BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

CANTON -- One of St. Lawrence County’s top public health experts says he believes the peak of local COVID-19 infection has yet to arrive. He also believes that social distancing is helping to avoid a “disastrous” hit on the county’s hospitals.

Dr. Andrew Williams, president of the St. Lawrence County Board of Health, updated the St. Lawrence County legislature’s Services Committee at a Monday, April 20 meeting held online via Zoom.

Earlier that day, the county Public Health Department announced 10 new cases of COVID-19 out of 1,165 people tested.

“I think there’s every reason to believe our peak is potentially weeks away. We started this weeks after New York City and there’s no indication in the numbers that we’ve reached our peak yet,” Dr. Williams told the board. “There was an initial kind of quick rise, and we talked about the rapid doubling rate. That’s slowed down. Now there’s sort of a steady daily increase.”

The doctor said that the strict social distancing measures that are now in place are working, and abandoning them now would likely lead to hospitals being overrun with COVID patients.

“If we abandon the measures we’ve put in place too early, it would be disastrous,” he said. “The social distancing measures and other public health measures we’ve put into place are definitely working. I’m confident if we hadn’t put these measures in place, instead of hundreds of patients we’d have thousands of patients … and I’m confident our hospitals would have been overrun.”

The infected in St. Lawrence County all fit into four “clusters” of people. They include travelers who returned from high transmission areas mostly before travel restrictions; transmission at restaurants or bars prior to the state shutting down non-essential businesses and banning large gatherings; transmission within families, “and that transmission occurred because somebody infected the family from group one or two,” the doctor said; and community home staff transmitting to residents.

Dr. Williams said any plan to re-open the economy should be coordinated regionally and be thoroughly planned.

“This virus is not going away. Everything we’ve seen in international news … we should expect the virus will be with us for some time. There’s no vaccine, but there’s one in development, and there’s no treatment,” he said. “We should talk about it and think about what the issues are. Most of the literature suggests you have to see a sustained decrease in cases for 14 days.”

One of the major obstacles is to screen the entire population, rather than test a narrow swathe that either has symptoms or has had contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient.

He said the county can test up to 250 people per day, but on the busiest day has only tested 55.

“We’re not turning people away. We’re not getting as many [requests for testing] as we’d expect,’ he said.

Dr. Williams said he believes St. Lawrence County is doing well in the fight against the coronavirus.

“We’ve done an excellent job as a county,” he said. “We can’t emphasize enough the positive effect of having an effective leader like (St. Lawrence County Public Health Director Dana Olzenak-McGuire) and the whole public health team. [St. Lawrence County Administrator Ruth Doyle] has done an excellent job and the support from legislators has been critical.”

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