It’s been a hellish half-year in Ulster County primarily due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the experts in public health don’t know whether the upcoming winter will be worse. Flare-ups of pocket of confirmed cases — positive findings — for the virus in various localities remind us that this implacable foe shows no signs of weakening.
Covid-19 cases pop up all over the place, sometimes where we least expect them. Tracking and quarantining follow. And it’s on to the next day’s cases: college campuses, migrant-worker camps, graduation parties, nursing homes, state prisons, manufacturing facilities, sports events, family gatherings. The seeming lack of a clear pattern in the location of confirmed cases is frustrating. How can we learn what we need to know if we don’t even know what to do, what’s best practice, and where it is succeeding?
So far, increased diligence in testing, tracking and treating has kept the spread of the disease in check locally, but lessons from other regions of the country – and of the world — have shown us that our situation remains precarious. Places that have been in a situation like ours have experienced outbreaks that have gotten out of control.
There are encouraging trends. Treatment is improving. Vaccines are in development. We are expecting fewer miracles.
When the state and Ulster County first started gathering statistics in early March, it was obvious at that time that most of the positive findings were concentrated in the southern parts of the county, those towns from which there was a lot of commuting to and from Orange and Dutchess counties. As the months progressed, the Kingston Corridor, with its more dense population and its high proportion of service jobs and nursing homes, caught up with Southern Ulster in terms of Covid-19 cases.
At one time, Orange in particular had a rapidly growing number of confirmed cases. In the Hudson Valley, Rockland County has become the clear leader in number of positive findings adjusted for population since then.
If you’ll remember, the early period was when the pandemic scare was reaching new heights in New York City. Local people were easily convinced that fleeing city folks were sure to contaminate them, perhaps more from carelessness than intent..
With its high proportion of young people from the great metropolitan area to Ulster County’s south, New Paltz was a local focal point in the early days of the pandemic. The number of positive findings in New Paltz jumped from 15 on March 28 to 71 on April 28. That total increased only slowly until the recent discovery this month of a campus cluster among newly returned collage students. The number of confirmed cases in the town is now 113. Of Ulster County’s 95 recorded Covid-19 fatalities in the past six months, New Paltz has six.
Ulster County had a total population of 182,493 in the 2010 decennial census. As of this Monday, the county had 2260 recorded positive cases, 199 of which were out-of-county and 24 for whom residence was unknown. That left 2037 confirmed cases for whom local location was known, or 1.116 positive findings per hundred people countywide.
Compared with other localities in Ulster County, is New Paltz’s a lot of cases, with the many interrupted lives, continuing health problems and family distress the pandemic causes? With its 113 positive cases in a population of 14,003, New Paltz has a ratio of .807 positive findings per hundred of population, well below the county average.
To study the geography more closely, we divided the county into three sections of roughly equal population (Southern Ulster, the Kingston Corridor, and the Remainder of the County). How many confirmed cases were there in each, and when did they occur?
It turned out that there was a distinct pattern of incidence in each of the three zones. In the early days of the pandemic, Southern Ulster had the largest numbers among the zones, and the Kingston Corridor was in an intermediate position between its southern and mostly western neighbors. The number of positive findings in the Kingston zone increased faster than those in the Southern section, however, and finally in August overtook them. In terms of the number of positive findings, the two zones have remained neck-and-neck since then.
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed positives in the Remainder zone have in the past six months remained at roughly half the incidence in the other two sections. As of September 21, the Southern Ulster zone had 812 positive findings, the Kingston Corridor 811, and the Remainder only 414.
The localities could be aggregated differently, of course. To provide a more complete picture, we included on the map the ratio of confirmed cases to population for each municipality within Ulster County. Some jurisdictions have higher proportions of people more exposed to infection because they have service jobs. In others, many people are second-homers or Airbnb visitors less exposed to Covid-19 transmission. And of course every population combines folks who range from the risk-averse to the risk-seeking.
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