Question: You had asked me to go to a City site if we needed testing again, and we did. We've been waiting for the results for two weeks. It seems very critical to the school's plan to have testing with short turnaround times. What do you say to parents whose kid has a runny nose or a fever and they want to get tested? We went to Highbridge Pool, which is a Health + Hospitals run site, but they send their testing to Quest Diagnostics' lab, which apparently is the one with the slowdown.
Mayor: I spoke to the CEO of Quest yesterday. You and others went through something absolutely unacceptable. It was directly related to the massive overload that occurred all around the country. What happened was, Quest just got overloaded all over the country and they are spread thin. They have resolved a lot of that. What we agreed on is over the next week or two the Quest turnaround for New York City will get to four days or less. We obviously want one day, two day, that's always our goal, but four days or less we can work with. The CEO was quite clear that the worst is behind them. They've added a lot of capacity and we should not see that problem again.
Question: If it is four days, you're just expecting if a child shows any symptom related to COVID, they would keep their child home for those four days until they can confirm that they don't have the virus?
Mayor: Correct. If your child's sick, if your child is showing those symptoms, keep your child home until they are well, and also let's get that test. And if it comes back negative, great. If it comes back positive, you got to go through the whole course of that pause.
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