Testing 1-2-3

In a Sunday press conference announcing that the city would be moving aggressively to open up new testing facilities and distribute at-home testing kits — amid an enormous growth in demand that’s triggered hours-long waits for frustrated New Yorkers — Mayor de Blasio said it was “a brand new reality,” with the city racing to adapt to the omicron variant. This comes after a report in The City website found the administration had shuttered 20 testing centers in mid-November.

It appears the mayor was living in some alternate reality where large numbers of New Yorkers wouldn’t be traveling to other states and countries or gathering indoors with family for the holiday season, and in sudden need of plenty of COVID-19 testing. No, city officials couldn’t have predicted the rise of a new hyper-contagious strain of the virus — but there’s no scenario in which testing capacity wouldn’t have to ramp up for the holiday season.

Even before omicron manifested as a public health threat in its own right, city and state health officials had been warning that the end of the year, with its colder weather and celebratory traditions, posed a danger to pandemic recovery that New Yorkers had to be wary of. How decision-makers got from that to reducing testing capacity is puzzling. While it’s a welcome development that they’re now rushing to play catch-up, with the mayor announcing plans to add 23 city-run sites to reach a total of 112 in operation by the end of the week, there was no need to get caught so flat-footed.

The private testing ecosystem has served as a stop-gap solution, but it’s hit-or-miss, as evidenced by many bitter complaints that private labs are taking three or even four days to return PCR results (to the point that Attorney General Tish James has threatened Brooklyn provider LabQ with legal action for misrepresenting turnaround times). In a crisis like this, it is the responsibility of the city government to act with foresight to protect public health. They failed this test.