NYC Opens Its Own Coronavirus Testing Lab

NEW YORK CITY — A new New York City-run coronavirus lab could help speed up test results for tens of thousands of city dwellers a day.

The newly-opened Pandemic Response Lab is the city’s own dedicated COVID-19 testing facility, officials announced Thursday.

It’s expected to process roughly 20,000 tests a day by November from its location in the Alexandria Center for Life Science in Manhattan, officials said.

“With New York City’s infection rate and hospitalizations at their lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic, we know that our strategy of widespread testing and tracing is working,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “The PRL will build on our city’s reputation as a world leader in making testing available to everyone.”

Test turnaround times have a sticky issue for many New Yorkers. Waits for some have been so long as to be useless, according to some reports.

The city now claims about 80 percent of test results now come back in 72 hours, according to a release.

The new lab will serve NYC Health + Hospitals and will use technology licensed from NYU Langone Health and Opentrons, a Brooklyn-based robotics company, the release states.

It will bring about 150 jobs — clinical lab technologists, customer success representatives, automation engineers, scientists and more — to the city, officials said.