Monday, November 09, 2020
New York’s block-by-block lockdowns are curbing covid-19. But residents aren’t pleased.
New York officials have embraced a new strategy to quash coronavirus spikes — shutting down schools and businesses with almost surgical precision, using block-by-block infection data while also boosting testing and contact tracing in those communities.
The idea is to stamp out virus sparks quickly, before adjacent areas catch flame, while avoiding the devastation of citywide lockdowns.
The unique effort, supported by a massive state and city testing apparatus, has been largely successful so far, earning the admiration of epidemiologists. But neither state nor city officials are taking a victory lap as they watch cases surge to their highest-ever levels in sister cities throughout the United States and Europe — and with painful memories of the spring outbreak when virus deaths exceeded 700 per day.
"We're all heartened at the fact that this is working," said Jackie Bray, deputy executive director of NYC Test & Trace Corps, an initiative the city launched in June that employs 4,000 tracers with a budget of about $1 billion in city and federal funds. "We're clear-eyed at how hard this is going to be to sustain through the fall and the winter."
The policy has allowed the city to avoid returning to blanket closures, unlike the European cities that also suffered immensely in the pandemic's first wave. France placed a 9 p.m. curfew in nine cities, including Paris. Italy tightened restrictions across its restaurants and bars.
A growing number of states and cities in the United States have also added restrictions on public activity. Massachusetts on Monday shortened hours for some businesses to encourage people to stay home at night. New York continues some statewide restrictions as well, such as requiring masks on public transit. But its data-based, hyperlocal approach differs from what others have implemented.
The policy had its origins in October when the state released a color-coded map — yellow, orange and red zones, least to most severe — which appeared as angry bull's eyes around clusters in Queens and Brooklyn, both parts of New York City, as well as suburban Rockland and Orange counties.
The map is built from the results of the nearly a million coronavirus tests New York has conducted per week, or about 0.6 percent of the state population daily, as of late October. The home address of every person with a positive test result is funneled into a health department database. Such data determines whether areas are designated red, orange or yellow zones.
"We identify the micro-cluster, that's called a red zone. We then put a buffer around it, that's called an orange zone, we then put a buffer around the orange zone which is a yellow zone," New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said at a news conference on Oct. 21, likening the spread of the virus to ripples created by a pebble dropped in a pond. "These areas are so small that people walk to a store, people walk to a restaurant and you see the viral expansion will be a series of concentric circles."
A woman reads the signs posted on the windows of a business that was shut down in Brooklyn after the community was designated part of a coronavirus red zone because of high infection rates.
The NYC Test & Trace Corps sends city workers equipped with rapid diagnostic tests into the zones and, alongside them, contact tracers. Those disease detectives conduct in-person interviews immediately after people receive results detecting coronavirus infections.
Those who test positive are asked to isolate at home for at least 10 days. If they are unable to do that — because they share their home with others and are unable to remain in a separate room, for instance — the city provides a hotel room free, said Ted Long, a physician and the executive director of the Test & Trace Corps. More than 2,500 people have isolated in hotels.
Medicine, food and other necessities can be delivered, he said, and the city mails masks and snacks each day to about 500 people in isolation at their homes.
While less draconian than the spring's citywide lockdown, the policy is unpopular among those who live and work in the targeted communities. "Small businesses feel that they are being unfairly punished," said Randy Peers, chief executive and president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. The state should be focused on individuals who violated coronavirus mandates, not the thousands of compliant businesses "caught up in this crossfire," he said.
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