ALBANY COUNTY — A  Fourth of July weekend party — with 28 COVID-19 cases linked to it so far — emerged as a symbol in the county’s 19th week of battling the coronavirus disease 2019.

Both state and county leaders made renewed and urgent calls for people — especially young people prone to parties — to keep their distance and wear masks. The governor set up requirements that bars serve food and announced several downstate bars that drew crowds and didn’t follow the rules were shut down.

Between July 3 and 5, about 200 college-age people gathered in backyards along Hudson Avenue in Albany to party, according to Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy; they weren’t wearing masks or staying six feet from one another.

“You’re hugging, you’re dancing, you’re having a great time,” said McCoy at his Wednesday press briefing, contrasting the behavior at the Hudson Avenue party to that of massive numbers of people who gathered for racial-justice protests in the city of Albany and in places throughout the county without causing noticeable spikes in COVID-19 cases.

The protesters wore masks and weren’t sharing food or drinks, said McCoy. “So protesters did it right; partiers aren’t doing it right.”

The county’s health department, which traces contacts for each case of COVID-19, is urging those who were at the party to call 518-447-4640 and to get tested.

Albany County Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen said last Thursday, “It’s very important for control of COVID for us to identify and appropriately isolate individuals that test positive as quickly as possible.”

This is especially true for the younger age group, Whalen said, since many are asymptomatic. “Knowing that you’re positive really helps empower you to make better decisions,” she said.

Every day, her department does contact tracing for people who may be quite ill, Whalen said. “We ask: Who are your contacts? Who were you in touch with? I ask all of those in the younger age group to think of this as a personal responsibility because you don’t want someone who’s quite ill to say that you were the contact. Please think of others,” she urged.

“What you do today …,” said Whalen, “will influence what happens two weeks from now.” She urged wearing a mask, frequent handwashing, and avoiding social gatherings.

McCoy on Wednesday stressed, “No one’s going to get suspended. No one’s going to get arrested.  … Come forward because you’re not going to be in trouble. We really need to stop that domino effect.”

The health department, he assured, does not share names, which is prohibited under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA.

The University at Albany, McCoy said, is “doing their due diligence to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

As he has many times before, McCoy on Tuesday pointed to the county’s dashboard, tracking data on COVID-19, to show that those in the 20-to-29 age group continue to have the most cases.

“These kids aren’t getting tested … They’re the ones going out and infecting everyone,” said McCoy.

He urged everyone to get tested and went over the various options:

— Walk-up testing in mobile sites in at-risk neighborhoods run by the county and the Whitney M. Young Jr. Health Center; cal 518-465-4771;

—  Drive-through testing by the state at the uptown University at Albany campus; call 888-364-3065;

— Both diagnostic and antibody testing at Priority 1 Urgent Care in Guilderland; call 518-867-8040; or

— Drive-through testing at the Rite-Aid pharmacy in Colonie; go online to www.riteaid.com.

McCoy stressed that anyone can get tested now; originally, only those with symptoms or health-care workers were tested. “Go get tested,” he urged. “It takes three minutes.”

He also reiterated, “If you don’t have health care, we pay for it.”

Gatherings

Clamping down on gatherings was a theme throughout the week at both the state and county levels.

Last Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that all restaurants and bars in New York State will be subject to new requirements that they must only serve alcohol to people who are ordering and eating food and that all service at bar tops must only be for seated patrons who are socially distanced by six feet or separated by physical barriers.

Cuomo again called on local government officials, as he did several times throughout the week, to enforce compliance. “If we do not enforce compliance, the virus will spread,” he said.

Cuomo went on, “I understand enforcement is not politically popular. I’ll tell you what’s less politically popular: If we have to close down a region because compliance wasn’t done.”

In New York City a “three strikes and you’re closed” policy is being enacted, meaning a business that  has three violations will be shut down, Cuomo said. “It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s selfish. It’s unacceptable,” said Cuomo of the failure to comply.

New York City, once the nation’s epicenter of the pandemic, entered the fourth and final phase of reopening on Monday, joining the state’s other nine regions.

Cuomo, on Monday, said that restaurants and bars would be closed down if patrons didn’t socially distance and wear masks.

“To the partiers who come out, I understand the frustration. I understand you’ve been inside for a long time. I understand you’re young. I understand people like to socialize …,” said Cuomo. “Don’t be stupid. What they’re doing is stupid and reckless for themselves and for other people. And it has to stop.”

On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that four downstate establishments have been shut down for violations. He said, “The restaurants and bars that encourage young people to congregate threaten to bring us back to the hell we experienced three months ago — yesterday, the State Liquor Authority suspended the liquor licenses of four bars and restaurants. This is a dangerous situation, and the bad operators will make it worse for themselves and everyone ….”

Since the onset of COVID, the liquor authority has brought 410 charges against establishments for violating executive orders and suspended 27 licenses for violations.

Despite the governor’s call for local enforcement, McCoy said on Tuesday, “The last thing we want to do is enforcing fines on businesses that are struggling.”

On Wednesday, McCoy said, “We’ve gotten over 1,000 complaints,” many of them minor, about mask-wearing. He also reiterated his view that penalizing businesses that are already struggling is not the answer. “We’re dealing with a health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time,” said McCoy.

Other states

Although Albany County has seen a recent uptick in new COVID-19 cases, the state as a whole continues to have declining numbers. 

On Wednesday morning, the state reported on 67,659 test results with 705, or 1.04 percent positive. The Capital Region, at 1.30 percent, had the highest rate in the state. The lowest continues to be the North Country at .50 percent.

“We expected the infection rate to go up after reopened,” said Cuomo on Wednesday, noting that all of New York is now in Phase 4. “We thought we could control it but we thought it would go up. Actually, it hasn’t even gone up; it’s gone down.”

With so many other states having high rates of infection, New York has done two things: Offered aid to hot spots, and required travelers from states with high rates to quarantine for 14 days on arrival in New York.

“We have offered our assistance to localities across the nation, anything we can do to help,” said Cuomo on Wednesday. “First of all, because everybody was there for us when we needed help, and I said that we would repay that, and we were grateful for it.

“Also, practically, if we don’t get the infection rate down in the rest of the country then we can anticipate that this is going to be on the upswing in New York sooner or later, and the people in New York paid too high a price for what we’ve accomplished to see it go backwards.”

Last Thursday, Cuomo announced that New York State has established two church testing sites in COVID-19 hotspots in Houston, Texas. On July 13, he announced the state was sending testing and contract-tracing teams to Atlanta, Georgia. On July 10, he said New York would send the COVID-19 medication Remdesivir to Florida as the state struggles with a resurgence of cases.

On Monday, Cuomo and his contingent took a one-day trip to Savannah, Georgia to meet with Mayor Van R. Johnson, a Democrat, and a Savannah health-care team to discuss best practices to fight the pandemic, including how to set up testing and contact tracing operations.

On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that 10 more states have been added to the list of states with high rates of COVID-19 infection. When people travel from those states to New York, they have to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Last week, Cuomo instituted a $2,000 fine to penalize travelers from a listed state if they don’t fill out the required form upon arrival to New York. Enforcement teams have been placed at the state’s airports, including Albany International Airport. Last Thursday, Cuomo said that travel-form compliance went up 92 percent after the fines were announced.

The quarantine applies to any person arriving from a state with a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a seven-day rolling average or a state with a 10 percent or higher positivity rate over a seven-day rolling average.

Minnesota has been removed from the list and Delaware, once removed, has been reinstated. These other states have also been added: Alaska, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Virginia and Washington.

“As infection rates increase in 41 other states, our numbers continue to steadily decline, thanks to the hard work of New Yorkers and our incremental, data-driven opening …. We must remain vigilant,” said Cuomo in making the announcement.

The list has grown from the original eight to 16, then 22, and now 30: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina,Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Newest numbers

McCoy began his Wednesday briefing with a conundrum. The state on Tuesday had listed Albany County as having had a resident dead from COVID-19. That death still can’t be verified, McCoy said.

He reviewed a history of deaths in Albany County of private nursing-home residents of which the state had been informed, as required by law, but not the county.

“It was frustrating then but we thought we worked it out with DOH,” said McCoy of the state’s Department of Health.

Last Thursday, July 16, the county had suffered its first COVID-19 death since June 24.

If Tuesday’s death is verified, that would bring the county’s COVID-19 death toll to 123.

McCoy said he does not know why the current uptick in COVID-19 cases is not resulting in the same number of hospitalizations and deaths as the apex of cases had in mid-April.

He called it the “million-dollar question,” and surmised the disease had “morphed.”

McCoy stressed how COVID-19 can have no effect on one person and be fatal for another. The vast majority of Albany County deaths have been of elderly people with underlying health conditions.

He spoke to the notion of someone who suggested putting all of her children in the same room when one was infected to get the disease behind them.

“It’s not the chicken pox, Lady. Don’t put your kids in a room and expose them to it,” said McCoy.

It’s not clear how long antibodies to the disease last or even if they prevent getting the virus again.

As of Wednesday morning, Albany County has 2,139 confirmed cases of COVID-19, an increase of 14 since Tuesday.

In addition to four new cases linked to the Hudson Avenue party, two were health-care workers, four were travelers, and one had close contact with a positive case.

For the remaining three new cases, McCoy said, “We don’t have a clear path of what exposure they had.”

There are now 664 county residents under quarantine, up from 578. The five-day average for new daily positive cases is now up to 12 from 11.8 yesterday.

Currently, Albany County has 84 active cases, up from 77 yesterday. So far, 6,614 individuals have completed quarantine, while 2,055 of them have tested positive and recovered, which is up 7.

Three Albany county residents are hospitalized with the disease with one in an intensive-care unit. The hospitalization rate for Albany County remains at 0.14 percent.

“We’re getting more cases,” said McCoy on Wednesday. “It’s going the other way.”