Syracuse, N.Y. — Onondaga County’s proactive testing within senior living facilities has uncovered at least 50 coronavirus infections among people with no symptoms whatsoever, County Executive Ryan McMahon revealed Thursday.
The county is proactively testing more than 1,000 seniors in assisted and independent living facilities, whether they’ve had symptoms of COVID-19 or not. (The state is in charge of testing at nursing homes.)
What’s not known is whether the findings are any indicator of the number of silent infections lurking in the community as a whole — the so-called ‘asymptomatic’ cases.
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The state and Upstate University Hospital have independently estimated that 1.3% — or roughly 8,000 people — have been infected so far in Central New York. By comparison, there are just over 1,000 confirmed infections in CNY. That means the vast majority are carrying the virus without symptoms, but could pass it on to others.
McMahon has argued that the high number of asymptomatic cases within senior living centers can’t be used to estimate the number of asymptomatic cases in the community at large. He’s accepted the 1.3% infection rate from the state, though suggested he believes the actual number may be lower.
As for the senior housing data, those tests are being done within the close quarters of a confined community. You’re going to find high concentrations of infections that won’t be present in the community as a whole, he’s argued. It’s similar to infections passed among people within the same household.
McMahon has likened the spread within senior centers to a building on fire: knowing the asymptomatic cases can help put out the blaze.
“There’s the potential for (asymptomatic people) to spread the virus to other individuals,” McMahon said. “Now we know who they are, we know where they are, and we can get them into quarantine.”
Those hidden cases have driven up the county’s daily totals of newly confirmed infections: there have been 79 confirmed infections on Wednesday and Thursday combined, the second-worst two-day total in Onondaga County since the pandemic began.
Of those, new cases in senior centers far outnumber those identified in the community at large.
McMahon said Thursday that, while contained, the number of asymptomatic cases is troubling.
“It’s sobering that there are people out there without symptoms,” he said.
But he’s still confident that Central New York — which has one of the lowest known infection rates in the state — will begin reopening on May 15, the earliest restart date set by the governor.
More tests, by their nature, are going to find more infections, he said. That’s why social distancing is so important: you may not be sick, but might be carrying the virus anyway. And we all need to get back to work long before the virus is completely defeated, he’s stressed.
Proactively finding hot spots among the community’s most vulnerable should be encouraged, even if it makes the data look worse, he said.
There are fewer than 100 active known infections within the community as a whole, when subtracting outbreaks within senior centers and among households, McMahon noted. That leaves more than 200 active cases in senior centers and among household contacts.
But there has not been widespread testing within the community as a whole, outside of those who develop sickness. The overall infection number doesn’t count asymptomatic cases, because those people haven’t been tested.
So how did the state estimate 1.3% have been infected, the vast majority of whom show no symptoms? That percentage was deduced by doing antibody testing — taking a small sample of people, sick or not — to see if they’d developed defenses to coronavirus.
More widespread testing is on its way soon: the state is proposing a requirement that 14,000 people a month get tested in Onondaga County once we reopen for business. Most of those tests will be proactive testing of healthy people, McMahon said.
That means we’ll see more infections going forward. The question, McMahon said, is whether we can effectively treat the sick and quarantine their contacts once society reopens.
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Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at [email protected] or 315-470-6070.
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