Medical volunteers suiting up at the Aqueduct testing site run by SOMOS.
Four days a week, Ilon Rincon Portas suits up for work at 7 a.m. inside a white tent at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Southeast Queens.
The doctor, who immigrated from Venezuela, carefully puts on a thin papery coverall with a hoodie that resembles a child’s pajamas.
“Because I am short I also need to adapt a little bit and have some tape around my shoes and my sleeves,” said Rincon Portas, explaining how the extra tape ensures “that it’s not going to be moving around as I move through the day.”
It takes about 10 minutes to complete the whole outfit, which also includes an N95 face mask, gloves, hat, and plastic visor. This protection is necessary for the few minutes of contact Rincon Portas will have with dozens of patients coming to this drive-through site for free COVID-19 tests.
Ilon Rincon Portas in full gear at the coronavirus testing site run by SOMOS at the Aqueduct race track in Queens.
Rincon Portas is among hundreds of medical professionals volunteering at two drive-through testing sites run by SOMOS, a network of about 3,000 primary care doctors serving mostly Medicaid recipients in the city’s immigrant communities. The patients are screened in advance in Spanish, Chinese, or English, to make sure they have the right symptoms to qualify.
As the cars line up to enter, volunteers check the paperwork. Then, the windows roll down just long enough for Rincon Portas to stick a swab resembling a long Q-Tip up the patient’s nose. Rincon Portas said many appear very sick and sweaty, and estimates about 70 percent of them are immigrants, with the majority speaking Spanish. They learn their test results a few days after the samples are sent to a lab.
Rincon Portas lives in Washington Heights and takes a 2-hour ride on the A train to get to the Aqueduct for these 6-hour volunteer shifts. And yet, Portas wishes they could be doing more to fight the pandemic.
"When this whole COVID-19 thing started happening, I started getting very anxious because I wanted to help,” Rincon Portas explained. “It’s like I have these sets of skills and my hands are tied.”
Rincon Portas, 41, practiced emergency medicine in Venezuela and received asylum almost a decade ago for—in their words—being queer. Rincon Portas is non-binary and prefers the pronouns they and them. Though they were able to eventually become a U.S. citizen, they’re working in medical education because it’s impossible to become a doctor here at this time. They said Venezuela's government never sent over the right documents to be certified, in what is likely political retribution.
Portas said they wanted to help immigrants get tested because it’s a population at high risk of contracting COVID-19. Many are “essential workers” like delivery workers, house cleaners, and construction workers.
“Financially they don’t have the means to stay home necessarily,” said Rincon Portas. “A lot of people from migrant families are living in crowded conditions so it is more likely that they’re going to get sick.”
And immigrants may not have equal access to information or healthcare. Many are also undocumented and afraid to come forward.
Ilon Rincon Portas testing patients at a testing site at the Aqueduct racing site run by SOMOS.
Ramon Tallaj, who founded SOMOS five years ago, worried about all of these issues when COVID-19 came to New York. He’s a Dominican immigrant who practices medicine in Washington Heights. The state opened the first testing sites in New Rochelle, Long Island and Staten Island—out of reach for the doctors in his network.
“Where are [the immigrants]? In the poor boroughs,” he said. “We told the governor we need to do this, we didn’t wait.”
The SOMOS network says it amassed more than $6 million to purchase testing kits and protective gear. The Aqueduct site opened on March 18th. A field hospital is also going up there, and the National Guard is assisting the efforts. Tallaj said SOMOS encountered the same problems finding supplies as everyone else, but currently has enough to get by.
Listen to reporter Beth Fertig's radio story for WNYC:
At a time of scarce resources, the mayor has discouraged New Yorkers from getting tested unless they’re sick enough to be hospitalized. But SOMOS takes a different view.
“He is the mayor, and we are the doctors,” said Henry Muñoz, a founder of SOMOS. “Our physicians have an obligation to screen, confirm, and recommend testing when appropriate for our patients because it is the right thing to do. Information is power, and the more our patients know, the better off they are in addressing their health needs, and the needs of their families.”
The organization’s next goal is to open quarantine centers in hotels, like in China, where patients can get care away from their families without using hospital space.
“Therefore you decrease the capability of the virus to continue spreading, instead of sending them back to the [apartment] building where they are with so many people,” Tallaj explained. He said conversations continue with the de Blasio administration.
Recent data show low-income city neighborhoods where many immigrants live have the most confirmed cases of COVID-19, especially in the Bronx and Queens. It’s unclear if that’s because they’re at the highest risk, or if they’re getting more tests than people in wealthier neighborhoods.
SOMOS said it referred more than 7,000 people in total to the Aqueduct location and to another site in the Bronx at Lehman College, where it partnered with the state and Montefiore Hospital. Tallaj said about 70 percent of SOMOS patients have tested positive for the virus.
Pyae Hein Kyaw volunteering at the coronavirus testing site at Lehman College, run in part by SOMOS.
The immigrant medical professionals at the testing sites speak English, Spanish, Chinese dialects and sometimes other languages. Matilde Diaz, 41, went to the Bronx site late last month and said it was comforting to be tested by someone who knew Spanish.
“Because a lot of the time you feel more nervous when they’re telling you things in English,” she said. “And you think you’re going to do something wrong, or there’s going to be a problem. Or you might infect someone.”
Diaz, who is a Mexican immigrant, tested negative. She said she’s being careful with her four children and her parents, who all live in the same Bronx apartment, by sanitizing any clothes and shoes that go outdoors. She’s still working one day a week at a carwash but is given gloves and protective gear.
In addition to pulling in volunteer doctors, the SOMOS coronavirus testing sites have drawn many immigrants with other medical backgrounds.
Twenty-seven year old Pyae Hein Kyaw, who goes by the nickname PK, is from Myanmar and spends five days a week at the Bronx location. Even though he finished medical school in Myanmar, he said he was turned down when he tried to volunteer at hospitals because he hasn’t yet completed an American residency. But SOMOS welcomed him through its network, and Tallaj said PK’s got one of the highest success rates at swabbing patients—the brief but painful process that involves going deep into the nasal cavity.
PK said he travels from Floral Park to volunteer at the Bronx testing site, a trip that takes more than 2 hours on a bus and three subway trains that are crowded now that they run less often. He wears a fabric mask over his face and doesn’t mind the trip.
"It’s killing me that I'm not in a hospital right now,” he said. “I should be in the front fighting this.”
Rincon Portas said they enjoy seeing people from different backgrounds working together. “We know how to work hard and in a team,” they said. “Those are the things that also keep me from feeling the fear so much. The companionship and the teamwork and the caring.”
With translation help from Rebeca Ibarra
Beth Fertig is a senior reporter covering immigration, courts, and legal affairs at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig.
