ALBANY COUNTY — As COVID-19 cases spike in the Midwest, Governor Andrew Cuomo joined with Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Esther Whitmer — both Democrats — to call on Congress to conduct an oversight investigation into the Republican Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“How can you not tell the American people what you knew and when you knew it?” Cuomo asked in a free-ranging press conference in New York City on Thursday.

He also announced that New York State will form an independent Clinical Advisory Task Force of leading scientists, doctors, and health experts to review every COVID-19 vaccine authorized by the federal government, and will advise New York State on the vaccine’s  safety and effectiveness in fighting the virus. 

Cuomo also established a Vaccine Distribution and Implementation Task Force to design a program to distribute a vaccine.

“The President is once again in a dispute with the FDA,” said Cuomo of the Food and Drug Administration. “FDA says they want to make the approval more rigorous, more transparent. President says they’re trying to politicize it. Why would FDA be politicizing the approval?”

Cuomo also said that 54 percent of New Yorkers say they wouldn’t take a vaccine.

“The first question is, is the vaccine safe? Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion and I wouldn’t recommend to New Yorkers based on the federal government’s opinion,” said Cuomo. “Second question is, if it is a safe vaccine, how do you implement it? Implementation is a massive undertaking.”

Cuomo went on, “The state’s going to take the lead in all of this because the federal government has shown they have been incompetent when it comes to COVID. Why don’t the American people trust the Trump administration on COVID? Because they have been proven to be incompetent. This is not a subjective political answer. It’s proven. The second answer is because they lie. Our response, this nation’s response, is the worst on the globe.”

Whitmer and Cuomo’s joint statement called for “listening to the science and facts” rather than “playing politics.”

“Last week’s revelation that the White House blocked a Department of Health and Human Services plan to utilize the U.S. Postal Service to ship five life-saving masks to every household in the country, free of charge, in April was heartbreaking,” said the governors’ statement.

It went on, “Even more dangerous, the nation learned last week that political appointees at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — over the strong objection of CDC scientists — published the indefensible guidance that said people without symptoms did not need to get tested for COVID.”

In keeping with his push for ever-more testing, Cuomo on Thursday also highlighted a state website that tracks testing at public schools throughout New York.

“Schools are congregate situations by definition. The virus travels in congregate settings, by definition,” said Cuomo. “We are seeing problems in colleges all across this nation and all across this state.”

Cuomo said public school districts will be monitored with testing data. He described the state’s strategy this way: “We have the testing. Monitor the testing in schools very carefully. If you see a problem, react quickly. That’s our strategy.”

The state’s Department of Health is hosting the School COVID Report Card website. Gareth Rhodes  noted that labs across New York are required by law to report the names, ages, and addresses of people tested for COVID-19. He said of the 93,000 test results reported on Wednesday, about 5,000 were of school-aged people, aged 5 to 17.

“You now will have that data from the labs and you will have that data from the school surveys,” said Rhodes. “It will not always match up perfectly, because sometimes when the school district reports and when the lab reports there might be a slight lag, but the goal here really is to give parents and New Yorkers full transparency.”

On Thursday evening, the Report Card for the Guilderland Central School District, for example, showed just one of the district’s seven schools with anything but zeroes. Altamont Elementary School has had two students test positive, as of Sept. 23, the website says.

Newest numbers

Statewide, 1.02 percent of Thursday’s COVID-19 test results were positive. For the Capital Region, of which Albany County is a part, that rate was 0.5 percent, tied for second-lowest in the state with the North Country.

Of the state’s 10 regions, the Mohawk Valley had the lowest rate at 0.3 percent. These regions had percentages over 1 percent: Central New York, Mid-Hudson, New York City, and Western New York.

On Thursday morning, the office of Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy reported that the county now has 2,876 confirmed cases of COVID-19, an increase of 14 since Wednesday.

Of the new cases, nine had close contact with people infected with the disease, two are healthcare workers or residents of congregate settings, and three did not have a clear source of infection at this time.

Separately, eight of the new cases are associated with the University at Albany. As of Thursday evening UAlbany has had 111 estimated positive cases since Aug. 28, according to the SUNY COVID-19 Tracker set up to monitor cases on the state’s 64 university and college campuses.

The state requires campuses that have more than 100 cases in a two-week period to move to remote teaching for two weeks.

The state is counting these cases in discrete two-week periods, rather than in rolling two-week periods, which Albany County Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen said would make more sense from both an epidemiologic and logic point of view.

For the two-week period beginning Sept. 12, the state tracker reports 64 cases so far. Since Sept. 12, McCoy’s office has announced well over 100 COVID-19 cases related to UAlbany.

Whalen said that UAlbany continues to have a “low number of cases on campus compared to overall cases.” The county’s health department is tallying the cases of students, staff, or faculty who work or live or attend classes on campus.

Currently, 884 Albany County residents are under quarantine, up from 854 on Wednesday. The five-day average for new daily positives decreased to 14.4 from 16. There are now 93 active cases in the county, up slightly from 92.

So far, 11,706 Albany County residents have completed quarantine. Of those who completed quarantine, 2,783 of them had tested positive and recovered.

For the fourth consecutive day there were no new hospitalizations, with the number of county residents currently hospitalized for COVID-19 still at eight and the hospitalization rate remaining at 0.27 percent.

The county’s COVID-19 death toll remains at 134.