Hell's Kitchen Coronavirus Rates Plummet To All-Time Lows: Data

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — Coronavirus rates in Hell's Kitchen are at or near their lowest points since the city began releasing test data, continuing an encouraging trend that has coincided with the vaccine rollout.

In the two weeks between late May and early June, the percentage of COVID-19 tests that came back positive reached record lows in two of Hell's Kitchen's three ZIP codes.

For the week that ended on Friday, positivity rates across the neighborhood ranged between 0.36 and 0.73 percent. (In early January, by comparison, they were between 3.59 and 4.53 percent.)

The neighborhood's low virus numbers cannot be separated from its high vaccination rates. As of Monday, between 76 and 86 percent of residents in each Hell's Kitchen ZIP code were fully vaccinated, ranking among the highest in the city.

The neighborhood with the highest COVID-19 positivity rate as of Monday was Hunts Point in the Bronx, where 2.7 percent of tests came back positive last week — still just a fraction of the sky-high numbers recorded during last winter's post-holiday surge.

The lowest vaccination rates, meanwhile, are in Cypress Hills/East New York, Brooklyn; Claremont/Morrisania and Edenwald/Wakefield in the Bronx; and Laurelton/Rosedale in Queens. Many of those are lower-income neighborhoods whose populations are predominantly African-American — the group that remains the city's least-vaccinated.

Here's the latest Hell's Kitchen vaccine data:

• 10018: 100 percent first dose received, 86 percent fully vaccinated
• 10019/10020: 85 percent first dose received, 76 percent fully vaccinated
• 10036: 100 percent first dose received, 88 percent fully vaccinated

Meanwhile, across the Upper East Side, just 13 people tested positive for COVID-19 out of 5,642 people tested between June 5–11.