Ramapo Coronavirus: 159 School-Age Children Test Positive

RAMAPO, NY — With 672 active cases, Rockland County is struggling with coronavirus clusters identified by Gov. Andrew Cuomo as new hot spots.

"We've had clusters in the past as we've discussed," he said at a news briefing Wednesday. "Remember we started with New Rochelle, first hot spot in the United States which came from a religious gathering and then attending a wedding and that was the first super spreader event so we're quite familiar with this. So when there's a cluster we are very aggressive on it and we're oversampling in this cluster."

As of Tuesday, 71 percent of the active cases in Rockland County — people who tested positive for the coronavirus in the past two weeks — are in Spring Valley (ZIP code 10977) and Monsey (10952), according to the county's dashboard.

Of those, 159 are school-age children, according to the state's school COVID-19 report card.

Apparently none of them attend public school: the East Ramapo district, which includes ZIP codes 10901, 10952, 10954, 10956, 10965, 10970 and 10977, reports no students or staff have tested positive.

On its website, East Ramapo describes itself as "an urban/suburban school district that serves over 37,000 students from 47 countries and various socio-economic backgrounds." Most of those students are in private yeshivas; only 9,000 attend the district's schools.

Cuomo acknowledged an overlap with large Orthodox Jewish communities in his Tuesday news briefing.

"That is a fact. This is a public health concern for their community. It is also a public health concern for surrounding communities," Cuomo said. "I have said since day 1 these rules apply to all religions ... I don't care what your political opinion is. I don't care what your religious opinion is."

The number of active cases in Rockland has been rising rapidly. The county reported 672 active cases Tuesday, up from 534 on Friday. Friday's active cases were almost double the number (272) as of Sept. 16.

Yesterday afternoon, Rockland County Executive Ed Day called that "a significant increase." It puts an emphasis on contact tracing, he pointed out during his briefing on Facebook. "You can still spread the virus without being symptomatic."

While the active cases are concentrated in Rockland's Hasidic community, there are cases in every town, he said, reminding all county residents to practice social distancing, wear masks and wash their hands.

State officials are deploying rapid testing machines to Rockland, Orange County and Brooklyn, where the coronavirus clusters recently appeared.

With the increased testing, higher numbers of positive tests are just a mathematical reality. What's more important is the positivity rate and the number of hospitalizations, Day said.

Rockland had only a 3.6 percent positivity rate Tuesday, which is lower than over the weekend, he said. There were 22 people hospitalized: 15 with confirmed and 7 with suspected cases of COVID-19 — still very much better than the height of the outbreak, when there were more than 400 people hospitalized at a time.

"Appropriate enforcement action will be taken as necessary," he said.

He took issue with Cuomo's accusation Tuesday that the reason for the clusters was that Rockland, Orange and New York City had failed to enforce compliance.

Day pointed out that summonses can only be issued by the local police, not by health department inspectors. "To be very clear the local government responsible for this type of enforcement is the town or a village, not the county," he said. The county does not have the legal authority to do anything that isn't specified in the state's executive orders.

For example, he said, Cuomo on Tuesday referenced Nassau County's police department. Rockland doesn't have a police department but a sheriff's office, and sheriff's offices have not been authorized to enforce the executive orders.

He said Ramapo town officials have told him their building department and police department have been active.

"We have met with and talked to a number of community leaders and religious leaders," Day said. "The problem they have, to be frank, is a number of outliers."

The worry is that state officials will renew its pandemic restrictions.

"We are working to avoid a shutdown," Day said. "The issue has been clearly identified. To punish our local small businesses would be an absolute atrocity of epic proportions because they are doing the right thing."

Cuomo said he spoke to the leaders of the Orthodox community Wednesday morning

"I have worked closely with the Orthodox community for many years on many unique issues," the governor said. "The Orthodox community in Orange, Rockland, Brooklyn has presented in the past unique issues in terms of housing, in terms of education. We've had community issues, especially in New York City with the surrounding community, so I've worked with them on a number of issues. I explained the situation frankly and candidly and we had a good exchange. The — I think it's fair to say that the leaders of the community understand and they're going to take action and we're going to come up with an action plan."