As COVID infection rates spike elsewhere around the country, New York City has good news to report.

“Today, our rates of new cases of coronavirus, through all of those phases of reopening, have not had an uptick whatsoever," said Dr. Ted Long, executive director of the city's Test and Trace Corps. "They’ve been completely stable.”


What You Need To Know

  • Contact tracers are reporting successes in outreach and intervention

  • The city says the median test result wait is two days, but anecdotal evidence shows waits of longer than two weeks
  • The mayor says new labs mean city now has capacity to test 50,000 people a day

City officials attribute that success to New Yorkers’ general compliance with mask-wearing and social-distancing guidelines.

They also point to the Test and Trace Corps, the largest such initiative in the nation.

Long said the corps has identified 17,000 new COVID cases who’ve given it 17,000 new contacts. It’s reached 2,000 contacts who were symptomatic.

“Our ability to use the program to intervene, to catch people early in their infectious state before they’ve even been tested, is the reason we exist," he said.

But the other crucial half of the formula in mitigating the spread of COVID is diagnostic testing.

Long said the median wait for test results is two days.

But anecdotal evidence — including from another reporter at Mayor de Blasio’s news conference — tells a different story.

“I’m actually still waiting for results for a family member of mine. It’s been 17 days. This is a private lab," said Emma Fitzsimmons of the New York Times.

De Blasio, who reacted to the statement with surprise, responded: “Let me just say, 17 days is just plain unacceptable.”

Similarly, Julio Peña of Brooklyn had been waiting two weeks for his results when NY1 interviewed him Tuesday.

That negative result finally was delivered by email Thursday — 16 days after he got tested at a city lab.

De Blasio said strategies like pooling — or testing samples as a group — will soon alleviate the backlog.

And he said expanding labs means the city now has the capacity to test 50,000 New Yorkers a day.

“With, again, the growth of the national crisis over recent weeks, it took up lab capacity that we were using. A lot of labs were overwhelmed and we had to reset the equation," the mayor said, adding: “But we are telling you know that in many ways that has been resolved and many people can have confidence in turnaround times, particular if they go to Health + Hospitals.”