Americans are desperate to avoid a COVID infection as the Omicron variant grips the nation — while one New York City man is begging for a positive test.
The unidentified Brooklyn resident took to the community online message boards earlier this week to ask strangers to send him a snap of their positive results so that he could get out of hosting visiting relatives.
“I need help. I know this is a bizarre request, but I’m looking for a positive COVID test result from within the past few days,” the man reportedly wrote on NextDoor, a social media site designed for users to connect with neighbors.
“You can obscure any identifying info (like your name), but I have relatives coming into town. I told them they couldn’t stay with me, but they already bought a ticket and arrive shortly. I’m hoping that showing a positive COVID result will convince them to stay elsewhere,” he wrote.
“Please don’t recommend talking to them as I’ve spent three days trying to get out of this. Thanks and please be nice as this is causing me crippling anxiety,” the anonymous New Yorker concluded.
His post attracted a lot of attention on NextDoor, with some locals responding that they were unable to help out, but definitely felt his pain.
“I don’t have one, but I feel this energy and I am rooting for you,” one local stated.
“Unwanted company can be terrible. It’s rude and disrespectful to invade someone’s space,” another neighbor replied.
However, the desperate man was in luck — with one person in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn coming to his aid and supplying a photo of a positive at-home antigen test.
“Here you go,” the generous stranger responded beneath the snap, according to reports, without disclosing whether he was suffering severe symptoms from the virus.
It’s unclear whether the photo was enough to convince the man’s visiting relatives that he had actually come down with COVID.
A screenshot of the original NextDoor post was shared on Twitter by BuzzFeed journalist Joe Bernstein on Thursday morning, where it quickly went viral. “INCREDIBLE Crown Heights Nextdoor dilemma,” he wrote alongside it.
It’s a clever way to avoid the in-laws, but a fraudulent COVID diagnosis can fun afoul of the law as one Connecticut man learned earlier this week. The scammer was arrested for forging a positive test result so he could skip a court date.
Junior Jumpp, 31, had been scheduled to appear before a New Britain Judicial District judge on Nov. 30 for a bond review hearing related to a string of criminal cases, when he claimed he had come down with COVID. Investigators later determined the result was fake.
It comes as America struggles to cope with a surge of new COVID infections, largely caused by the new Omicron variant. The US had a record-breaking 441,000 new COVID-19 infections on Monday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — blowing away the prior record set on Jan. 8, 2021 with 294,000 cases.
The rise has occurred despite the majority of Americans being vaccinated, though early reports by health agencies during the current outbreak have indicated that most current COVID-related hospitalizations are occurring in unvaccinated patients.