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A Key Piece of New York City’s Covid

Response Is Closing as Cases Rise
The city’s Pandemic Response Lab, which provided mass testing,
is shutting down due in part to the prevalence of at-home tests
and a reduction in business.

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The Pandemic Response Lab has processed some 10 million Covid tests for New
Yorkers, with quick turnaround times. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

By Joseph Goldstein

Dec. 6, 2022, 1:17 p.m. ET

In the first year of the pandemic, before at-home Covid-19 tests

were widely distributed and when lines at CityMD urgent care
centers sometimes snaked around the block, City Hall realized
New York needed a large-scale laboratory of its own and set out to
recruit a company that would build one.

Out of that effort, the Pandemic Response Lab was born . Run by a
robotics company, and with New York City as its main customer,
the lab processed some 10 million Covid tests for New Yorkers,
with quick turnaround times. By early 2021 it had expanded into
variant surveillance, providing health officials with a detailed
snapshot of which new versions of the virus were gaining ground
in the city.

Now, the robotics company that owns the lab has decided to shut
down the mass testing facility at the end of the year, the firm’s chief
executive, Jonathan Brennan-Badal, said in an interview Monday
night.

The decision to close a key piece of the city’s pandemic

infrastructure comes at a time when Covid cases are climbing to
their highest levels since New York’s sixth wave this summer.

Transmission in New York City jumped in the days following the

Thanksgiving holiday, and as of late last week, there were some
3,700 cases being reported each day., according to city data . About
13.2 percent of laboratory tests were coming back positive over a
seven-day average, a significant jump from the rates in September
and October, when test positivity was mostly below 10 percent.

The number of daily cases does not include those identified

through at-home testing kits, which more New Yorkers have
turned to as they’ve become more available and as the city’s
testing sites have shuttered.

Some health experts hoped the Pandemic Response Lab would

become an enduring addition to New York City’s medical
infrastructure, providing cheap, large-scale laboratory testing
capacity for future health needs — or the next pandemic.
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But Mr. Brennan-Badal said the prevalence of at-home tests, the

diminishing danger of infection and a reduction in business drove
the company’s decision to close its testing operation. In recent
months, the lab was testing just a few thousand samples a day,
compared to more than 40,000 at earlier points. He likened the lab
to “a wartime operation” whose need had passed.

“For me, it’s the end of an era and I’m so happy that we can be
winding down,” said Mr. Brennan-Badal, whose company,
Opentrons, makes robotics for biology laboratories and cell-
services.

The city’s recent increase in Covid cases may have been driven by
the spread of XBB, a hybrid of two different BA.2 subvariants ,
which by mid-November made up 14 percent of cases in New York
City, compared with 6 percent at the start of the month, according
to a sample of cases sequenced at laboratories that include the
Pandemic Response Lab. (More recent data is not yet available.)
The XBB form of the virus is particularly effective at evading
antibodies from previous infections or vaccination , health officials
have said.

The city has been dialing down its pandemic response efforts for
months, following Omicron’s initial, lightning-fast spread a year
ago, when the city was suddenly awash in illness. And the testing
problems of the past — when it could take hours of waiting in line
to get your nose swabbed and days, if not a week or more , to learn
the results — have vanished, due to the availability of at-home
tests.

The city’s public hospital system, which oversaw New York’s

testing program, says that the city can rely on a large network of
commercial and hospital laboratories for its needs. “Our capacity
and turnaround time for all Covid-19 testing will remain the same,”
the city’s hospital system, Health and Hospitals, said in a
statement.

Still, some public health experts worried that dismantling

pandemic infrastructure might be a mistake.

The city has been winding down its pandemic response efforts for months. Janice
Chung for The New York Times

Dr. Jay Varma, the epidemiologist who helped shape Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s pandemic response for much of 2020 and 2021, was
instrumental in bringing the lab into being in 2020. He said it was
clear that to manage Covid, New York City needed a mass testing
program and that the turnaround times at most commercial
laboratories were unacceptably long.

“There needed to be a lab that was big enough for New York City
and largely answerable to New York City,” said Dr. Varma, who is a
member of a scientific advisory board for the lab.

Dr. Varma, now a professor at Weill Cornell Medical School, said he

understood that at the moment there was little pressing need for
the Pandemic Response Lab. But he said he had hoped the city
would continue to fund the operation at a level to keep it open, “as
an insurance policy against the need you’ll have in the future.”

Mr. Brennan-Badal said that the city had paid the lab roughly $150
million in connection with its testing operation, which, he said, on a
per test basis was a small fraction of what larger national
laboratory businesses were charging.

The company will continue its sequencing effort, but fold it into
another part of the company, Mr. Brennan-Badal said. Determining
which variants are on the rise in New York City and even in which
neighborhoods is a key part of the city’s surveillance program.

The closure of the mass testing facility, on Manhattan’s East Side,

means that between 100 and 150 lab employees will lose their jobs
early next year, Mr. Brennan-Badal said.

Should the need arise for a mass testing facility in New York in the
future, he said the company was ready to help other facilities
“rapidly scale up testing volume” or even reopen the lab.

“There are more efficient ways to rapidly scale up testing volume

than having an underutilized lab operation,” he said. “That’s our
fundamental point of view.”

The lab’s upcoming closure was first reported by Bloomberg.

Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York, following years of criminal justice and
police reporting for the Metro desk. He also spent a year reporting on Afghanistan from
The Times’s Kabul bureau. @ JoeKGoldstein

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