Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
Chronicle Managing Editor Cathy DeDe writes: We asked Ginelle Jones, Director of Warren Couunty Public Heath, about the new State-run Covid tracking and reporting system.
She said, “We are happy that people are able to get isolation and quarantine orders online to make it more convenient for our residents.”
Of self-reporting for in-home Covid tests, she said, “We have been getting 30 to 40 or so results a day, and we are happy to see that our residents have been receptive to using this system. We can’t say for sure what percentage of people are reporting, however.”
“There are tradeoffs with the new system,” Ms. Jones said. “Thankfully our community is pretty well educated about Covid-19 at this point, so they are familiar with the steps they should take to protect themselves and others….”
“From an information standpoint, we are unable to retrieve as much data for the public as we could before, particularly related to breakthrough cases and recoveries that our staff tracked.”
Ms. Jones said hospitalizations remain “the major metric” to track Covid, as “concrete data that our staff is able to monitor in real time.”
She said, “Our biggest concern has been to keep our medical providers, particularly hospitals, from getting overwhelmed by those seriously ill with Covid-19. Tracking local and regional hospitalizations to ensure that there is space for our residents to be treated if needed is vitally important.”
She said, with the state stepping in, “We are getting as much of our staff back to a normal workload as possible, offering programs in school, vaccination clinics and the other Public Health initiatives that we can pursue as denoted on our website at this time.”
She said “many” of the per diem public health assistants they hired for Covid continue at the County, “in various capacities, as we still get a lot of Covid-related phone calls and emails every day. They are helping with education, outreach and vaccination as needed.”
Ms. Jones said, “We aren’t out of this pandemic yet, and people still need to take precautions because we have high rates of community transmission around the state.
“But from an illness standpoint, we are headed toward normalcy, where this will be a disease that we will be dealing with for years to come. We know we have tools to lessen the impact thanks to vaccination and other mitigation efforts.”
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