New York City revealed Sunday that despite a citywide test positivity rate of less than 1%, some neighborhoods are registering results far higher. Borough Park, home to the largest Hasidic population in the city and one of the neighborhoods with the highest rate of positive cases at the beginning of the pandemic, saw a positivity rate of over 4%, with that number surpassing 6% in part of the neighborhood.
“In recent days, we have observed heightened rates of COVID-19 in many neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations,” Dr. Dave Chokshi, New York City’s health commissioner, wrote in a letter to local Orthodox media outlets Sunday. Chokshi pointed to increased positivity rates in Borough Park, Midwood, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Forest Hills and Far Rockaway in Queens.
“The neighborhoods experiencing transmission were particularly hard hit in the worst weeks of the pandemic this past spring and we never want to return to those awful days,” Chokshi wrote.
According to charts prepared by the city’s health department, the spikes in positivity rates in New York City’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods appear to begin around Aug. 15.
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