November 30, 2020
The CDC and other medical authorities were emphatic: avoid holiday travel to reduce the risk of catching and spreading the novel coronavirus. The warnings went largely unheeded as air travel on the day before and the Sunday after Thanksgiving hit a million passengers for the first times since mid March. In the aftermath of the presumptive holiday super spreader, White House pandemic coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx was recommending that travelers over 65 years old and those with underlying medical conditions get tested immediately adding, “if your family traveled, you have to assume that you were exposed and you became infected.”
There’s just one little glitch: testing demand still exceeds supply. Today the Gazette checked out the HHC site on Nagle Avenue and found the line cut off by 12:30PM, three hours before the scheduled close at 3:30. Over the course of around 15 minutes several people arrived looking for a test but were turned away and advised to try again tomorrow. At CityMD on West 181 Street a line snaked around the corner on Wadsworth Avenue up to W182 and back again on this rainy and windswept day. A guy near the front of the line said he’d been waiting for more than two hours.
Nine months ago, President Trump told America that anyone who needs a test can get one. Left unsaid that day was that you might have to wait on line in the rain for hours or even come back and try again another day. And while this was perfectly understandable back in March when testing was just ramping up, nine months on it’s an indictment of the administration’s laissez faire pandemic policy of simply letting it burn through the population. Not great.
And burning through is exactly what it’s doing: yesterday COVID-19 hospitalizations set a new record, surpassing 90,000 as the pandemic death toll climbed to 267,500. Another thousand Americans are dying with COVID-19 every day now while the President rants that only massive voter fraud can explain his not winning a second term.