How Essex County held off the worst of the pandemic
Adirondack tourist hub held the line, enforcing ban on gatherings
Essex County Supervisors Chair Shaun Gillilland can smile about it now, although it is not a wide smile.
On the 23rd day of March 2020, he penned an emphatic letter to the hundreds of thousands of hikers, vacationers and second-home owners who are driven to the mountainous and sparsely populated county each year in search of fun and relaxation.
But last year they were being driven by something else: fear of their neighbors in the crowded cities to the south that were being ravaged by disease.
Rather than stay put, urbanites would flee to the mountains, setting down the equivalent of a small city in a county where there were scant medical services or, for that matter, services of any kind. It wasn’t just that Gillilland was worried about how people would find a ventilator. He was worried about how they would find a gallon of milk.
“As a vaccine does not exist, we have no capacity to test, our
hospitals are small and incapable of handling additional influx and our stores and infrastructure are incapable of providing supplies to a larger population, we are asking that you respect the integrity of our hospitals and infrastructure and not travel to Essex County from any area at this time,” Gillilland wrote then.
He may as well have ordered the Ausable River to flow back up the shoulders of Mount Marcy. Somehow, though, through a sustained public health campaign and a responsive local population, the tourism epicenter of the Adirondack Park would go on to record the lowest rate of infections of any county in the park.
This June, more than a year into the emergency, its rate of 4,242 infections per 100,000 people was second-best in the state, despite top destinations such as Lake Placid resorts, High Peaks trails and Whiteface Mountain, New York’s selfstyled “Premier Ski Resort.”
About the same time as the county was asking people not to come, Linda Beers, director of the Essex County Health Department, was driving to her Schroon Lake home and happened to gaze across the waters to an unfamiliar sight: Almost overnight, the summer homes along the east shore were already lit up like Broadway — in March.
Public officials began to scramble. “There were some very tense conversations; we even talked about shutting down the Northway,” Beers said. “Our hospitals could never handle that number of people — what would we do if they all got sick?”
At the Elizabethtown Community Hospital, Dr. David Clauss was taking inventory. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had ordered hospitals to stock up on two things ECH did not have: ventilators and ICU beds. An arm of the University of Vermont Health Network, ECH had only a couple of transport ventilators for patients on their way to city hospitals, and the Ticonderoga campus didn’t have any overnight beds at all.
“We had to completely rethink how we were going to provide care,” Clauss said. “We had no ICU on campus, and we had to convert outpatient rooms to inpatient rooms in Ticonderoga.” Everyone braced for the worst, he said, and then “waited and watched as the wave came toward us.”
Meanwhile, the situation in New York City was becoming dire, and the virus was moving north to Albany and then beyond. Gillilland said he and county Manager Dan Palmer “were learning epidemiology on the fly. We didn’t have an understanding of how fast this would travel, and we began to get scared of what would happen if we got a cluster.”
They weren’t the only ones. Residents were scared by the influx of out-of-towners. Supervisors and the sheriff began to receive calls whenever someone saw an out-of-state license plate.
There was pushback from the hikers, too, who didn’t see the risk of being outdoors. When people ignored warnings against congregating at the Rattlesnake Mountain trailhead in Willsboro, Gillilland and the mountain’s private owners decided to close it. Hikers simply moved the orange barrels, drove through the tape and hiked anyway.
Epidemiologists noted that if everyone in the world would just stay put for two weeks there would be no more COVID -19. Travel is the one way to ensure the spread of the disease, and travel is the calling card of Essex County, said Jessica Darney Buehler, Essex County Health Department’s director of planning. “Communicable diseases have no respect for any borders,” she said.
And neither did the hikers. While the big commercial hotels shut down, many small inns, bed-and-breakfasts and Essex County’s mushrooming population of short-term rentals did not, and as the summer progressed, Essex County tax collectors — who had assumed sales and occupancy taxes would fall off a cliff — in fact saw numbers trending in the opposite direction.
Layered in was the calliope of quarantines and travel bans of travelers from other states, all of which was in constant flux. Though the restrictions were seemingly impossible to enforce, the county took the work seriously. Beers, with her broad smile and almost pathological cheerfulness, would confront unauthorized travelers by saying, “We’re very glad you’re here, but you’re going to have to leave.”
Painful as it was for business owners, a key factor in keeping infections low early on was the state’s economic shutdown, which helped ensure visitors were either outside or in small, self-contained groups. “They were coming almost exclusively to enjoy the outdoors,” Clauss said. “They didn’t have the option of sitting around a bar after a hike and having a beer.”
By the time the hiking season was over, Keene Supervisor Joe Pete Wilson estimated 150,000 hikers had passed through his town’s two most popular trailheads alone.
In Lake Placid, as state restrictions eased, infections struck the hospitality industry, and residents with no history of travel or contact with people who had already tested positive became sick — an indication that the disease was being transmitted by vacationers. As the summer progressed, a fullblown health crisis always seemed to be simmering just beneath the surface.
So every time the virus flared — at a restaurant, brewery, hardware store, fruit stand, group home, private party or church — the health department and volunteers from the Medical Reserve Corps were there to snuff it out. It was exhausting work, going from one hotspot to another. Yet for the health department, it was also a point of pride. Each positive case felt personal, said Andrea Whitmarsh, the department’s public health educator, every cluster a gut punch.
There was a dire situation that happened at one nursing home. Because tests were taking up to 14 days to process, the Bronx company that owns the Essex Center nursing home didn’t realize that an asymptomatic employee was going to work every day while carrying the disease. A major surge erupted, and by the time the nursing home declared itself COVID free nearly two months later, 16 residents had died and 60 residents, 38 staff members and 12 close contacts of staff had been infected.
Essex County ultimately took matters into its own hands, partnering with the Trudeau Institute and Adirondack Health in Saranac Lake to establish the North Country’s own $1 million, state-of-the-art testing lab that would be able to process 160 samples a day.
But by the time Columbus Day 2020 passed, and the dust from the hikers’ boots had settled, the numbers told an astounding story: Only 150 people had been infected, and aside from the nursing home — which was outside the county’s jurisdiction — no one in Essex County had died of COVID -19.
Essex County’s infections would spike in the winter, as a stir-crazy public ignored pleas against travel to infected areas. But even so, as COVID passed its one-year anniversary, only one of New York’s 62 counties, Tompkins, had a lower infection rate per 100,000 people than did Essex.
The county’s early and unyielding line against gatherings is now seen as a success story, but it was initially abrasive.
“I have one friend who still won’t speak to me,” Gillilland said. And hell, officials discovered, hath no fury like the mother of a bride who has just been informed that a longplanned wedding on Marcy Field is a no-go.
“What would we do if they all got sick?”