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City Scrambles And Residents Line Up For Tests As Coronavirus Spikes In Sunset Park
By
Fred Mogul
Published Aug 17, 2020
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Fred Mogul / Gothamist / WNYC
By
Fred Mogul
Published Aug 17, 2020
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The spike in COVID-19 cases in Sunset Park has local residents scratching their heads, pointing their fingers, pulling up their masks, and lining up for tests.
“The park has been wild, so I’m not surprised -- too many people without masks,” said Ronnie Scott, 42, a shoe designer who lives in the neighborhood. “People are getting too comfortable, and here we are: seven percent”
That’s the rate of coronavirus tests coming back positive in Sunset Park. It is about seven times higher than the city as a whole, and it’s why city health officials dispatched a mobile unit with a large blue tent from the Testing and Tracing Corps to the park for which the Sunset Park neighborhood is named. They promised results within three to five days.
Scott was one of hundreds of people who lined up to get tested this past week. He said he feels fine and isn’t too nervous, because he knows what to do, and he’s playing it safe. He was just getting the test out of an abundance of caution.
“If you stick to the precautions, then you can be OK: one person does the supermarket runs. You wear gloves. You come to the park early, six or seven in the morning, let the kids run around and go home,” he said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday said contact tracers are combing through the neighborhood to get to the bottom of the spike and to stop it from spreading, but stressed that no cluster of coronavirus cases has been found in the neighborhood. He said workers have placed 35,000 calls, and another 77,000 robocalls and knocked on 7,300 doors. Since July 29th, 5,200 people in the area have gotten coronavirus tests, including almost 800 through visits to city-run mobile sites like the one in the park.
Dr. Ted Long, who runs the city’s Testing and Tracing Corps, said it’s too soon to say what’s causing the Sunset Park outbreak. He’s confident that if the cases can be traced back to a single person, event or location, the tracers will figure it out -- but he said it doesn’t always work out that way in real life, the way it does in the movies, with disease detectives uncovering the cause of an outbreak after a few suspenseful twists and turns. Last month, when there was a spike in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, the city conducted thousands of tests and couldn’t trace the cases back to a particular source.
“The fact that we didn’t find that in Tremont points to community spread as the likely explanation for what’s going on,” Long said.
“Community spread” just refers to a pathogen passing from person to person, in public, in a general area.
Ciaran O’Hara, a high school history teacher, was also on line for a test and he, too, wondered if the park has been a petri dish for coronavirus.
“I come here every day to work out at the outdoor gym and then I go swim in the pool,” he said. “Having such a nice park -- maybe, ironically, this is the reason that we're getting a spike, because everyone's enjoying the outdoors.”
Diego Barrientos, 60, said it’s not just the park -- all over the busy 5th Avenue retail area nearby, he sees people either without masks or with them on only partially.
“They have them over their mouth but not their nose, or down by their chin,” he said, demonstrating by pulling his own mask down. “When I see people I know, I tell them, ‘You gotta pull it up.’”
Sofia Feldmann, 24, a graduate student, is more bewildered. She said everywhere she goes in the neighborhood, people are very compliant.
“I live on the Chinatown side, and everybody is always wearing a mask, like 100 percent of the time, over there,” she said. “So I think people are actually being really responsible -- and I don't know what really accounts for that uptick in cases.”
Dr. Denis Nash, professor of epidemiology program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health and a former city Health Department epidemiologist, is concerned about contact tracing efforts. He is glad that there are lots of boots on the ground in Sunset Park, because getting more people tested and getting those who are infected to quarantine helps suppress the outbreak. He concedes sometimes “community spread” is the best explanation tracers come up with, but he thinks the city’s Testing and Tracing Corps needs to be asking better questions to figure out how transmission is occurring.
“Is it related to work? Is it related to household transmission? Are there certain occupations that are putting people at higher risk, such as essential workers. or working indoors in settings where there's not enough personal protective equipment?” he asked. “We need to know the extent to which each of these things are driving transmission.”
Answering these questions may or may not help with the Sunset Park outbreak, in the short run. By the time patterns are discerned, it might have run its course, especially if sick people do a good job of isolating and everyone else does a better job at mask wearing and social distancing. But, Nash said, more granular intelligence gathering would help the city in the longer run.
“New York has done an amazing job at driving down infection rates from our peak in early spring, but we still need to know what's going on, so that we can do an even better job,” he said.
He said between 1,500 and 2,000 people are getting infected with the virus in New York City each week. Some of that is imported from hotspot areas, and some of it is acquired here, and the city needs to do a better job of figuring out how than just leaving it at “community spread.”
“As we move into the fall, whatever the sources of transmission might be right now could quickly become exacerbated,” Nash said, as more people return to workplaces, at least some students go back to school, and people spend more time indoors, overall. “What we're seeing now could be a trickle that becomes a flood, as things reopen further.”
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coronavirus
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Fred Mogul
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