Post-Christmas NY Coronavirus Spike Prompts Scrutiny

NEW YORK CITY — An expected post-holiday coronavirus spike hit New York much more quickly than officials feared.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday the next few days will tell whether a recent 2-point leap in coronavirus positivity is an illusion or not.

The state’s seven-day average positivity is 5.97 percent. But after Saturday and Sunday — the two days after Christmas — daily rate stood at 8.3 percent, Cuomo said.

“For it to go up in two days is dramatic and very, very fast,” he said during a briefing.

New York City’s positivity stands at 4.86 percent by the state’s reckoning. But the city itself uses a different method to calculate the rate, and it appears to be substantially higher.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday tweeted the city’s average rate stood at 7.24 percent.

“The end of this battle is in sight — we can't let up the fight now,” he tweeted.

Cuomo said the apparent spike could be artificially skewed because of testing patterns around the Christmas holiday. He noted the state conducted about 220,000 per day before Christmas and 124,000 after.

“So one of the theories that we're going to look at is people who are going to get a test because they were traveling because they were concerned about spreading the virus were getting tested up until Christmas,” he said. “And anyone who went and got tested post-Christmas over the weekend was a person who was showing symptoms and thought they might be positive and therefore they went for a test.”

The number of positive cases in the state didn’t go up, Cuomo said. He also noted that the number of tests at urgent care clinics, which tend to be places where symptomatic people get tested, went up during the days in question.

The state will continue to investigate, Cuomo said.