'Better Picture' Emerges Of 2 Coronavirus Upticks In Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, NY — Ramped-up testing and tracing in two Brooklyn neighborhoods where health officials feared a coronavirus spike have revealed a "better picture" of the upticks, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.

Both Sunset Park and Borough Park are now seeing a 2.5 percent seven-day rolling average infection rate, or the percent of coronavirus tests that came back positive, after the city's Test and Trace Corps descended on the neighborhoods.

The averages are still higher than New York City's overall infection rate, which was .83 percent on Wednesday. But, particularly in the case of Sunset Park, they are a good sign that officials got ahead of an uptick in cases, de Blasio said.

Sunset Park's infection rate at one point was near 7 percent.

"We're seeing a fuller picture, and it's a better picture," de Blasio said. "That additional testing allowed us to get a fuller picture and also encourage folks who did need to safely separate to do so."

City officials knocked on 16,700 doors in Sunset Park and administered 8,500 coronavirus tests in the neighborhood after first noticing a "warning signal" of 228 positive cases in early August.

The testing blitz soon revealed that specific households, rather than a neighborhood cluster, was the cause of the uptick, officials said.

A similar Test and Trace ramp-up is still ongoing in Borough Park, where a smaller uptick of 16 cases connected largely to a local wedding was found last week.

De Blasio said Wednesday that more positive cases have been found since the testing blitz, but that the infection rate is still 2.5 percent.

"We see results that give us some comfort," de Blasio said. "The test and trace effort is going further in that community."