SARATOGA SPRINGS – Saratoga County officials say they are working with the state to track down all potential exposures that a jewelry store employee has had with others after it was revealed on Monday that he had the first case of a more variant. contagious infection of the coronavirus detected in the United Kingdom.
The state analyzed and tested five more people associated with N. Fox Jewelers in Saratoga Springs on Monday. Four of them tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19, but more tests were underway on Tuesday to determine whether they were infected with the new variant B117, the county said. Of the four who tested positive, three were previously known to be positive and one was sick and isolated before learning about the test result, the county said.
No one else tested positive for the variant until Tuesday night, the county said.
“It worries us, in a sense,” said Mike McEvoy, EMS coordinator for the county, during a Facebook Live event on Tuesday. “If there is a widespread outbreak of (the variant), we will have more sick people in a community more quickly and our ability to care for them in public health and in hospitals can potentially be compromised.”
The variant was first detected in the UK last fall and has since been identified in California, Colorado, Florida and 37 countries. While scientists estimate the variant to be 40 to 70 percent more infectious than the last, they say it does not appear to be more lethal and is unlikely to alter the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines being launched today.
A ‘watershed’
The arrival of the variant comes at a dangerous time for the region, state and nation, however.
The Capital Region is already dealing with record infections and hospitalizations that show no signs of slowing down, the capacity of hospitals across the country is dwindling and the vaccine’s release to much of the general public is still months away. In the Capital Region, ICU capacity remains the lowest in the state, at 16% on Tuesday. Hospital officials in the area say they have started to turn to non-clinical and agency staff to increase their bed capacity.
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that the variant’s arrival in New York is a new and serious danger and could be a “game changer”.
“The numbers are staggering with the increase in virus transmission,” he said. “This is something that we should watch and pay close attention to.”
The new variant upsets the dynamics between vaccinations versus infection rate that Cuomo compared to a “walking race” and “light at the end of the tunnel” – which means it can lead to extra deaths while New Yorkers wait for their turn. receive the inoculations that will end this pandemic.
Eli Rosenberg, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Albany, said a more contagious virus could mean that governments need to increase their level of vaccine coverage. Experts said somewhere around 75 to 85 percent of the population will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus in order for any significant level of collective immunity to be achieved.
“There is this classic mathematical relationship between transmissibility and collective immunity,” said Rosenberg. “And basically, as something spreads more easily, you need to have a higher coverage for herd immunity … if this becomes the (dominant) strain, then the bar changes in vaccine coverage.”
On Tuesday, Cuomo encouraged anyone who believes he was exposed to the variant while visiting Saratoga Springs jewelry store, located on 404 Broadway, between December 18 and 24, to schedule a test. The state set up a free trial site for store customers only at Saratoga Spa State Park, located at 99 E. West Road in Saratoga Springs.
Customers can register here. The venue will be open from 10 am to 6 pm daily until Friday.
“Anyone who has been exposed, anyone who has been exposed to someone who has been exposed, contact us,” said Cuomo, speaking directly to people living in the Capital Region. He travels, but we have to know. Containment is vitally important here. “
It’s not just a problem in the capital region
Although the new variant was first identified in Saratoga Springs, the problem is unlikely to be limited to Saratoga or even a wider region of the Capital, said Rosenberg.
“All of this with the Saratoga case, with the UK cases – you have to remember that they are all based on small samples,” he said. “So, for each one we are detecting, there are many that we are not.”
Detecting specific strains of coronavirus is a complicated and time-consuming process that involves sequencing an entire genome. The United States has been criticized for not sequencing enough samples during the coronavirus pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that they expect to more than double the number of sequenced samples 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 samples of coronavirus since March, said Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the state Department of Health. The pace of sequencing accelerated in December, when the transferability of the UK variant was in the headlines.
Of the more than 1,600 samples that Wadsworth has sequenced so far, 870 have occurred since December 23, said Bruno.
“As part of an expanded effort to determine the extent to which the UK variant is present in the state of New York, hospitals and clinical laboratories across the state are sending COVID-19 samples to the Wadsworth Center, and Wadsworth has dramatically increased the number of samples is sequencing, “he said.
The increase is not so dramatic for the number of positive COVID-19 tests that appear every day in New York. That number has exceeded 10,000 in 21 of the past 30 days, according to the state’s COVID-19 tracker.
“We are testing a fraction of what is positive every day in New York,” said Rosenberg, referring to the sequencing efforts.
“So I think it is unlikely to be restricted to Saratoga or the Capital Region or whatever,” he added.
State health commissioner Howard Zucker said on Tuesday that the state’s Wadsworth Lab is able to detect the UK variant in about 44 hours, which is much faster than other laboratories.
“I will notice that we do this much faster, much more efficiently than the federal government,” he said. “The CDC takes much longer than that and other states have reported that it takes several weeks to get the results from the federal government. Therefore, we are moving very quickly on this, in relation to the samples that arrived, to see if the other individuals had the United Kingdom strain or have the United Kingdom strain. “
Edward McKinley and Lauren Stanforth contributed to this report.