Cuomo: 74% Of COVID-19 Spread Is Household/Social Gatherings
State contact tracing data does show that roughly 74% of the recent surge of COVID-19 has come from household and social gatherings.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo released that data during a press conference on Friday, noting that the state found 46,000 data points. Of that data, 73.84% shows that private household gatherings are driving the spread.
Close behind, at 7.81% of the spread is from healthcare delivery, 2.02% comes from higher education students and 1.5% of the spread comes from education employees, among other metric points.
Among those contributing least to the spread are hair and personal care activities, which account for .14% of the spread, and gyms, which account for .06% of the spread.
Here is a breakdown of the statewide contact tracing data — where the virus is spreading.
73.84% of the spread is from household/social gatherings. pic.twitter.com/DJrQi5bVzd
— Cameron Hurst (@CameronNHurst) December 11, 2020
Christine Schuyler, county public health director, discussed a wide range of coronavirus-related topics during November’s meeting of the county Board of Health, emphasizing “family spread” as the cause of a recent surge in coronavirus cases.
“What we have seen, just from case investigations, really seems to be family spread,” Schuyler said. “We have a lot of family members spreading it amongst themselves. We got a couple weddings where it has gone through large portions of the families on both sides and friends. We’ve had Tanglewood Manor. So it really seems to be community spread; we haven’t seen spread within schools, which is really good.”
The governor also set new metrics for micro-cluster zones on Friday and that state officials will calculate the data over the weekend and announce new yellow, orange and red zones on Monday to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
“Some of the states have had a full-open, full-close… I think that’s highly destructive,” Cuomo said. “Our approach has been different. It’s been following the data and metrics.”
To enter a red zone, a region has to have its data trend toward 90% capacity in the next 21 days. An orange zone has to see a 4% positivity over the last 10 days or hit 85% hospital capacity in the next three weeks. A yellow zone threshold is reached when a region has a 3% infection rate over 10 days and the cluster is in the top 10% for hospital admissions per capita.
Chautauqua County’s infection rate over a 7-day period, as of Wednesday, was 6.2%.
See more in the weekend edition of The Post-Journal.