ALBANY COUNTY — This week — Albany County’s 92nd of coping with the coronavirus — marked the one-year anniversary of vaccines being available to fight COVID-19.

A Commonwealth Fund report released Tuesday said, without the vaccine, there would have been about 1.1 million additional COVID-19 deaths and more than 10.3 million additional COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States by November 2021.

But Albany County, like the rest of the Northeast, is now in the midst of a surge following Thanksgiving gatherings and cold weather that drives people indoors. Nationwide, more than 120,000 COVID-19 cases are being reported each day.

Last Friday, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a statewide mask mandate, which went into effect on Monday. All New Yorkers, regardless of vaccination status, must wear masks indoors in public unless they are at a venue or business that has implemented a vaccine requirement.

“The objective is, as I’ve said all along, ... twofold: Protect the health of New Yorkers and protect the health of our economy,” Hochul said at a press conference in New York City on Tuesday.

She stressed that the mask mandate is “a short-term measure,” to get past the holiday surge, and will be re-evaluated on Jan. 15.

Statewide, Hochul said on Tuesday, the average number of cases has gone up 58 percent since Thanksgiving. “That was the trigger,” she said, for implementing the mandate.

She also said, “Hospitalizations are up 70 percent since Thanksgiving” — which she termed “an alarming jump statewide.”

Vaccination, Hochul said on Tuesday, should have been a turning point in the war against COVID-19. “We still have 30 percent of New Yorkers who are not fully vaccinated … This is a crisis of the unvaccinated. Did not have to be — totally preventable.”

Albany County has seen a surge of infection and Albany Medical Center Hospital met the governor’s threshold of not having more than 10 percent of its staffed hospital beds available, meaning that elective procedures are on hold at Albany Med until at least mid-January.

Last Tuesday, Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy joined with Schenectady County’s manager in announcing mask advisories. McCoy said then that he had contacted leaders in the other Capital Region counties and none of the others would agree. The advisories were not mandated and had no enforcement mechanism.

A violation of the state requirement “is subject to all civil and criminal penalties, including a maximum fine of $1,000 for each violation,” according to the governor’s office. Local health departments are being asked to enforce these requirements.

Albany County’s health department, like many others, has for two years been inundated with added work as it identifies and traces each case of COVID-19 — as of Wednesday, 36,715 cases — quarantining people who have been exposed, as well as educating the public and holding vaccine clinics.

Mary Rozak, the spokeswoman for McCoy’s office, told The Enterprise in an email on Tuesday, when asked how the health department would enforce the mask requirements, “This will largely be a complaint-driven system for enforcement, and Albany County is reactivating its complaint hotline. Once active, those visiting Albany County businesses should utilize that hotline to report any violations, which will be followed up on by county staff to determine next steps in terms of any necessary enforcement.”

Enforcement of mandates under the Cuomo administration was left to local law enforcement, Rozak said on Friday, which was a challenge. “The sheriff said, after a complaint, sometimes by the time you got there, the offending parties had put on masks or left,” Rozak recalled.

Although the county’s health department has a staff that performs enforcement duties, for example, with restaurant inspections, those are regularly scheduled, set for a predetermined time, said Rozak. “This is a whole different ballgame,” she said.

 

Reaction

Reaction against the mask mandate was swift from some Republicans.

Four in 10 Republicans remain unvaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll published Dec. 2. Consequently, according to a New York Times analysis, the COVID-19 death rate is much higher in heavily Republican counties than in Democratic counties.

GOP Assemblyman Chris Tague, who represents rural parts of Albany County along with Greene and Schoharie counties, objected on Friday to the statewide mandate, saying, “It is despicable that Gov. Hochul has decided to threaten our people and businesses with a $1,000 fine for any incidents of noncompliance. This mandate will be disastrous for our small businesses, which have had this mandate suddenly thrown into their laps during the critical holiday sales period, and will stifle our collective recovery as a state.”

Senate Republican Leader Rob Ortt issued a statement Friday evening, saying, “To be clear, today’s half-baked announcement from Governor Hochul is a complete reversal from her previous comments, and she is now attempting to mandate that local governments and businesses do the impossible.

“Like her predecessor, I believe the Governor has overstepped her authority with this order. I am reviewing options with my colleagues to rescind this authority and restore these public health decisions to local communities, where they belong.”

Speaking of holdouts against vaccination, Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin said at Hochul’s press conference last Thursday that he has seen, in his travels to “Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo — a number of our communities that are more Republican-leaning — there has been a lot of resistance as well.”

“Some of it has been politically driven,” Benjamin said. “And one of the things that we would like to try to do is to find ways to have conversations, to take the partisanship out of getting vaccinated, wearing a mask, and keeping us all safe.”

The New York Association of Convenience Stores issued a statement on Friday saying, “Experience has shown that, when our stores are thrust into the role of mask police, bad things can and do happen, including sporadic violence directed at employees just trying to do their job.

“For now, we ask the cooperation of our valued customers as we strive to implement this policy in a manner that keeps our stores accessible and our team members safe. And we hope our state leaders will reconsider the wisdom of potentially placing our essential workers in harm’s way.”

Some local Democrats favored the mandate.

“I have continually said that any kind of mask or vaccine requirement would only be truly effective if it’s done at least on a regional basis,” McCoy said in a statement on Friday, applauding Hochul’s mask mandate and noting “new daily cases of COVID spike here in Albany County, and across the Capital Region and the state.”

At her Tuesday press conference, Hochul featured small-business owners who had had success with patrons wearing masks or with requiring vaccination before entry.

“But businesses, my desire, my objective with this mask or vax mandate has been to keep you open, to keep your doors open, so you can continue to resume what you do every single day,” said Hochul. “You’re a critical part of our state’s economy. You’re an important part of our communities, you’re a place that people have their jobs.”

Vaccinations are free and widely available.

In Albany County as elsewhere, the majority of people now hospitalized with COVID-19 and dying from the virus are unvaccinated.

“Community spread requires a community-minded solution, as the Omicron variant emerges and the overwhelmingly dominant Delta variant continues to circulate,” said the state’s acting health commissioner, Mary Bassett, in a statement. “We have the tools we need to protect against the virus — and now we must ensure we use them.

“There are tools each individual can use, and there are actions we can take as government. Getting vaccinated protects you, and wearing a mask is how we will better protect each other. Both vaccination and mask-wearing are needed to slow this COVID-19 winter surge.”

 

Rules

The governor’s office outlined the following rules in making the mask-mandate announcement:

Businesses and venues that implement a proof-of-vaccination requirement can accept Excelsior Pass, Excelsior Pass Plus, SMART Health Cards issued outside of New York State, or a CDC Vaccination Card.

In accordance with the CDC’s definition of fully vaccinated, full-course vaccination is defined as 14 days past an individual’s last vaccination dose in their initial vaccine series (14 days past the second shot of a two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine; 14 days past the one-shot Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine).

The state also accepts vaccines approved by the World Health Organization for these purposes. Parents and guardians can retrieve and store an Excelsior Pass or Excelsior Pass Plus for children or minors under legal guardianship.

Businesses and venues that implement a mask requirement must ensure all patrons 2 years and older wear a mask at all times while indoors.

Unvaccinated individuals continue to be responsible for wearing masks, in accordance with federal CDC guidance. Further, the state’s masking requirements continue to be in effect for pre-K to grade 12 schools, public transit, homeless shelters, correctional facilities, nursing homes, and health care settings per CDC guidelines.

New York State and the state’s health department continue to strongly recommend mask-wearing in all public indoor settings as an added layer of protection, even when not required. Children aged 2 to 5 who remain ineligible for vaccination must wear a proper-fitting mask.

New Yorkers can retrieve their Excelsior Pass or Excelsior Pass Plus at https://epass.ny.gov/home. Businesses and venues can download the Excelsior Pass Scanner app — free for any business nationwide and available in more than 10 languages.

The state has set up an online Frequently Asked Questions resource for business owners and the general public.

It explains that masks are required in an indoor public place, defined as any indoor space that is not a private residence — that is, businesses and venues that are publicly owned or owned by a private business. This includes indoor entertainment venues, concert halls, indoor sports stadiums, recreational spaces, restaurants, office buildings, shopping centers, grocery stores, pharmacies, houses of worship, and common areas in residential buildings.

The new mask mandate is in line with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which for months has labeled New York State — including Albany County — as having a “high” rate of community transmission of COVID-19. Both a “high” rate and a “substantial” rate — the top two of four categories — are to trigger mask-wearing indoors in public.

 

Supreme Court allows vax mandate to stand

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court allowed New York State’s mandatory vaccination of health-care workers, regardless of religious objections, to stand.

The unsigned ruling provided no reasoning but included a dissent from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. The order also said that Justice Clarence Thomas “would grant the application.”

When Hochul replaced Cuomo as New York’s governor at the end of August, she instituted the statewide vaccination mandate for health-care workers after Cuomo had indicated both medical and religious exemptions would be granted. The mandate went into effect at midnight on Sept. 27.

Two different suits had been filed in New York State, challenging the order. A federal judge in Utica, David M. Hurd, had ruled in favor of the challengers while a federal judge in Brooklyn had ruled against them. 

At a Sept. 15 press briefing, Hochul said that allowing health-care workers to regularly test negative for COVID-19, rather than be vaccinated, was intentionally left out of the regulations.

“We’ll be defending this in court ….,” she said. “I’m not aware of a sanctioned religious exemption …. Everyone from the pope on down is encouraging their members to get vaccinated.”

The day after Hurd’s Oct. 12 ruling, Hochul called his decision “disappointing” and said she was working on an appeal.

“We believe it works,” she said of the mandate. “It has a dramatic effect.”

Hochul displayed quotes from what she termed “a broad representation” of religious leaders, urging people to get vaccinated.

Hochul said that vulnerable patients deserved to have confidence that those caring for them would not infect them with COVID-19. “My responsibility,” Hochul said, “has always been to protect the people of this state.”

She acknowledged the importance of personally held religious beliefs, but concluded, “We also have a public-health objective, which is overriding.”

The Sept. 13 complaint from unnamed health-care workers said they held sincere religious belief that they “cannot consent to be inoculated ... with vaccines that were tested, developed or produced with fetal cell line[s] derived from procured abortions.”

Their case was argued by lawyers from the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic law firm based in Chicago, which has fought abortion and same-sex marriage through lawsuits and also filed cases as part of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The two cases together were heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which did not block the requirement, reversing Hurd’s ruling, leading to the Supreme Court.

“We acknowledge that Plaintiffs may possibly suffer significant employment consequences if they refuse on religious grounds to be vaccinated,” wrote the unanimous panel of three judges. “It is well settled, however, that adverse employment consequences are not the type of harm that usually warrants injunctive relief because economic harm resulting from employment actions is typically compensable with money damages.”

The appeals court decided, rather, that the vaccination mandate for health-care workers was “a reasonable exercise” of the state’s power to protect public health.

Gorsuch wrote in his dissenting opinion, “Today, we do not just fail the applicants. We fail ourselves. It is among our Nation’s proudest boasts that, ‘[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in [matters of] religion.’”

 

Commissioner’s view

While the state now has dozens of confirmed cases of Omicron, the highly contagious COVID-19 variant, New York’s new health commissioner is focusing on more than just emerging strains — concerns like long-haul cases and children’s mental health.

This is the second year of children’s education being interrupted, Bassett said at last Thursday’s press conference. 

While her department is focused on vaccination and booster shots, she said, “There are other ways in which people have to be kept safe.” She has talked with the state’s education commissioner about it.

Bassett also said her department will convene researchers on long-term effects of COVID-19. Her department, she noted, has huge amounts of COVID data.

Getting hospitalized or dying of COVID, she said, are not the only bad outcomes. Having a mild infection, she said, “is not always going to end in a happy way.”

Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open released a review of 57 studies, comprising more than 250,000 survivors of COVID-19, showing more than half suffered aftereffects that were prevalent longer than six months after their exposure to the virus.

This included survivors who initially had no symptoms or mild cases as well as patients who had severe cases.

Most prevalent were lung issues, neurologic disorders, mental-health disorders, functional mobility impairments, and general and constitutional symptoms were chest imaging abnormality, followed by difficulty concentrating, generalized anxiety disorder, general functional impairments, and fatigue or muscle weakness. Other frequently reported symptoms included cardiac, dermatologic, digestive, and ear, nose, and throat disorders.

Forty-five of the studies, or 79 percent, came from high-income countries like the United States. The long-term aftereffects “occur on a scale that could overwhelm existing health care capacity, particularly in low- and middle-income countries,” the report said.

Persistent symptoms — lasting more than six weeks — have been reported in 19 percent of fully vaccinated individuals, the report said.

The report recommends “one-stop multidisciplinary clinics … to avoid multiple referrals to different specialists and encourage comprehensive care.”

Over half of the states are reporting Omicron cases as are nearly 60 countries, Bassett noted. Many more cases are undetected and the variant is spreading in the community, not just from foreign travel.

This week, CNN reported, Cornell University identified more than 900 COVID-19 cases, many of them are Omicron cases in fully vaccinated students. Hence, the university is closing its Ithaca campus.

“While I want to provide reassurance that, to date, we have not seen severe illness in any of our infected students, we do have a role to play in reducing the spread of the disease in the broader community,” wrote President Martha Pollack in a letter to the campus community.

On Wednesday, the governor’s office reported 50 confirmed cases of Omicron statewide: 27 in New York City, eight in Suffolk County, five in Nassau County, four in Oneida County, two in Tompkins County, one each in Broome, Onondaga, and Westchester counties, and one unknown.

The three important questions, Bassett said, for which answers are not yet solid are: Is Omicron more transmissible? Is it more severe? How will vaccination protect against it?

In other countries, she said, Omicron looks to be highly contagious but no more lethal. And current vaccinations appear to offer protection from severe cases and hospitalization, said Bassett.

A British preprint study released this week on vaccine effectiveness against Omicron found two doses of vaccine are “insufficient to give adequate levels of protection against infection and mild disease with the Omicron variant, although we cannot comment on protection against severe disease.”

However, the researchers found that booster doses “provide a significant increase in protection against mild disease and are likely to offer even greater levels of protection against severe disease.”

Bassett stressed that the current uptick in infections is because of the Delta variant, which she termed “overwhelmingly the dominant strain in the United States and around the world.”

“We want people to get fully vaccinated,” she said, which included getting booster shots.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer-BioNTech boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds and the CDC has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for those teens as a booster.

Currently, any adult who completed getting vaccinated with Moderna or Pfizer is eligible for a booster shot six months after the second shot. Adults who got the one-shot Johnnson & Johsnon vaccine are eligible after two months.

As people plan to gather for the holidays, Bassett urged, “Plan around the most vulnerable.” This includes the elderly and children under 5 who are not eligible for a vaccine. Everyone else should be vaccinated, said Bassett, urging, “Put them in a circle of protection.”

Bassett urged mask-wearing as well as vaccination. “Vaccination is how we protect ourselves,” she said. “Masking is how we protect each other.”

 

Arts grants

Hochul on Monday announced $45 million in grant awards through the New York State Council on the Arts. 

In June 2021, the council rolled out a grantmaking process to increase access to state funds through expanded eligibility that led to a nearly 40-percent increase in applications for fiscal year 2022 to date, according to the governor’s office.

Following a streamlined application process, the agency will continue to support those severely impacted by the ongoing effects of COVID-19 through flexible funding accommodations.

NYSCA’s Round Three grants include Support for Organizations, Support for Artists, Special Opportunities, and Recovery Grants.

In Albany County, Albany Center Galleries Inc., Albany Barn Inc., the Albany County Historical Association, and the Albany Institute of History and Art each received $49,500 in Support for Organizations funds.

The Albany County Historical Association, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and Albany Barn Inc. also each received $10,000 in Recovery Funds.

More than 60 percent of NYSCA’s fiscal year 2022 grantees have organizational budgets of $1 million or less.

“The arts have long been a critical sector in our economy, and as we continue to rebuild a stronger New York, it’s essential we do all we can to help this industry thrive once again,” said Hochul in a statement, making the announcement.

 

Albany County

This week, between Wednesday, Dec. 8, and Tuesday, Dec. 14, Albany County suffered two COVID-related deaths, bringing the county’s death toll from the virus to 457.

The latest victims were: a man in his eighties and a man in his nineties.

McCoy, in his Wednesday morning release, reported 201 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the county’s five-day average of new daily positive cases to 157.6. Albany County’s most recent seven-day average of cases per 100,000 is 47.7 and the Capital Region’s average of cases per 100,000 is 58.6.

There are now 593 active cases in Albany County, up from 544 on Tuesday. The number of county residents under quarantine increased to 1,187 from 1,107.

There were eight new hospitalizations since yesterday, and there are 66 county residents currently hospitalized with the coronavirus — a net increase of five. Nine of those hospital patients are now in intensive-care units, up from eight on Tuesday.

McCoy urged vaccination and booster shots to control the virus and reported that, of the 66 county residents currently hospitalized with COVID, 70 percent are not vaccinated, 3 percent are partially vaccinated, and 27 percent are fully vaccinated.

Between Dec. 5 and 11, he reported, a total of 1,100 new COVID-19 infections were identified in Albany County. Of those individuals, 367 were vaccinated, 325 were not and 408 either refused to respond or had not yet been interviewed at the time that these numbers were generated.

As of Tuesday, 76.5 percent of all Albany County residents have received at least the first dose of the vaccine, and 69.4 percent have been fully vaccinated. The first-dose vaccination rate for the county residents age 18 and older is 85.5 percent

“In the latest sign that COVID-19 is still a threat, we’ve returned to reporting new daily infections above 200 in Albany County, and sadly, we now have the most county residents hospitalized with the virus at one time since February 20,” said McCoy in Wednesday’s release. “Hospitalizations will likely increase in the days ahead as we continue to feel the post-Thanksgiving surge of COVID cases and head towards more holidays at the end of the month.”