Schenectady County exceeds 3% positive COVID test rate with no big cause

Categories: News, Schenectady County

SCHENECTADY – There is no single source of the COVID infections that are piling up in Schenectady County, no cluster that can easily be attacked.

Instead, county officials say, dozens of small-scale personal interactions every day spread the virus.

The county reported 63 new confirmed infections on Monday, pushing the rate of positive tests here above 3% for the first time since May, after hitting 0.5% or even lower for much of October.

In that regard, Schenectady County essentially reflects the state as a whole, which topped the positive 3% on Monday (and three more times this month) after remaining below 3% since May.

Schenectady County lost its 57th resident to COVID over the weekend and its only hospital now has 24 COVID-positive hospital patients after dropping to zero in August.

Since the pandemic reached New York City in March, 143,548 COVID tests have been administered in the county of 155,000 people and contact tracers have made countless calls to try to determine where 2,136 residents of the county have been infected and who to them. turn they could have infected him.

“I wish I had had a much more complicated take on this, except it’s the same thing everyone sees,” said Keith Brown, acting director of public health for Schenectady County.

“There is no anomaly here. It’s just what the numbers say and what we warned about: At this point, it’s community spread.

COVID would be easier to treat, he said, if the source of most infections were a single large group of cause and effect like the infamous Albany Fourth of Julyblock party, or SUNY-Oneonta, or the Correctional Center de Greene, or a number of nursing homes.

Instead, it’s dozens of little ones that take more work to keep up.

“They are literally little clusters,” Brown said. “Which on the one hand is frustrating but on the other hand is good – we are doing a good job in preventing larger clusters.”

He said residents of the county need to take better infection prevention precautions until a vaccine is widely available.

Governor Andrew Cuomo took to the air on Monday to make the same point. The next six weeks, until January 1, are the most social time of the year and come at a time when the pandemic has gained momentum in a population tired of dealing with it.

“This is a toxic cocktail of dynamics and facts,” he said, describing a situation that is in danger of spiraling out of control.

The trend over the past three weeks indicates that 6,000 New Yorkers will be hospitalized at the end of the next three weeks, he said, but that doesn’t add up to all of the Thanksgiving family dinners and reunions later this week. in violation of the precautionary principle. guidelines.

“How can we forget all the pain we have endured?” … We were storing the bodies in refrigerated trucks… emergency rooms and hospitals were like combat zones, ”Cuomo said.

“How does that not chastise us and scare us?”

He said Staten Island hospitals are approaching saturation point and the state will activate a temporary emergency facility there.

If nothing else, fewer people will return home for the holidays by public transport:

Albany International Airport has handled around 25% of last year’s passenger volume lately and between 20% and 35% in the last five days before Thanksgiving 2020. Amtrak is down to around 20% in volume last year and continues to decline after CDCs. recommendation to Americans not to travel on Thanksgiving. Greyhound does not share details but said it has cut back on bus trips during the pandemic; passenger volume is higher as Thanksgiving approaches than earlier this year, but not as high as in 2019.

A reporter asked Cuomo about a number of upstate sheriffs, saying they would not enforce Cuomo’s ban on home gatherings of more than 10 people.

Cuomo replied that sheriffs don’t have the right to choose the laws they enforce.

“He’s not a law enforcement officer, he’s a dictator,” he said. “And I think it’s a dangerous precedent. The upstate sheriffs, what they do is they’re political.

Locally, sheriffs in Fulton, Montgomery, Saratoga and Schenectady counties have made various statements to this effect, although some have made it clear that they will not actively seek such gatherings, rather than offering a blanket refusal to make any application. .

The New York State Sheriffs Association said in a press release Monday that with his directive, Cuomo imposed an impossible task on local law enforcement that he dispensed with his own police to State of having to perform.