Official: Virus ‘more prevalent in community’
ALBANY COUNTY, N.Y. » County Executive Dan McCoy and Albany County Health Commissioner Dr. Elizabeth Whalen announced the latest increase in positive COVID-19 cases.
As of Tuesday morning, there are 136 confirmed positive cases within the county. McCoy said 576 people are under mandatory quarantine, 652 individuals under precautionary quarantine and nine are currently hospitalized.
“If you look at the trajectory of cases over the past week, you see the progression and the evidence that COVID-19 is becoming more prevalent in the community,” Whalen added.
Both officials repeated calls for people to take the pandemic seriously and to assume it’s everywhere throughout the community.
“It was alarming,” McCoy remarked on the number of people he has seen out and about.
“Governor [Andrew] Cuomo shut down the state to 75 percent, then 100 percent of nonessential employees and I have to tell you, driving around the county, I didn’t notice the difference,” McCoy added.
“People, the world’s changed,” he said.” The only way we’re going to stop this spread is by staying home and using the new steps
that we’ve put out, through the CDC, through the health department, through the governor’s office, and six feet of separation, coughing into your arm, washing your hands. And that’s not going to change if people continue to go on out like there’s nothing going on.”
McCoy intoned that the world has changed and people need to heed public health and safety guidelines set forth by the CDC, health department and governor’s office.
“The more we stay home and isolate in place, we can slow this down. We’re trying to slow it down, so we don’t overcrowd our hospitals, we don’t overcrowd our EMS personnel and our firefighters and police officers that are on the street,” McCoy explained.
McCoy also noted the need for people to donate blood and if they can to make an appointment with the American Red Cross.
Whalen echoed the sentiments of the importance of following those guidelines outlined.
“As we previously discussed, due to some limitations in widespread community testing, it’s likely that we’re not getting a true picture of what we are seeing in the community,” Whalen noted.
“And that’s why we continue to urge caution to everyone in the community to continue to follow the advice laid out by County Executive McCoy, by Governor Cuomo, by health officials across the state and across the country to stress the importance of social distancing, hand hygiene and staying home,” Dr. Whalen explained.
Whalen added those steps will go a long way toward lessening the burden on hospitals and health care workers.
“That curve that we keep talking about flattening is the essential piece of why social distancing is important,” Whalen stated.
“We continue to look to other countries who are in the midst of where we may be in a week or two. We know that their hospital systems are overwhelmed. We know that people are not getting the care they would get in the normal course of events, when you have a fully staffed hospital and full support needs such as ventilators and PPE that we would normally have,” Whalen added, citing Italy as an example of an overwhelmed system.
In addition, Whalen explained how flattening the curve will buy them more time and resources.
“Flattening that curve gives us more time, gives us more resources. Without social distancing, we’re looking at a large number of people being affected in a way that will overwhelm the system,” Whalen remarked.
“With these strategies, we are looking at trying to make use of the resources that we have to continue to provide the excellent care that the residents in Albany County have come to expect from the excellent hospitals that we are served by. Please protect your hospitals. Please protect your healthcare workers. Please protect yourself,” Whalen continued.
“We are sending out teams to visit in excess of 500 people at home [in quarantine] on a daily basis. This is a tremendous stress to our workforce, but we are doing it. We are doing it because we need to play our part and we know we need to ensure people are following the guidelines of their quarantine,” Whalen added.