Omicron variant overwhelming New York’s hotels

Free rooms program being tested due to rising virus rates

For much of the pandemic, one way that the city has tried to slow the coronavirus’s spread is by offering free hotel rooms to infected people who cannot easily isolate themselves from those they live with.

But the sheer number of people who are sick with the omicron variant may be overwhelming the hotel program — both for the general public and another for people in homeless shelters.

Inside one Brooklyn shelter this week, 11 women who had tested positive for the virus were crowded into a small room furnished with only a few mattresses on the floor and several chairs, two of the women said.

Three people who tried to take advantage of the main hotel-quarantine system said Thursday that they either had waited days before getting a room, given up and paid for one themselves, or been stuck on hold for hours on a city hotline without anyone ever picking up. Others have posted messages on Twitter about their own long waits.

“I requested a hotel over 5 days ago & they still have not arranged transportation for me,” one user, @Pettierb, wrote Friday morning. When she finally spoke to someone, she wrote, she was told she did not qualify for the program because she no longer needed to quarantine anymore, even though she still had COVID-19 symptoms.

As the number of new virus cases in the city has skyrocketed to 130,000 so far this week, from 16,000 during the first week of December, the city unit that runs the main hotel-quarantine program has declined to say whether there was a wait for rooms. The hotel program, which the city calls “the only free, major hotel isolation program in the country,” started in June 2020 with 1,200 rooms. A spokesperson for the Test and Trace Corps, the unit of the city Health and Hospitals agency that runs the program, said Friday that nearly 30,000 people had used the hotels so far.

It was not clear how many rooms are involved in the program now, but the spokesperson wrote in an email that demand for the hotels had “quickly increased” as omicron spread and that two more hotels were being added this week, with more to follow if needed. Cathy Guo, 29, a New York University graduate student who lives with three roommates, said that after two of them tested positive for the virus shortly before Christmas, all four spent many hours apiece on hold with the city hotline without reaching anyone.

Finally, Guo said, on Monday — about four days after the second roommate tested positive — one of the four was transferred to a line where a recording said there were 150 people ahead of her on hold. Three hours later, a dispatcher picked up and said the city would send someone to bring the sick roommate to a hotel.

“They still haven’t come,” Guo said early Friday.