The map used by the city is created by a San Francisco-based health data company called Castlight. “The cost of doing that in that case was better than getting docked pay,” she added. Ultimately, Callahan said, she had no choice but to pay $35 for a two-pack of rapid tests at a nearby pharmacy. “I don’t have the ability or the job flexibility to have an extended lunch,” she said. On her lunch break, she visited the CVS, only to be told they hadn’t offered testing for months she moved on to Quest but said she was told she’d need to make an appointment in advance. Callahan consulted the map in mid-December and found two testing sites near her office, a CVS and a Quest Diagnostics. Though the mobile testing sites aren’t exactly kept secret, they’re less easy to find - tucked away at the bottom of the page below the map, listed on the NYC Health + Hospitals website and shared in PDFs on Twitter.įor people like Christine Callahan, a Greenpoint resident who gets tested regularly for her job in construction administration, the map may be the first and only centralized resource they see when searching. The map does include brick-and-mortar city-run testing locations, like the ones housed on NYC Health + Hospitals campuses. Some of those locations have closed due to staffing shortages others may charge patients hundreds of dollars for a test depending on their insurance. Instead, the city’s map directs users to urgent cares, private clinics and pharmacies. While local officials have doubled the city’s testing capacity to more than 200 sites in response to the omicron surge, more than half are mobile units and they’re not included in the map that headlines the city’s “testing locations” homepage, raising questions about its efficacy. New York City’s map is frustrating for those used to easily finding the exact location of every restaurant, pharmacy, or tattoo parlor in their area. “I wanted to create a map where people could go get tested for free, rather than find a private location where they could potentially have to pay,” she added. The resulting website, testingsites.nyc, has racked up thousands of views since it launched in mid-December, Frymire said. After a couple hours’ work, she’d collected all the city-run testing sites from the website and mapped them herself.
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Those appeared in long lists at the bottom of the page separated by borough, without a map to help users find the location closest to them.įrymire, a software developer who specializes in data visualization, instinctively saw a design problem she could easily fix. When Ellie Frymire was exposed to COVID-19 in mid-December, she knew she wanted to get tested at a city-run site rather than the overbooked urgent cares near her Park Slope apartment.īut the map on the city’s COVID-19 testing website didn’t include the New York City Test & Trace vans and tents dotting the city.
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