COVID response: prevention done right

It is challenging to write about the pandemic because things have moved so quickly. Information is often outdated between the time it is written and printed.

As a Tompkins County legislator, I have learned that one job of the government is to prevent problems from happening. When prevention is done well, it is usually invisible. One way to look at the events of the past year is to try to see the invisible things that didn’t happen because of positive, visible actions we took.

The Tompkins County government’s response to the pandemic overall has been robust. I also know that certainly there were individuals who experienced problems with the way things have been handled. But I really feel that given the size and unprecedented nature of this situation, I am glad to live in Tompkins County.

Tompkins County established an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in March 2020. The county reassigned staff internally to help at the EOC, resulting in employees needing to cover two jobs at once, at least to some extent. The EOC’s mission is to coordinate COVID-19 information coming from New York state and to respond to short- and long-term situations in a time-sensitive manner.

The EOC has been working very closely with Cayuga Health Systems (CHS) from the very beginning. CHS set up one of the first large COVID-19 testing facilities in the state, which generally receives very high grades.

In November, as infection rates were rising, the county and CHS collaborated on opening a second testing site downtown at a temporarily vacant county building. CHS subsequently opened a third testing site in the county.

The county authorized an expenditure of $55,000 to purchase an extra testing machine for CHS to use to make sure staff could handle the large numbers of tests being done. This action had the added benefit that the machine is manufactured in Tompkins County. We hope to have this money reimbursed by the federal government.

The county authorized an expenditure of $600,000 to make sure that any Tompkins County resident who wanted to could receive a COVID-19 test for free. The hope is that a significant portion of this testing money that Tompkins County spent will be reimbursed by the federal government.

These investments in testing locally put us ahead of most areas in terms of quickly getting a testing appointment and receiving the results. This quick turnaround directly resulted in less spread of the disease. I heard about wait times of four or five days to get test results in other New York counties. Our wait time is a day or two.

Other county government actions that resulted in better service and less disease spread:

• The vaccine registry. We heard over and over about residents with no or limited internet access and how they felt left behind in getting a vaccination appointment. We instituted the registry — a waiting list — and 8,500 Tompkins County residents signed up in the first week alone. Within one month, there were 18,000 people on the list.
• Contact tracing. For each person who tests positive for COVID-19, it requires many hours of work to call all the people they have been in contact with. Our county Health Department staff were overwhelmed. We hired more staff, and our employees finally found some relief after months of overtime. I heard stories in neighboring counties of people not being informed that they had been exposed to COVID-19 for up to 10 days after the contact. Our Health Department was usually able to contact people within a day.
• Phone availability. Tompkins County contracted with the 2-1-1 phone service to allow residents to talk directly with trained people. Not everyone has internet access in our county, and some people need to speak directly to another human being to fully understand all the intricate details of testing and vaccination.
• Transportation. Tompkins Coun­ty worked with TCAT and Gadabout for those who needed transportation to get tested and vaccinated.
  
  Outreach. Tompkins County conducted public outreach campaigns including digital, print, robocalls and snail mail. Early on in the vaccination campaign, the Health Department’s website had 38,000 hits in a single day. The county public health director joked that the county website may not have that many hits in the entire previous decade.

Tompkins County can be proud of having one of the lowest infection rates, lowest deaths per capita and highest vaccination rates in New York state. These proactive steps helped to make that happen. That is what good government can do for people.
Though we can’t “see” a low death rate or a low infection rate, we can certainly recognize the “positive invisibility” that a good government can produce.

Dan Klein has been on the Tompkins County Legislature for seven years. He represents Danby, Caroline and a portion of the town of Ithaca.

The Democratic View is edited by Tompkins County Democratic Committee Communications Director Renate Ferro. Democratic residents with current topics are invited to submit them for consideration. Contact renateferroTCDC@gmail.com.