D-Jamaica). “The whole phenomenon around the lack of testing in Southeast Queens has gone on since the onset of the pandemic.”

The absolute lowest amount of testing per 100,000 people in the city is bound by a ZIP code bisecting Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, stretching mostly over Adams’ district. Only 4,837 per 100,000 people have been tested there – nearly half of the city’s average rate of testing per ZIP code.

The next lowest ZIP code covers most of Woodhaven, just a little farther north. The rates of testing in ZIP codes stretching over South Ozone Park, Ozone Park and South Jamaica are not far behind.

While still below the citywide average, Howard Beach’s test rates are not as low as the aforementioned neighborhoods.

None of that information surprised Felicia Singh, a neighborhood advocate and District 32 City Council candidate, who has been calling for more and longer-lasting testing sites in the area for more than three weeks.

“I told [NYC Health + Hospitals, the mayor and governor] that COVID would travel here and sadly I was right,” Singh tweeted.

When she saw lines wrapping around the two-week rapid testing site at the Ozone Park Library on its final day on Oct. 2, Singh filled out a request for a city-run site on the border of the neighborhood and East New York. It was not approved, even though at the time the number of confirmed positive cases per 100,000 people had skyrocketed 650 percent over the two-week period, according to the city’s data.

“Still, getting the testing sites for all of our districts has been a battle,” Adams told the Chronicle over the phone. “We’ve still got communities of color slighted when it comes to testing. There is a lot of bureaucracy that astounds when it comes to maneuvering through this.”