Everyone has their pandemic pastime. What’s Francine Ricchi’s? Tracking the lengths of COVID testing lines.

For more than a year, the Boerum Hill resident has done laps around her Brooklyn neighborhood almost daily, tallying the number of people waiting to get their noses swabbed and then posting to her Twitter account.

On her most recent trips, though, Ricchi has seen a change in the testing sites along her route. During past waves, she has watched lines grow and dwindle, as community transmission rises and falls. And sure enough, as cases skyrocketed in December, she documented queues of more than 100 people waiting to get tested.

But even though the daily number of New York City cases has still been enormously high — day after day larger than the peak once recorded in April 2020 – Ricchi said testing lines have become ghost towns.

“It was mostly documenting different locations showing there was no line at opening time,” she said. On January 26th, when the daily average case rate was 5,054, “there was really nobody. At one location, there were two people. We’re definitely in this period where demand for tests has dropped off.”

City data supports Ricchi’s findings. As COVID cases have come down from their omicron summit, so too have tests, which is to be expected.

But official PCR testing numbers have been cut nearly in half over two weeks. Last year, a similar drop took six months. It’s the sharpest drop over the shortest time ever recorded during the pandemic.

Morning Edition host Kerry Nolan speaks with WNYC health and science data reporter Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky about what the plunge means. Click listen in the player, and head to Gothamist for more on the story.