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St. Lawrence County hospitals can handle current COVID-19 cases, says health board president

Posted 4/15/20

BY ANDY GARDNER North Country This Week Although St. Lawrence County’s coronavirus problem is far from over, the local hospitals are able to handle the current number of infections, the rate of …

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St. Lawrence County hospitals can handle current COVID-19 cases, says health board president

Posted

BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

Although St. Lawrence County’s coronavirus problem is far from over, the local hospitals are able to handle the current number of infections, the rate of which has gone down since the beginning of the month. However, a local public health official says reporting that data is not as simple as just stating who has tested positive and who is feeling better.

“[St. Lawrence County’s] ‘doubling rate’ has decreased to every 13 days (New York City is doubling every 11 days). We had a period of very rapid increase, this appears to have abated,” Dr. Andrew Williams said in an email. “As we look at the patterns/clusters of documented infection, it is very apparent that the social distancing efforts have helped to minimize the transmission of the illness. The effort of the Department of Health to identify and isolate or quarantine individuals also appears to be very effective.”

On April 6, he reported the county’s doubling rate had exceeded New York City.

Dr. Williams is president of the St. Lawrence County Board of Health, and is also chief medical officer of Community Health Center of the North Country and associate chief medical officer of St. Lawrence Health System. SLHS operates Canton-Potsdam, Massena and Gouverneur hospitals.

He said while St. Lawrence County has more cases than many surrounding counties, the county is also testing more people.

“We have a relatively high testing rate compared to most of the surrounding counties. However, we have only tested about 1,000 out of a population of about 100,000 residents. Therefore it is difficult to determine what the true incidence and prevalence of the disease is,” he said.

“Because the recommendations for testing right now focus mostly on patients with symptoms, we simply don’t know how many asymptomatic residents there might be. The newly available serological testing (using antibodies to determine prior exposure to the illness) may allow us to have a better understanding of the epidemiology of the disease in our community.”

Dr. Williams said local hospitals are able to manage the current infection rate.

“At this time we are able to manage the current number of identified patients in the county. We have an entire floor of CPH available to care for these patients, with the option to scale up our response as needed,” he said.

Reporting the numbers presents its own set of challenges, according to Dana Olzenak-McGuire, the county’s director of public health.

“We are still learning so much about the virus. With the numbers of cases still rising in our county, we are careful in how we are classifying individuals who tested positive and who are no longer exhibiting symptoms,” she said.

To say a COVID-19 patient has completed mandatory isolation, the person must go at least three days (72 hours) since recovery. Recovery, Olzenak-McGuire said, “is defined as resolution of fever without the use of fever-reducing medications and significant improvement in respiratory symptoms (e.g., cough, shortness of breath) and at least 7 days have passed since symptoms first appeared.

That still comes with a big caveat.

“It should be noted however that this recommendation will prevent most but cannot prevent all instances of secondary spread. The risk of transmission after recovery is likely substantially less than that during illness. Recovered persons will not be shedding large amounts of virus by this point if they are shedding at all,” the public health director said.

“While it is our goal to be transparent and to provide information so the community is informed, doing so poses several challenges as the data is constantly changing and significant coordination is required to ensure accuracy. We will be providing testing data through the state’s COVID tracker,” Olzenak-McGuire said. “Additionally, we are working diligently with essential workers who have been quarantined to determine whether they can and should return to work while they are in their 14-day exposure window. We want to contain the virus as best and as fast as we can to slow the spread down.”

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