Curran: Closing Schools Again Is A Last Resort

NASSAU COUNTY, NY — Nassau County Executive Laura Curran urged residents to keep wearing masks and to keep social distancing as the county faces the highest daily case numbers since May.

There have been hundreds of new cases confirmed every day this month, and the number is steadily climbing. The county's positivity rate — the percentage of people who test positive each day — has been slowly climbing. The seven-day average was 3.08 percent, Curran said, and yesterday's was 3.5 percent. There are currently 147 Nassau residents in county hospitals, with 26 of them in the ICU and 15 on ventilators.

"People are worried what's going to happen this winter, with the cases going up and the weather being colder," Curran said. "Long Islanders should draw confidence from what we have achieved together. At the peak of this crisis, our hospitals were stretched, testing was limited, and we didn't know much about the nature of the virus.

"Since then...we've gone from being the hardest-hit in America to leading the way on reopening safely," she added.

According to Curran, Nassau is performing more than 10,000 tests a day. Over the last week, the county performed 82,285 coronavirus tests over the last week. "We're conducting more daily testing in Nassau County than some states with even two times or three times our population," Curran said.

The new wave of cases began in the fall, and has grown much more in recent weeks. Despite the correlation, Curran said that the new spike in cases has not been tied to schools or businesses. Instead, most of the cases the county is seeing this fall come from social events: weddings and parties, family get-togethers and other events where people are gathering in large numbers and not wearing masks and ignoring social distancing rules.

"I don't like to proselytize, I don't like to preach, but this really is a defining moment for us," said Curran. "So my plea to everyone of all ages: just continue using common sense."

Curran and other officials said that shutting down schools this fall and winter is a last resort for the county, but that it would have to happen if the infection rate climbs too high.

"Our contact tracers have found that school buildings have not been a major vector of transmission," she said. "There hasn't been much transmission within school buildings. Isolating children from teachers and friends is not good for their mental health, it's not good for their educational development, it's not good for their social and emotional development."

Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein, the county health commissioner, said that the reopening of schools has been an "incredible success," adding that about 99 percent of in-person school days have happened. So far this year, 106 schools across the county have had to go remote at least one day, and 22 have had to go to remote learning for 14 days.

Eisenstein added that it's not even necessarily large numbers of cases that can cause a school to go remote. One infection could force dozens of others to go into quarantine, leaving the school unable to operate.

"We have the tools, we have the know-how to get through this winter without a shutdown, but we all have to do our part," said Curran. "Wearing the masks, practicing the social distancing and avoiding those large gatherings will do more than save lives this winter: it can keep kids in school and it can assure our businesses stay open."