With Covid-19 testing hailed as a key to jump-starting local and regional economies, efforts are under way across the state, county, and local municipalities to increase availability. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has announced that pharmacies will be allowed to begin diagnostic testing, Suffolk County has added “hotspot” testing sites in various regions, and a new, local drive-through testing site is to open today in Southampton Village, facilitated by a public-private partnership.
However, much of the information remains ambiguous. Antibody tests are not widely available yet here, and diagnostic tests are still hard to come by and largely limited to those who are already showing symptoms of Covid-19 or who are essential workers in critical fields.
“The gap is extraordinary. We don’t have enough tests to test every American that has been infected,” said Dr. Michael McDonald, who wears many expert hats. He is the coordinator of the East End Resilience Network Initiative, chairman of Oviar Global Resilience Systems Inc., and executive director of Health Initiatives Foundation Inc. He has worked with the White House and other federal agencies through multiple administrations, studying and preparing for pandemics, since the 1980s.
“The policies don’t match reality here, and you can’t just fix it by doing detection. What we really need to understand is whether we have long-term immunity,” Dr. McDonald said this week. “Science isn’t there yet. That’s a misnomer. People are becoming immune in the short term, their bodies killing the virus, but is this a long-term immunity if they get hit again six months from now? . . . Not only their own illness, but can an 18-year-old meatpacker get infected three months after they were tested originally, and go back home where [an elderly relative] is and kill that relative?”
Dr. McDonald has set up two must-see websites, crammed with information relevant to the South Fork. They are resiliencesystem.org/dashboards/south-fork-east-end/, which includes a screening tool developed by Apple and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and eastend-newyork.resiliencesystem.org.
In Southampton Village, Mayor Jesse Warren teamed up with the Hamptons Health Society and HRH Care for the South Fork’s first Covid-19 drive-through testing facility. Mr. Warren took to Instagram to announce the news last week. On Sunday, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said the Southampton spot wasn’t an official county test site, but yesterday, Mr. Bellone said Suffolk County would now be a partner providing “outreach and educational resources.”
“In order for us to get back to work, we’re really going to have to increase testing,” Mr. Warren said. “Getting the viral testing is great, but there are people who have tested positive who would like to go back and see if they test negative so that they can leave their quarantine. The faster we administer testing, the faster we can get back to some form of normal life. The more people we test, the better.”
Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming sent a letter to Mr. Bellone saying, “we need to join and advocate as strongly as possible for increased testing” from the federal government.
“By the time we were doing significant testing in the community, we all knew the virus was there and it was spreading, it was highly contagious and deadly,” she said in a recent press briefing. “It would be refreshing to see that those lessons have been learned and we now have the support we need to open the economy, do antibody testing, and diagnostic testing. We need to shout that to the rooftops, we need to expand our capacity for testing and we need the federal government’s help.”
Testing is solidly woven into a web of federal political interests, Dr. McDonald posited.
“Anybody who says anything that rings true but is against [President Trump’s] interests, he’s summarily executing in terms of removing them from their positions. It’s incredibly chaotic and insane,” he said. “The pandemic program was destroyed, defunded months before the breakout of Covid-19 in Wuhan. . . . The problem with any fast-moving outbreak is you have to move immediately. They completely ignored it because they had no clue — it didn’t matter to them. Their interests were economic. Their measurements were how many would vote for Trump. It’s tragic.”
Governor Cuomo on Saturday said pharmacies would be able to test for Covid-19, but it is unclear when and how that process will get off the ground. Efforts this week to get through to CVS, a national chain with several locations here, were unsuccessful. But Robert E. Grisnik, the owner and supervising pharmacist at Southrifty Drug in Southampton Village, said yesterday “we have no clarification or guidance on how this is going to happen.”
“The governor made this statement, said it will happen, but there is no guidance out there,” Mr. Grisnik said. “We don’t know anything more. We hope to have it.”
By Tuesday afternoon, Suffolk County had tested 86,499 residents and confirmed that 37.8 percent, or 33,418 people, were positive for Covid-19. Across the six already-established hotspot test sites in communities with large populations of minorities and non-English speakers, one of which is in Riverhead, 48 percent of the 2,124 people tested have been confirmed as positive.
New York State’s antibody testing program, with a sample size of about 7,000 as of Tuesday, yielded an infection rate across Nassau and Suffolk counties of 14.4 percent. Just a few days earlier that rate was 16.7 percent. Governor Cuomo said yesterday that testing is a major part of being able to reopen the economy in a phased approach.
But, he said, “testing won’t work if it’s too hard to get.”