Coronavirus in NY: Driver for Taxi or Ride Services Tests Positive

The man, 33, walked into St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in the Far Rockaway section of Queens on Tuesday and reported flu-like symptoms. He went home and returned later when his symptoms worsened, an official said.

On Friday night, the man tested positive for the coronavirus. Dozens of workers at the hospital are now in isolation and are being tested.

“This is a new case,” said Councilman Donovan Richards Jr., who represents Far Rockaway. “And the first in Queens.”

“Obviously, 40 people are out,” Richards said. “The hospital will need to replace those people temporarily. They will need money to do that. They need supplies. We need to keep the health care up and running.”

Tom Melillo, a hospital spokesman, said the patient remained in quarantine at the hospital on Saturday.

Melillo said hospital officials are monitoring everyone who may have been exposed to the patient.

It was not immediately clear whether the man drives a yellow taxi or works for ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft.

Health officials said they were also seeking to determine whether the driver may have exposed passengers.

New York state now has nearly 50 people who have tested positive for the illness, most of them in Westchester County, just north of New York City.

The new case in Queens appears to put the total for the city at five.

On Friday, New York City officials asked the federal government to send more diagnostic kits for the coronavirus, saying in a letter that the city’s limited capacity to test had “impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic.”

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Public health workers and government officials have linked a majority of the state’s cases to a cluster in Westchester that first came to authorities’ attention after a New Rochelle resident was confirmed as New York’s second coronavirus patient.

In tracing people who had contact with the man, a partner at a small Midtown Manhattan law firm, disease detectives learned that he had attended synagogue services before becoming infected.

Public health officials closed the synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, and asked that anyone who had attended services, a bat mitzvah or a funeral there recently isolate themselves as a precaution.

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As of Friday, New York officials said they had asked about 4,000 people in the state who might have been exposed to the virus to isolate themselves at home. About 2,700 of that group were in New York City, and most of them had recently returned from five countries where the outbreak has been most severe: China, Iran, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

At least 44 people in New York state had been placed under mandatory quarantine as of Friday, including 33 in Westchester County, nine in New York City, one in Nassau County on Long Island and one in Erie County in western New York.

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New Jersey officials said Friday that four people in the state had tested positive for the virus: a 32-year-old man, a man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s, all from Bergen County near New York; and a man in his 60s from Camden County, in the southern part of the state. Also Friday, Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut said that an employee of a Danbury hospital who lives in Westchester County had tested positive for the virus.

As of Saturday, the coronavirus outbreak had sickened more than 102,000 people, killed nearly 3,500 and been detected in at least 92 countries. In the United States, more than 300 cases of the virus had been confirmed, and at least 17 people had died, according to a New York Times database.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .