Governor releases ‘updated’ focus zone designations, but no individual zone data

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday announced updated metrics for focus zone designation that take regional hospital capacity into account.

Designation as a focus zone brings with it additional restrictions on business and social activity. The restrictions are “calibrated” according to health risk from various types of economic activity based on data derived from contact tracing efforts in the state, the governor said.

The focus zone designations remain the same red, orange and yellow zones originally rolled out by the stat in mid-October.

The governor’s office released the following descriptions of the updated metrics after the governor’s afternoon press briefing:

“A red zone will be implemented in a region where hospital capacity is within 21 days of reaching 90%, even after the cancellation of elective procedures and a 50 percent increase in bed capacity in hospitals in the region.

“A geographic area will be eligible to enter an Orange Zone if it has a 4% positivity rate (7-day average) over the last 10 days and it is located in a region that has reached 85% hospital capacity. Alternatively, a geographic area may also become an orange zone if the State Department of Health determines the area or region’s rate of hospital admissions is unacceptably high and a zone designation is appropriate to control the rate of growth.

“A geographic area will be eligible to enter a yellow zone if it has a 3% positivity rate (7-day average) over the past 10 days and is in the top 10% in the state for hospital admissions per capita over the past week and is experiencing week-over-week growth in daily admissions.”

There is currently not enough publicly available data to determine whether Suffolk County’s focus zones in Riverhead and Hampton Bays will retain their yellow zone designation, have the designation removed, or become an orange zone.

The state has not publicly released positivity rate data for the individual focus zones since Dec. 6. The State Department of Health did not respond to RiverheadLOCAL’s request for the data for the Riverhead and Hampton Bays focus zones.

Suffolk County’s hospital capacity is currently at 79%, with 619 of 2,998 hospital beds available, according to data released by the county yesterday afternoon.

The governor said yesterday state officials will be calculating the data and looking at the data this weekend and announce any new zones on Monday.

Yesterday the governor also announced that indoor dining will be shut down in New York City on Monday because the hospitalization rate in NYC has not stabilized.

Further determinations on additional indoor dining restrictions throughout rest of the state will be forthcoming, Cuomo said.

The governor said that after an analysis of data collected through contact tracing, the state has determined that gyms and personal care salons can remain open in orange zones with reduced capacity (from 33% to 25%) and increased testing (weekly rather than biweekly).

Cuomo displayed a chart showing what he said were infection rates resulting from 30 different types of activities, calculated by analyzing “46,000 data points,” gathered through contact-tracing from September through November.

The data show 74% of viral spread is resulting from private household gathering, Cuomo said. Every other type of activity delineated on the governor’s chart represented less than 8% of the infections, with app but two others less than 2% — including restaurants and bars, which according to the data Cuomo presented yesterday represented 1.43% of the infections.

The “46,000 data points,” however, represent only 21% of the approximately 219,000 new infections reported by the state between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30.

New York officials have not released data on what percentage of total positive cases are successfully contact-traced, but New Jersey last month put that number at approximately one-quarter of all positive cases.

New York officials have acknowledged that almost 50% of those who are reached by phone do not provide names and places, but have not disclosed the percentage of positive cases statewide that are never reached at all. On Dec. 1 Suffolk County Commissioner of Health Gregson Pigott said less than 48% of confirmed new COVID-positive cases cooperated with county case investigators.

The state health department has directed hospitals, which have already been ordered to increase their capacities by 25%, to take steps to remain below 85% capacity by either adding an additional 25% of capacity, eliminating elective surgeries, or both.