When New York City Department of Design and Construction Commissioner Lorraine Grillo unveiled the city’s first COVID-19 Center of Excellence in early December, a new 22,000-square-foot medical facility in the Bronx with 40 exam rooms that it built for the city’s public hospital system, it didn’t come a moment too soon.
The epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States this spring, the city’s numbers were beginning to climb again as cases surged across the country in the coronavirus’s relentless second wave.