(WBEN) - Health officials seeking to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus in New York state focused Wednesday on a suburban community where nine people connected with a lawyer hospitalized with the disease have now tested positive. Hundreds of people were ordered to self-quarantine as the new results pushed the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state to 11.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the disease appeared to have been passed from the lawyer to his family and other people they’re close with in New Rochelle, north of New York City, in what experts call “community spread.” After his diagnosis, tests came back positive for the lawyer’s wife, two children and a neighbor, as well as one of his friends and members of that man’s family.
The Governor also also said that the Coronavirus tests administered in Buffalo have come back negative. On Tuesday, it was announced that two families in Erie County had been placed in a quarantine after returning from Italy. As many as six people in the two families had been tested after showing symptoms.
Cuomo said hundreds of people are in quarantine in connection to the latest cases. People who’ve come into contact with them will be tested and should sequester themselves in their homes, he said. They include people who worked with the lawyer and his wife at their law firm, hospital workers who treated him, the son’s college roommate, and scores of people who attended events at their synagogue in recent weeks. Two school districts also canceled classes.
“Whenever you find a case, it is about containment and doing the best you can to keep the circle as tight as possible,” Cuomo said.
The 50-year-old lawyer, who commuted by train from New Rochelle to work at a small Manhattan law firm, has an underlying respiratory illness that potentially put him in more danger from the disease, officials said. He is being treated in the intensive care unit of a Manhattan hospital.
Cuomo said the lawyer had no known travel history to countries where the outbreak of the new coronavirus has been sustained. State and city officials said the man had done some other traveling recently, including an early February trip to Miami.
The Bronx school that the 14-year-old attends will remain closed into next week. Westchester Torah Academy, where the children from the other affected family are students, is also closed. Services were canceled at the synagogue that the lawyer’s family attended. The school district in Hastings-on-Hudson said it was closing Thursday and Friday “out of an abundance of caution” because a parent had been in contact with a person under quarantine. Mount Vernon City School District said Wednesday on their website that schools will be closed until Monday so cleaning crews can disinfect buildings.
Westchester County health officials on Tuesday directed the family’s synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, to halt services immediately. Congregants who attended Feb. 22 services as well as a funeral and a bat mitzvah on Feb. 23 were directed to quarantine themselves at least through Sunday.
County officials said they will mandate quarantines for those who do not comply.
Young Israel Rabbi Reuven Fink said the lawyer is “quite ill” and asked for prayers for him and his family. He told congregants that following the quarantine order is “a sacred obligation that we all must take very seriously.”
“This is a very emotionally trying time for us all,” Fink said in a statement posted to the synagogue’s Facebook page. “When we first heard of the Coronavirus it seemed so remote. It has now come not only to our doorstep, but has pierced our lives.”
Yeshiva University's entire statement is below: