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NEW YORK, April 29 – For the first time yesterday, hundreds of New Yorkers were able to get tested for Covid-19 without having serious symptoms or underlying health problems, hoping that they had already contracted and expired the life-threatening illness.
Dozens of masked people, many young and apparently healthy, waited their turn at the branches of the New York CityMD medical chain to find out if they had had the new coronavirus.
For weeks, the tests were reserved for the sickest or those most at risk of serious complications.
But now CityMD, which specializes in walk-in consultations, is one of the first organizations to announce that virus and antibody testing would be available to anyone, beginning yesterday.
In New York, one of the most affected areas in the world with 17,000 confirmed or probable Covid-19 deaths out of 157,000 confirmed cases, the question on everyone’s mind is: Have I already had the virus?
The now unemployed barber Ariel Krupnik, 32, was among those willing to wait two hours for a $ 300 (RM1,307) blood test that could reveal within three to five days if he had developed antibodies to the coronavirus.
He never had any symptoms. But he believes his health insurance will cover the test, and finding out that he has already had the virus would be “like a little spring gift,” Krupnik said.
Even if the results are not 100 percent reliable, and even if the antibodies are not proven to confer full immunity, Krupnik said a positive result would mean feeling less compelled to stay indoors constantly, just waiting for his weekly trip to the supermarket.
And it would mean that you could donate blood for the plasma therapies that many hospitals are testing for coronavirus patients.
“I can help other people who are having it,” said Krupnik.
‘Curious’
The motivation is similar for Pauline Guardenti, 26, a French woman who has lived in New York for eight years.
“I saw that we could donate our blood, that’s why I’m doing it,” he said. “To tell the truth, I don’t care if I had it or not. There really aren’t enough studies to know whether we are immune or not. “
Ariela Rubin, 37, generally works as a waitress at a vegetarian restaurant that is now closed due to the pandemic.
She said she had symptoms of the virus in February, when most people in New York were not paying much attention to the outbreak of a new virus in China.
Rubin said he is “curious” about whether he contracted the coronavirus earlier this year.
But the sight of a crowded waiting room yesterday made her nervous, for fear of contagion in case she hadn’t actually had the virus, and Rubin said she planned to postpone her visit until the next day.
With the evidence available to almost everyone, New York authorities hope to better follow the spread of the disease, an important step in developing plans for how economic activity, currently suspended until May 15, can resume in the city. .
Recent antibody tests on a sample of 7,000 people indicate that nearly one in four New Yorkers may have been exposed to the virus, according to state governor Andrew Cuomo.
That could mean that more than two million of the city’s 8.6 million residents have already contracted it, more than 12 times the number of existing confirmed cases. – AFP
