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SARATOGA SPRINGS – Saratoga County officials say they are working with the state to trace any potential exposures that a jewelry store worker has had with others, after it was revealed on Monday that he had the state’s first case of a more contagious variant of coronavirus first detected in the United States.
The state sampled and tested five other people associated with the N. Fox Jewelers store in Saratoga Springs on Monday. Four of them tested positive for the virus responsible for COVID-19, but further testing was underway on Tuesday to determine if they were infected with the new B117 variant, the county said. Of the four who tested positive, three were previously known to be positive, and one had been ill and was in self-isolation before learning of his test result, the county said.
No additional people had tested positive for the variant on Tuesday evening, the county said.
“This concerns us, in a way,” said Mike McEvoy, EMS coordinator for the county, during a Facebook Live event on Tuesday. “If there was a generalized epidemic of (the variant), we would have more sick people faster in a community and our ability to care for these people in public health and in hospitals might be compromised.”
The variant was first detected in the UK last fall and has since been identified in California, Colorado, Florida and 37 countries. While scientists estimate the variant to be 40-70% more infectious than the previous one, they say it does not appear to be more deadly and is unlikely to alter the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines currently being deployed.
A “ game changer ”
The arrival of the variant comes at a perilous time for the region, state and nation.
The capital region is already facing record-breaking infections and hospitalizations that show no signs of slowing down, hospital capacity nationwide is shrinking and vaccine rollout for much of the general public is still months away . In the capital region, the capacity of the ICU remains the lowest in the state at 16% on Tuesday. Hospital officials in the region say they have started tapping non-clinical staff and agencies to increase their bed capacity.
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that the variant’s arrival in New York posed a serious new danger and could be a game-changer.
“The numbers are frightening on the increase in transmission of the virus,” he said. “This is something we have to watch out for and be very careful about.”
The new variant upsets the dynamic between vaccinations and the rate of infection that Cuomo has likened to a ‘run’ and ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ – meaning it could lead to additional deaths as New Yorkers are waiting their turn to receive the inoculations that will end this pandemic.
Eli Rosenberg, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Albany, said a more contagious virus could mean governments need to increase their levels of vaccine coverage. Experts have said that 75 to 85% of the population will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus for a significant level of herd immunity to be achieved.
“There is this classic mathematical relationship between heritable and herd immunity,” said Rosenberg. “And basically as something spreads more easily, you have to have higher coverage for herd immunity … if that becomes the (dominant) strain, then the bar is shifted on vaccine coverage.”
On Tuesday, Cuomo encouraged anyone who thinks they’ve been exposed to the variant while visiting the Saratoga Springs jewelry store, located at 404 Broadway, between December 18 and December 24, to schedule a test. The state has set up a free test site only for customers of the Saratoga Spa State Park store, located at 99 E. West Road in Saratoga Springs.
Customers can register here. The site will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily until Friday.
“Anyone who has been exposed, anyone who has been exposed to anyone who has been exposed, please contact us,” Cuomo said, speaking directly to people who live in the Capital Region. “There is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a virus. It travels, but you have to know. Containment is vitally important here.”
Not just a capital region problem
Although the new variant was first identified in Saratoga Springs, the problem is unlikely to be limited to Saratoga or even the larger capital region, Rosenberg said.
“All of this with the Saratoga case, with the UK cases – you have to remember that they are all based on small samples,” he said. “So for everyone we detect, there are many that we are not.”
Detection of specific strains of coronavirus is a complex and time-consuming process that involves the sequencing of an entire genome. The United States has come under fire for not sequencing enough samples throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week said it hoped to more than double the number of samples sequenced every week, from about 3,000 to 6,500.
In New York City, the state’s Wadsworth lab and private labs have sequenced nearly 5,000 random coronavirus samples since March, said Jonah Bruno, spokesperson for the State Department of Health. The pace of sequencing picked up in December, as the transmissibility of the British variant grabbed the headlines.
Of the more than 1,600 samples Wadsworth has sequenced so far, 870 have taken place since December 23, Bruno said.
“As part of an expanded effort to determine the extent to which the British variant is present in New York State, hospitals and clinical laboratories across the state are submitting COVID-19 samples to the Wadsworth Center , and Wadsworth has dramatically increased the number of samples, it’s sequencing, ”he said.
The increase, however, is not dramatic enough for the number of positive COVID-19 tests that occur every day in New York City. That number has crossed 10,000 for 21 of the past 30 days, according to the state’s COVID-19 tracker.
“We’re testing a fraction of what turns positive every day in New York City,” Rosenberg said, referring to the sequencing efforts.
“So I think it’s unlikely that it’s limited to Saratoga or the capital region or whatever,” he added.
State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said on Tuesday that the state’s Wadsworth lab was able to detect the UK variant in about 44 hours, which is much faster than other labs.
“I will note that we are doing this much faster, much more efficiently than the federal government,” he said. “The CDC takes a lot longer than that, and other states have reported that it takes several weeks to get results from the federal government. So we’re going really fast on that, in terms of the samples that came in. , to see if the other individuals had the British strain or the British strain. “
Edward McKinley and Lauren Stanforth contributed to this report.
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