Thomas Breen photo
Hill Health Center’s 226 Dixwell Ave. site, soon to be home to a new Covid-19 testing facility.
Two local community health centers will be opening new walk-up testing sites in Dixwell and Fair Haven starting Wednesday morning with the goal of reaching black and brown communities that have been hardest hit so far by the Covid-19 pandemic in New Haven.
The city is in negotiations with a Greenwich-based doctor who runs several testing sites in Fairfield County to open another new Covid-19 testing site in the Elm City.
Mayor Justin Elicker, Cornell Scott Hill Health Center CEO Michael Taylor, Fair Haven Community Health Care CEO Suzanne Lagarde, and Murphy Medical Associates’ Steven Murphy delivered those updates Tuesday afternoon during the mayor’s daily virtual coronavirus-related press briefing.
The meeting took place online via the Zoom teleconferencing app and on YouTube Live.
The city now has 1,160 positive coronavirus cases and 37 Covid-19 fatalities.
Elicker announced that three new coronavirus testing sites will open soon.
Unlike the city’s two existing testing sites on Long Wharf, one run by Yale New Haven Hospital and one by CVS in conjunction with the state, these will be located in dense, residential, majority black and brown neighborhoods.
The sites will be easily accessible by foot. At least the first two slated to open will be run by familiar, well-respected and trusted community health centers located in the heart of primarily working-class African American and Hispanic communities, respectively.
City of New Haven
A heat map of Covid-19 infections by neighborhood, with x’s showing where the new testing sites will be located.
One testing site will be run by Cornell Scott Hill Health Center at the community clinic’s current Dixwell Avenue location, at 226 Dixwell Ave.
Another will be run by Fair Haven Community Health Care at the community clinic’s current Grand Avenue headquarters at 374 Grand Ave.
Both of those are slated to open Wednesday morning. Testing will be free, including for patients without insurance. Taylor and Lagarde estimated that the turnaround time for providing patients with test results will be roughly two or three days.
“One of the things that community health centers do is we’re in the community. We build trust,” Lagarde said. “We’re hoping that we can leverage that and bring in folks who might be fearful of testing.”
She said that these two new testing sites will also be thoroughly accessible by foot. She said that 30 percent of her clinic’s patients routinely struggle with obtaining reliable transportation. A vast majority of the state’s current testing centers, she said, are drive-through and inaccessible to those without ready access to a car and discouraged from riding public transportation out of a fear of contracting the novel coronavirus.
Both Taylor and Lagarde encouraged people interested in getting tested to call in advance to schedule an appointment.
Dixwell patients should call Hill Health at 203 – 503-3000 to schedule an appointment.
Fair Haven patients should call Fair Haven Health Care at 203 – 871-4179.
Taylor (pictured) and Lagarde both said that they will be testing anyone who is interested in being tested, not just those who are currently community health center patients.
They also said that they will be reserving tests for those who are symptomatic or have been exposed to the novel coronavirus.
They estimated that each of their clinics should be able to test one patient every 15 minutes.
Fair Haven’s testing site will be open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Hill Health’s testing site will be open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.
Elicker said that Greenwich-based doctor Steven Murphy (pictured) also plans to open up a coronavirus testing site somewhere in the city. He said that the city is still in negotiations with Murphy as to where that should be.
People can register to be tested at one of Murphy’s testing sites by going to this website.
Murphy already runs drive-through testing sites in Stratford, Stamford, Westport, New Canaan, and Darien.
His site will also be free for patients to get tested. That includes the uninsured, he said, who will not receive a bill from his office for being tested.
Murphy said he was born in New Haven. “It’s great to see the community rise up and answer the call” for the need for more testing, he said.
Testing “is a key tool to helping us beat the virus,” said Elicker, “not only by allowing us to understand who the virus is impacting, but it’s also a way to ensure that, in the long run, we will be able to open up” the city’s largely shuttered economy and public life in a safe way by allowing for the voluntary quarantining of the sick, contact tracing, and voluntary isolation of the exposed.
Rodney Williams (pictured) is a small business contractor whose company is based out of Dixwell Plaza just a few steps away from the new Hill Health testing site. He has been vocal on social media about the great need for more testing directly in the community rather than out on Long Wharf. He applauded Tuesday’s announcement for bringing much needed testing to the city’s black community.
“I appreciate that it’s coming to our community so that we can identify more people in our community that’s at risk, and hopefully save lives,” he told the Independent in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.
As much as this new testing site is worth celebrating, he said, he’s alarmed that it took well over a month since the start of the pandemic — and weeks of public knowledge that black and brown communities have been hit disproportionately hard by the virus — for a testing sites to open in Dixwell and Fair Haven.
“We’re 30 days in,” he said. “We got busted up already. We’ve got people in our families we lost. People are still in the hospital right now.
“It took this many people to die, this many people to get sick, this many articles to be written about the black community. This is crazy.”
The testing sites on Long Wharf are nice, but they’re all drive through and serve primarily the county, not the city, he said. Hopefully these new neighborhood-based, walk-up testing sites will change that tide.
The announcement about the new free testing sites in communities of color comes one day after Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers called on government at all levels to look at the structural racism that left the same neighborhoods redlined in the 1930s, foreclosed upon in the 2008 financial crisis, and hardest hit by Covid-19 today.
Other updates from Tuesday’s press briefing:
• Elicker noted that the state has adjusted its reporting on coronavirus infection and fatality data to include probable, and not just definite, cases. He said that “probable” Covid-19 cases are those people who meet certain clinical criteria and where the epidemiological evidence points towards them having Covid-19, even if their test results have not yet come back positive. Elicker said that the city has 1,129 confirmed positive cases and 31 probable Covid-19 cases, as well 30 confirmed positive coronavirus fatalities and seven probable Covid-19 fatalities.
• Elicker said that the city’s transportation, traffic, and parking department is working on disabling pedestrian walk signal buttons at intersections throughout the city so that people do not have to press a commonly touched surface in order to cross safely at an intersection. He said these intersections will instead be run on a cycle where traffic lights periodically turn red and pedestrians get the appropriate right of way.
• New Haven Public Schools Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto said that one public school custodian, two food service workers, and one security guard have tested positive so far. He said that quite a few other staff have also been taken out of rotation and are quarantining as they await test results. The school system recently received a large donation of surgical-style masks; it has a stockpile of personal protective equipment to last at least 30 days for all working Board of Education staff, Pinto estimated. He said that even the largest school buildings that are serving as food distribution sites have no more than six people in them at a time (two security guards, two custodians, two food service workers), and that they have been instructed to practice social distancing and wear appropriate PPE.
• Elicker and city Health Director Maritza Bond said that they plan on making available information on not just positive tests and fatalities, but also negative tests, so that the public can better track total testing numbers and not just increased infection rates. They said they are currently reviewing these negative test numbers that have been provided by the state health department.
• Elicker said that local law enforcement is working with federal authorities to investigate the zoom bombing incident at Monday night’s virtual Board of Alders meeting, at which a hacker interrupted the meeting with a graphic video depicting the sexual assault of a child. “It’s pretty shocking what people are willing to do, and we won’t stand for it in the City of New Haven,” he said. He also said that his staff is providing municipal boards and commissions with additional training on how to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.