Here's how to get a coronavirus test in New York City if you're feeling sick

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Here's how to get a coronavirus test in New York City if you're feeling sick
Staten Island Coronavirus testing facility

REUTERS/Mike Segar

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Health workers check-in people in their cars at a new drive-thru coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing center at the South Beach Psychiatric Center in the Staten Island borough of New York City.

  • New York City residents - outside of NBA players and the ultra-wealthy - have struggled to get coronavirus tests in recent days.
  • The state's Department of Health opened a drive-through testing facility on Staten Island to combat this, among other plans.
  • If you feel like you need to get a test or your doctor has ordered one, call the New York State Health Department at 888-364-3065 to make an appointment.
  • You can also text COVID or COVIDESP (for Spanish) to 692-692 to receive the latest updates.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

With 7,845 people in New York infected with the coronavirus, the demand for testing continues to increase. The state's made a recent push to make testing more available to New Yorkers, which Governor Andrew Cuomo has said accounts for the rapid climb in coronavirus cases.

To handle some of these coronavirus cases, New York City's first drive-through mobile testing facility opened in a Staten Island parking lot. It's the first state-run coronavirus testing facility in New York City and the third in New York State. It will be open by appointment from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The coronavirus test is essentially a nasal swab that must go all the way up the patient's nose.

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To make an appointment at the drive-through testing center, you need to call the New York State Health Department at 888-364-3065. The city has also said it has plans to open walk-in testing sites, ABC 7 reports.

Testing is prioritized for those with serious illnesses

The other two testing facilities in New York are in New Rochelle - just outside of the city in Westchester Country - and in Jones Beach on Long Island. The tests are all free for New Yorkers when ordered by a healthcare provider.

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation is also rapidly expanding its testing capacity. Mayor Bill De Blasio announced on Wednesday that all hospitals and healthcare providers under the NYC Health + Hospitals umbrella would increase COVID-19 testing capacity by 5,000 tests per day, with results available in 1-2 days, in partnership with BioReference, the lab that handles the testing analysis.

The city said testing will be prioritized for those with serious illnesses at New York City hospitals, and those with mild symptoms should stay home, practice social distancing, and then reach out to their doctor or chosen healthcare provider if symptoms don't subside in 3-4 days.

New Yorkers can also text COVID or COVIDESP (for Spanish) to 692-692 to receive the latest updates regarding testing facilities.

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'New York has been very aggressive'

"We did 10,000 tests last night," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Friday. "New York has been very aggressive about increasing our number of tests."

During a Thursday press briefing, Mayor Bill de Blasio described the rate of new coronavirus infections in the city as "staggering." On CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Governor Andrew Cuomo said that there were likely "tens of thousands" of untested coronavirus cases in New York. New York is one of the regions in America that's been hit hardest by the virus.

On Friday, in a continued attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Cuomo announced that all New York residents in non-essential jobs would be required to stay home to avoid spreading the new coronavirus. He also announced that President Donald Trump would be sending a floating hospital to New York to help care for people.

Though New York is working quickly to ensure reliable testing, it's been difficult in recent weeks to actually receive a test - unless you are a Brooklyn Nets player or among the uber-wealthy.

Challenges in getting tested

Others, including New York Times reporter Tim Herrera, have outlined the difficulties they've faced getting coronavirus tests in recent days.

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"Almost a dozen calls with five health care providers over five hours. Two hours of hold music. Two hours in a hospital. Four days of anxiously checking an online portal for results. And lots of confusion," Herrera wrote.

"That's the winding path through bureaucracy that took me from placing my first phone call last Wednesday to getting my positive coronavirus test results on Monday night. Five days in limbo."

The US is facing a shortage of testing materials that led to it falling behind other developed nations in the rate of tests performed per capita. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires that a patient meet a series of strict criteria before being tested for the virus, reports Business Insider's Taylor Nicole Rogers.

"When something is available but limited, and there's limited access but it exists, people with more fame and more money are more likely to get it," Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research in Washington, DC, previously told Insider.

That being said, New York has made impressive strides in testing capacity in recent days.

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On Friday morning, Cuomo said that 10,000 new coronavirus tests were processed overnight - bringing the state's total to 32,427 tests, reports Business Insider's Andy Kiersz.

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