NY Web snubs public options

Almost two years in and this is the best we can do?

Mayor 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 Web sites make that exceedingly difficult.

Many of those shortcomings are showcased in the interactive map City Hall posted on its main testing resource page, nyc.gov/covidtest, which:

Prominently features the same 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;

Does not include any of the pop-up or mobile locations run by contractors for the publicly owned Health and Hospitals Corporation, which are instead included in a 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 testing sites, The Post found.

“It would be nice if there was an easier way to see where all the sites are, if there were more sites,” said Louis Guerra, 28, who stood outside of the Health + Hospital system’s Cumberland facility in Fort Greene. “It wasn’t clear what I should be doing.”

The shortcomings left momof-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,” said Moskel. “It was really impossible.”