Southern Brooklyn will see four new COVID-19 testing sites in the coming weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday.
“Lack of widespread testing was our Achilles heel from day one, but we’re rewriting that story every day,” the mayor said during his daily coronavirus briefing. “Our effort to test and trace every New Yorker in need of a test is coming together at lightning speed, giving us the tools we need to defeat the virus once and for all.”
The borough’s eight active testing sites will be joined by four new ones by May 25, with the first one slated to open in Midwood on March 18 alongside another new site in Manhattan. The other three locations — in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park and Canarsie — will open the following week along with seven others across the city.
“Again, this is going to keep growing,” said de Blasio. “The more capacity we have, the more labs we bring into the game, the more we’ll keep building this program out.”
The free testing will be available to anyone with symptoms of coronavirus — regardless of age — as well as anyone who may have come in contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient or who works in a residential home like a shelter or senior care facility.
The 12 additional sites, along with the existing 28 testing locations, will bring the city’s testing capacity up to 10,700 tests per day — more than halfway to the mayor’s goal of 20,000 tests per day by May 25.
“We are now confident in that goal. In fact, we want to beat that goal,” de Blasio said Thursday. “We believe that more and more testing capacity can be put into play quickly, and that’s going to allow us to then test people, do the follow-up tracing, contact tracing, and for those who need to be in a hotel, make that hotel available to them.”
Councilman Justin Brannan, who represents a swath of southern Brooklyn, said in a tweet that it took some coaxing from his constituents for City Hall to finally budge on a testing site for Bay Ridge.
“We huffed and we puffed and City Hall finally listened!” he wrote.
The four new southern Brooklyn sites will be located at:
- 1223 Coney Island Ave., between Avenue H and Avenue I, in Midwood
- Brooklyn Army Terminal at 80 58th St., at the intersection Third Avenue, in Sunset Park
- 8511 5th Ave., between 85th and 86th streets, in Bay Ridge
- 6565 Flatlands Ave., at the intersection of Ralph Avenue, in Canarsie
