On Dec. 21, State Senator Peter Harckham asked Governor Kathy Hochul to open a COVID-19 test site at FDR State Park in Yorktown. Sen. Harckham said that the request came after receiving “dozens of complaints about the lack of available tests in the area & we must address this issue for our mutual constituents.”
“The current state testing plan, which was announced yesterday, would require my constituents in Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties to have to choose between a state run testing site in New York City, Long Island or Albany. While I understand that Westchester County has requested to reopen the County Center for testing again, the timeline for such an opening remains unclear. Moreover, even once reopened, the majority of my constituents would need to travel 45-60 minutes to get to that location,” writes Harckham in a letter to the Governor.
“Constituents have waited up to 5 hours, or worse, been told that there are no available COVID test until after Dec. 28. .. An ideal solution to ensure testing access would be to open a drive thru testing site at FDR State Park in Yorktown. The park is located just off the Taconic Parkway, making it easily accessible for many people in the area, …and is large enough to easily host a testing site and allow people to pull in and out without causing the virus to spread. In fact, the park has previously served as a mobile testing and vaccination site.”
President Joe Biden promised 500 million test kits for the American people, but they will take weeks to be made, purcahsed, and sent out to residents in Westchester and across the country. Biden has also promised a website where Americans can request a kit, which will be mailed to them, but the website is not yet operational.
Some health experts are complaining that if the tests land in residents homes by January of February that may help stem the increase in the Omicron variant, but if they arrive anytime after that, the test kits will have a minimal impact.
Westchester County Executive George Latimer has offered to reopen the Westchester County Center in White Plains and Glen Island Park in New Rochelle as testing sites. If Governor Hochul agrees, New York State would have to staff the site and run its operations.
“That’s not a plan — it’s a hope,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which tracks testing trends. “If those tests came in January and February, that could have an impact, but if they are spread out over 10 to 12 months, I’m not sure what kind of impact it is going to have.”
One of the larger manufacturers of COVID tests, Abbot Labs., said that it plans to make 70 million tests in January, and will be able to increase production in the months ahead. But now with the holidays over, Westchester residents, and all Americans will need to test themselves and their family members to determine if anyone contracted COVID over holiday gatherings.
Some Governor’s had the foresight to secure tests for their residents. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said that 500,000 kits are being sent out to residents for home testing use. The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, will be providign 25,000 kits to New York City, which has a high rate of positive COVID results, and thousands more New Yorkers can’t get a test to determine if they have COVID.
A similar problem occured under former President Donald Trump in 2020, when there was a shortage of available tests. That shortage, and the lack of President Trump to embrace testing, resulting in the virus spreading undetected. President Biden wants every American to get tested, but nationally, and locally, governments have been focusing on getting as many people vaccinated as possible.
Many testing sites, like the ones in Westchester at the County Center and Glen Island Park closed over the summer. Today, 1.5 million Americans are getting tested every day.
NY Attorney General Letitia James warned New Yorkers about private companies charging fee for testing and claiming to have immediate results. James said that some residents have waited for five days for their results, after being promised that the results would be made available within 24 hours.
James Labworq LLC as one company who was false advertising.
