ALBANY COUNTY — The state is broadening its testing for COVID-19 at the drive-through site at the University at Albany uptown campus.

“We received word overnight,” said Albany County Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen at Friday’s press briefing. “They’re looking to cast a much broader net of people that need to be screened or tested for COVID-19.”

This will allow people who may be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms to be identified and isolated while their contacts are traced and quarantined until they are past the 14-day incubation period.

Added categories of people to be tested include health-care workers and first responders as well as anyone working in a nursing home or long-term or congregate setting, which includes parole officers, nutritionists, and psychiatrists among others. A complete list is on the county’s website.

Also included are “essential employees” who work with the public. Again, the list is long and includes, among many others, bank tellers, mail and shipping workers, faith-based workers, transit workers, and utility workers.

People who want to be tested need to make an appointment by calling 1-888-364-3065.

Broadening the test base, said Whalen, is “essential in any effort to reopen.”

Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy noted that Governor Andrew Cuomo is requiring  30 trackers, people who trace contacts once someone has tested positive for coronavirus disease 2019, for each 100,000 people in a county. 

“We’ll need roughly 90 people per month,” said McCoy.

Currently, the county’s health department has 30 trackers. If the state isn’t paying for the trackers, said McCoy, the county has to get creative.

He said he had talked to the county sheriff and others about having firefighters and people working in emergency medical services serving as trackers.

Whalen had said at Thursday’s press briefing that she had talked with her counterparts in neighboring counties. “The concept of a new normal is very nebulous … nothing about this is normal,” said Whalen

She said the public-health risk “will not be mitigated completely until we have either a large percentage of the population that is immune or a vaccine for this virus.”

Whalen went on, “This is not a switch we will flip … It will be a dial,” she said and will require careful, daily monitoring.

Of those tested for antibodies in the Capital Region, Whalen said, only 2.2 percent had antibodies.

“We don’t know yet what that means in terms of immunity,” she said. “The vast majority are susceptible. … All of us have to act as if we are susceptible,” she said, reiterating the need for hand-washing, social distancing, and wearing a mask in public.

More deaths

In the last two days, five more Albany County residents have succumbed to COVID-19.

On Thursday, McCoy announced that a man and woman, each in their seventies, and another woman in her eighties had died of the disease. On Friday, he said that two men — one in his eighties and the other in his nineties — had died.

All five of them had underlying health issues. This brings the county’s death toll from COVID-19 to 58.

One of the people who died on Thursday was a resident of Shaker Place, the county’s nursing home. Fifty residents of Shaker Place have tested positive for COVID-19, including two who have recovered. Additionally, 18 employees who have tested positive remain out of work, while nine others who had tested positive have fully recovered and returned to work. Eight Shaker Place residents have died of the disease.

As of Tuesday morning, 1,309 county residents had tested positive for COVID-19 with 1,009 people under mandatory quarantine and 15 people under precautionary quarantine.

So far, 2,979 residents have completed quarantine, with 768 of them having tested positive and recovered.

Twenty-nine county residents are hospitalized, with six in intensive-care units. The hospitalization rate for Albany County stands at 2.21 percent.