Health officials work to trace variant
Saratoga County: No new cases of more contagious version have been found
Saratoga County officials say they are working with the state to trace all potential exposures that a jewelry store employee had with others, after it was revealed Monday that he had the state’s first case of a more contagious coronavirus variant first detected in the United Kingdom.
The state swabbed and tested five more people associated with the N. Fox Jewelers store in Saratoga Springs on Monday. Four of them tested positive for the virus that causes COVID -19, but further testing was under way Tuesday to determine whether 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 isolating before learning of their test result, the county said.
No additional people had tested positive for the variant as of Tuesday evening, the county said.
“It concerns us, in a sense,” said Mike Mcevoy, EMS coordinator for the county, during a Facebook Live event Tuesday. “If there is a widespread outbreak of (the variant) we would have more people ill in a community faster and our capacity to take care of those people in public health and in the hospitals could potentially be compromised.”
The variant, first detected in the U.K., has since been identified in California, Colorado, Florida and 37 countries. While scientists estimate it is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent more infectious than the regular virus, they say it does not appear to be more lethal and is unlikely to change the effectiveness of the COVID -19 vaccines currently being rolled out.
A ‘game changer’
The variant’s arrival comes at a perilous time for the region, state and nation, though.
The Capital Region is already dealing with record-breaking infections and hospitalizations that show no signs of slowing, hospital capacity nationwide is dwindling, and vaccine rollout to much of the general public is still months away. In the Capital Region, ICU capacity remains the lowest in the state at 16 percent Tuesday. Area hospital officials say they have begun drawing on nonclinical and agency staff to increase their bed capacity.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Tuesday that the variant’s entrance in New York constitutes a new, serious danger and could be a “game changer.”
“The numbers are frightening on the increase of the transmittal of the virus,” he said. “This is something we have to watch and we have to pay careful attention to.”
The variant upsets the dynamic between vaccinations versus infection rate that Cuomo has compared to a “footrace” and “the light at the end of the tunnel” — meaning it could lead to extra deaths as New Yorkers await their turn to receive the inoculations that will bring an end to this pandemic.
Eli Rosenberg, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University at Albany, said a more contagious virus may mean that governments need to raise their bar for vaccine coverage. Experts have said anywhere from 75 to 85 percent of the population will need to be vaccinated against coronavirus for any meaningful level of herd immunity to be achieved.
“There’s this classic mathematical relationship between transmissibility and herd immunity,” Rosenberg said. “And basically as something spreads more easily you need to have higher coverage for herd immunity. ... If this becomes the (dominant) strain, then the bar is moved on vaccine coverage.”
On Tuesday, Cuomo encouraged anyone who believes they may have been exposed to the variant while visiting the Sara
toga Springs jewelry store, located at 404 Broadway, between Dec. 18 and Dec. 24 to schedule a test. The state set up a free test site just for patrons of the store in the Saratoga Spa State Park, located at 99 E. West Road in Saratoga Springs.
The site will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily until Friday. See the online version of this story for how to register.
“Anyone who was exposed, anyone who was exposed to someone who was exposed, please contact us,” Cuomo said, speaking directly to people who live in the Capital Region. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of; this is a virus. It travels, but we have to know. Containment is vitally important here.”
Beyond the Capital Region
While the new variant was first identified in Saratoga Springs, it’s unlikely the problem is confined to that city or even the broader Capital Region, said Rosenberg.
“All of this with the Saratoga case, with the U.K. cases — you have to remember that they ’re all based on small samples,” he said. “So for every one we’re detecting, there’s a whole lot we’re not.”
Detecting specific strains of coronavirus is an involved and time-consuming process that involves sequencing an entire genome. The U.S. has been criticized for not sequencing enough samples throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week said it hopes to more than double the
number of samples being sequenced each week from about 3,000 to 6,500.
In New York, the state’s Wadsworth Laboratory and private laboratories have sequenced nearly 5,000 random coronavirus samples since March, said Jonah Bruno, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health. The pace of sequencing picked up in December, as the transmissibility of the U.K. variant was making headlines.
Of the more than 1,600 samples Wadsworth has sequenced so far, 870 have occurred since Dec. 23, Bruno said.
“As part of an expanded effort to determine to what extent the variant from the U.K. is present in New York state, hospitals and clinical laboratories from across the state are submitting COVID -19 specimens to the Wadsworth Center, and Wadsworth has dramatically increased the number of samples it is sequencing,” he said.
The increase is not nearly dramatic enough for the number of positive COVID -19 tests that turn up every day in New York, however. That number has crossed 10,000 for 21 of the last 30 days, the state’s COVID -19 tracker shows.
“We’re testing a fraction of what is coming up positive every day in New York,” said Rosenberg, referring to the sequencing efforts. “So I think it’s unlikely that it’s restricted to Saratoga or the Capital Region or what have you,” he added.
State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker on Tuesday said
the state’s Wadsworth Lab is able to detect the U.K. variant in about 44 hours, which is much quicker than other labs.
“I will note that we do this a lot quicker, a lot more efficiently than the federal government,” he said. “The CDC takes a lot longer than that, and other states have reported it takes several weeks to get results back from the federal government. So we’re moving very quickly on this, regarding the samples that have come, to see whether the other individuals had the U.K. strain or have the U.K. strain.”
Jail outbreak
A dozen correctional officers and one medical worker at the Albany County jail have tested positive for the virus within the past two weeks, Sheriff Craig Apple said.
He said no inmates have tested positive, but he also said the facility will test inmates only if they show symptoms. Apple said that as of Tuesday, no inmates had shown COVID -19 symptoms and thus no inmate has been tested. Prior to knowing they had virus, the correctional officers who tested positive did have interaction with inmates, the sheriff said. Officers wore their masks and gloves when with the inmates, he said.
“We’re having a little flare-up right now with it,” he said. “We knew this was going to happen. We just tried to prolong it as long as we could.”