As COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths rise in Suffolk, infected people are not cooperating with contact-tracing efforts

Less than 48% of confirmed new COVID-positive Suffolk residents are cooperating with the county’s case investigators, Suffolk County Commissioner of Health Dr. Gregson Pigott said today.

The health commissioner said of Suffolk’s 7,948 new “index cases” — people who have tested positive — in the last 14 days, only 3,801 people provided case investigators with the names of their close contacts.

Meanwhile, Suffolk’s newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases, along with its testing positivity rate, hospitalizations and deaths, continue to climb.

If case investigators are unable to learn the identities of close contacts of newly diagnosed COVID cases, state contact tracers can’t reach out to them to let them know of their exposure and advise them to quarantine. That means the close contacts of the newly diagnosed “index cases” may be unaware of their own infection because they are pre-symptomatic or they remain asymptomatic. But they can still — albeit unwittingly —infect other people.

That promotes the spread of the virus in the community, officials say.

In a phone interview after the media briefing today where the health commissioner made the statements regarding cooperation with county case investigators, a county spokesperson said the actual number of people who refused to cooperate was far lower than what the health commissioner’s comments indicated.

The actual number of people who have refused to cooperate in the past two weeks was 144, according to county spokesperson Derek Poppe.

Poppe said there were 7,300 cases between 11/13 tp 11/26 and “144 people refused to interview, isolate or give contacts.”

The larger number referenced by the health commissioner included people who already knew they had been exposed to a COVID-positive person and were already self-isolating, Poppe said.

Suffolk’s new confirmed cases and hospitalizations have risen to levels that haven’t been seen here since the spring outbreak. The testing percent-positive rate has spiked to more than 5% — 5.2% yesterday, County Executive Steve Bellone said today. There were 248 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Suffolk — the highest number of hospitalizations and the first time the number has been over 200 since June 3, Bellone said.

On Nov. 1, the county’s testing percent-positive rate was 1.2% and there were just 42 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Suffolk. Today, Bellone noted, there are more COVID patients in intensive care units — 46 — than were hospitalized on Nov. 1.

“There can be no doubt now that we’re in that second wave we’ve talked about for so long,” Bellone said.

The county executive said the state, its counties and hospital systems learned a lot from the experience they lived through this spring. “We are in a different place today,” he said. As a result, strategies have changed, he said, to focus on discreet areas designated as micro-clusters, rather than implementing restrictions in entire regions.

“With the surge in numbers that we have seen, we have not waited for the state, however,” Bellone said. “We have taken a very proactive approach to addressing this second wave. And we know that testing is one of our most valuable tools in combatting the virus,” he said.

“Testing allows us to identify the positive patients — to isolate them, so that we can contain the spread by quarantining anyone who was potentially exposed, and we’re doing everything that we can to increase access to testing for our residents who need it,” Bellone said.

The county’s strategy includes free school-based testing programs in the Riverhead and Hampton Bays school districts, where micro-cluster focus zones were designated by the state last week. The county has also launched free community-based testing sites in Riverhead, Hampton Bays, Huntington Station and Patchogue, he said.

Bellone repeated the governor’s warnings about small group gatherings in people’s residences. Sixty-five percent of new cases result from those types of gatherings, he said.

“We are seeing people follow the guidance out in public,” he said. “But it is in those smaller gatherings where that compliance has been lacking. So it is critically important that people do everything they can limit those gatherings, to practice following the guidelines of social distancing and mask-wearing when they are in a gathering so that we can reduce the spread of this virus.”

Editor’s note: This article has been revised after its initial publication to include additional information provided by a county spokesperson.