Small Coronavirus Uptick In Brooklyn Linked To Wedding: Mayor

BOROUGH PARK, BROOKLYN — The city is ramping up testing in another Brooklyn neighborhood this week after detecting a small uptick in coronavirus cases, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday.

A group of 16 coronavirus cases in Borough Park the past few days have sent a "warning sign" to health officials, who will mobilize the city's Test and Trace Corps to the neighborhood.

Many of the 16 cases were linked to a recent large wedding, the mayor said. Officials hope increased testing will show whether there was a larger spread of coronavirus from the event and help the city get it under control.

"That’s what’s causing the particular concern — an event that was larger than it should have been and one that we’re following up on right now," de Blasio said. "Hopefully we’ll find there was not a substantial spread, but this is why we do the test and trace work, to get ahead of something like this."

The wedding in Borough Park had "substantially" more people than the current 50-person limit for events at catering halls, de Blasio said.

The city's health department plans to follow-up with inspections and a reminder of guidelines for catering halls in New York City to prevent similar gatherings in the future, he added.

The small Borough Park uptick comes a week after another, much larger, spike in cases was detected in nearby Sunset Park. A similar testing blitz in Sunset Park determined that there were problems with specific households, but no "cluster" of cases in the neighborhood.

The response in Borough Park will include mask distribution at houses of worship, working with community leaders and encouraging residents to get tested, de Blasio said.

The approach is similar to what was done in Sunset Park, where the city has tested 5,200 people since July 29.

Of those tests, 328 came back positive, according to health officials. 112 of the positive cases were people who live in Sunset Park (New Yorkers do not have to live in the neighborhood where they get tested).

Test and Trace Corps' Chief Equity Officer Annabel Palma said data from Sunset Park shows the city's efforts to track and control potential upticks is working.

Despite the upticks, the thresholds for containing coronavirus in New York City continue to decline. The infection rate reached a new low point on Wednesday, with only .24 percent of New Yorkers coming back positive for COVID-19 in the latest round of tests.

"We are finding positive cases, monitoring them, asking them and helping them to safely separate," she said. "Together we can prevent as second wave of COVID-19 in New York City. It is up to us to make sure that we don’t let our guards down."