Checking on dinners - but not whiners
NYC virus tracers pry — just not on protests
City coronavirus tracers will ask New Yorkers if they’ve recently been to outdoor bars and restaurants — even though disease detectives were never allowed to ask about protest attendance, The Post has learned.
“Patients are asked who they spent close time with socially. To ensure we’re adapting our program to New Yorkers’ changing routes, patients will explicitly be asked if they spent time with their close contact at a bar or restaurant as the city continues to reopen,” said City Hall spokeswoman Avery Cohen, while reaffirming they won’t be asked about demonstrations.
“People are asked to name any gatherings they have attended to help identify cases related to specific events,” Cohen said. “Regarding bars and restaurants, we’re adapting the program to match the increased mobility of New Yorkers, especially those in the younger age brackets.”
The city’s Health Department found that the proportion of 20somethings diagnosed with COVID-19 doubled during the second half of June. The new cases were less likely to live in The Bronx and more likely to reside in wealthier neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, according to lab reports.
“We didn’t see an uptick from the protests,” Cohen said when asked why they weren’t tracking attendance.
Earlier in the week, Dr. Jay Varma,
Mayor de Blasio’s senior adviser for public health, said, “There’s nothing that we can see that directly links the protests to the rise that we’re seeing right now among younger people.”
But he admitted, “There’s a lot we don’t know.”
Dr. S. Patrick Kachur, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, defended the city’s position of leaving demonstrations out of tracing questions.
“Asking about protests might alienate some people — and it might not generate that much useful information,” Kachur said.
“What would you do if you knew someone was standing [outside] the Barclays Center for hours? Would you ask literally everybody to come in? So they took some reasonable steps. Trying to ascertain this information could compromise our ability to establish the trust that we need,” Kachur explained.
But a former associate commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration slammed the approach.
“When President Trump says if we stop testing we’ll have fewer cases, the mayor calls out the hypocrisy,” said Peter Pitts.
“When we can’t explain the uptick in our fair city’s COVID-19 infection rates among the 20-29 age group — and we aren’t asking if they’ve attended a Black Lives Matter protest, that’s called hypocrisy, too.”