Pollworker coronavirus cases rise
Despite efforts to keep sites safe, some volunteers who came in contact with voters have tested positive.
Despite painstaking efforts to keep election sites safe, some poll workers who came in contact with voters on Election Day have tested positive for the coronavirus, including more than two dozen in Missouri and others in Indiana, Iowa, New York and Virginia.
The infections cannot be tied definitively to polling places. Because COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in the country, there is no way to determine yet whether inperson voting on Election Day contributed to the surge, public health experts said.
Still, the infections among poll workers raise concerns because of howmany people passed through voting sites, which implemented social distancing rules, erected protective barriers and stocked sanitizer, masks, gloves and other safety gear. In most places, poll workers were required towear masks.
The cases emerged while election workers continued counting thousands of ballots. As a hand tally of the presidential race began in Georgia, the state’s top election official placed himself under quarantine after his wife tested positive.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is in a county considered a national virus hot spot, an election official who worked an early voting site later tested positive.
“I’m actually surprised that we don’t have more cases,” said Linn County Election Commissioner Joel Miller, who noted that several county workers in his building tested positive in the lastweek.
Election workers in Jackson County, Missouri, in the Kansas City suburbs, seemto be the hardest hit so far, with about 28 staffers testing positive in the past couple of weeks.
Tammy Brown, head of the Jackson County Election Board, said her staffers urged voters who felt ill to avoid coming inside, though she suspects not everyone listened. The board dealt with nearly 200,000 voters, including more than 60,000 who cast early ballots.
“We, as election officials, all knew we were at risk,” Brown said.
With transmission rates high in Missouri, health officials are not ready to link the cases to polling places. They say the workers could have become infected anywhere.
The county offered drivethru voting for people with COVID-19 or who were quarantining because of contact with someone who was infected. When part-time workers became ill, full-time election board staff worked the drive-thru line.
It’s difficult to trace cases back to polling places because the virus manifests in different ways, and some people never get symptoms. Infections also are spiking as people gather with extended family or friends and return to more crowded public settings.
The U.S. on Sunday topped 11 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, with the most recent million coming in less than a week, according to Johns Hopkins University. The virus has now killed more than 246,000 people in the United States, and the disease is spreading faster across the country than at any time since the pandemic started.
While that spread increases the likelihood poll workers may have contracted the disease elsewhere, there have been calls for their co-workers to quarantine and voters to be tested as a precaution.
In New York, more than 1,600 people who voted at a site in the Hudson Valley on Election Day have been advised to get tested after a poll worker tested positive. Officials said colleagues who had sustained contact with the worker will be tested, but they described the risk to voters as minimal because the person wore a mask, kept distance and followed other safety measures.
Similarly, officials in Virginia’s Carroll County said two poll workers in different precincts have tested positive. A health official said that because both were in their infectious periods on Election Day, testing has been offered to workers and voters.
Virginia officials statewide had masks, face shields, gloves, hand sanitizer and other supplies for polling places, and they trained people in safety practices, said Jessica Bowman, deputy commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections.
It could be several weeks before the effect of in-person voting nationwide is known. Polling places that used safety measures could have greatly minimized transmission rates, said M. Kumi Smith, an assistant professor with the epidemiology division at the University of Minnesota.
“A super-spreader event is a lot easier to identify when you’re still at an early stage of an epidemic or when there’s a really discrete event that’s really unlike anything else that anyone else is doing,” she said. “But given the real range of activities that are going on here, I would probably be a little bit more skeptical of someone who declares that this is definitively a super-spreading event.”