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Parts of Staten Island, the most suburban borough in New York City where things like backyards and driving to the grocery store are the norm not the exception, have some of the highest rates of people testing positive for the coronavirus in the city.
For a pandemic that feeds on population density, ravaging public housing projects and sweeping through nursing homes, it seems a paradox that leafy Staten Island, which boasts the greatest proportion of public parks in the city, would be so vulnerable. The borough now has the second-highest rate of documented infection, a hair behind the hard-hit Bronx, with 21 cases per 1,000 people, according to data from the city health department.
In one ZIP Code, a corridor from Staten Island’s Tompkinsville neighborhood to Latourette Park, the prevalence of the disease is 60% higher than the city average. As of Thursday afternoon, nearly 142,000 New Yorkers had tested positive for the virus, 10,582 of them live on Staten Island. That’s 7.5% of all cases even though the borough makes up 5.6% of the city’s population.
Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said at this stage, with so many cases coming in across the five boroughs every day, it’s hard to pinpoint what’s going on in Staten Island.
“It is difficult to produce fully reliable answers on why one section of the city might have elevated numbers of confirmed cases when compared to another,” Gallahue said.
It’s especially confounding because Staten Island shares little in common with other hotspots in New York, places like East Harlem, the Bronx and Queens, where city health officials and lawmakers have pointed to underlying socio-economic disparities. In contrast, Staten Island’s population is staunchly middle class, boasting the second-highest median household income after Manhattan and with the highest rate of homeownership, at 70%, in the city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Rather than large apartment complexes, which characterize Manhattan, most dwellings on the island are single-family houses with space to social distance.
So why are known cases so disproportionately high in Staten Island? There are two likely explanations both of which—and here’s another paradox—might actually be a source of pride for the island.
Steven Matteo, the City Council’s Republican minority leader, pointed to his borough’s high proportion of nurses, cops and firefighters.
“One plausible explanation as to why Staten Island has such a high infection rate is that it is home to so many heroic first responders and essential workers, often more than one per household,” Matteo said.
Health care is the largest employer in Staten Island, and the borough is home to more than one-third of all New York City firefighters and one-fifth of its police officers, according to the state comptroller’s office.
And the outbreak has hit the EMS, firefighters and cops particularly hard. At the outbreak’s peak several weeks ago, nearly 20% of the uniformed police force called out sick. As of Wednesday, 4,500 NYPD members had tested positive for the virus and 31 have died, the department said.
See: NYPD Detective and ‘gentle giant’ Cedric Dixon was the force’s first known COVID-19 death
Separately, Dr. Philip Otterbeck, chair of the department of medicine at Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island, said he sees the high rate of infection as a function of better access to testing there.
Between 5% to 6% of the population of Staten Island have gotten tested for the disease as of Tuesday, compared to 1% to 2% in Manhattan. Indeed, ZIP Codes on Staten Island boast some of the highest rates of testing per capita of anywhere in the city, according to data analysis by ProPublica. As of Thursday, 506 Staten Island residents have died from the virus.
See: Coronavirus antibodies found in 21% of New Yorkers in early testing
Doctors are testing more than 1,000 people daily, and have tested over 27,000 since the beginning of the crisis, according to data from the state.
“Staten Island is a unique community,” Otterbeck said. “People go to a family doctor, they have really good follow-up care and private providers make decisions about their care.”
In those kinds of patient-provider relationships, it’s been easier for Staten Islanders to get tested than, say, at a hospital setting, where overwhelmed emergency rooms are following stricter health department protocols about who to test, Otterbeck said.
In part, higher rates of testing on Staten Island also reflect special programs that provide the disproportionate number of cops, nurses, doctors and firefighters who live there special access to testing, Otterbeck said. Staten Island was also one of the first boroughs to get a drive-through testing site.
And there’s broad agreement that more testing would yield far more positives across the city. Preliminary data from a statewide antibody study showed Thursday that as many as one in five New York City residents may have been infected with COVID-19, exponentially more than the 142,000 with a lab diagnosis.
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Ultimately, the city will have to explore the inequities in the outbreak once the crisis is past, said Matteo, of the city council.
“Once we get through this unprecedented crisis, it is imperative that we analyze the data,” Matteo said. “We have to determine why certain parts of the city appear to have more coronavirus cases than others.”
