New York Pleads for More Tests as Cases Rise

As of noon on Friday, fewer than 100 people had been tested for the coronavirus in New York City over the past month, according to the city’s Department of Health, even as concerns grew that the virus was circulating largely undetected.

State officials said on Friday that so far 33 people in the state had tested positive for the illness — the majority in New Rochelle, just north of New York City. Officials conceded there were likely far more.

“I think it’s fair to say we have no idea how many New Yorkers have been infected with this virus without knowing it,” said Mark Levine, a New York City councilman who heads the City Council’s Health Committee.

Demetre Daskalakis, a deputy commissioner in the Department of Health, said on Thursday afternoon that New York City presently only had enough supply for “around a thousand people” before running out.

The city’s letter on Friday to top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the limited number of tests was already undermining the city’s efforts, citing “slow federal action.”

The city’s deputy mayor for health and human services, Raul Perea-Henze, wrote that “New York City must receive additional testing kits as soon as they are available from the CDC.”

On Friday morning, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that the state had confirmed 11 new cases of the coronavirus, all of them linked in some way to a Westchester County man who was the second person in the state to test positive for the virus.

The new cases included one Manhattan man in his 50s with “very mild symptoms,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a radio interview Friday.

That Manhattan man’s family was being tested for the virus and disease specialists were monitoring his associates, de Blasio said. Officials have not specified the association between the new patient and the man from Westchester, who lives in New Rochelle and works as a lawyer in midtown Manhattan.

With the new test results, New York state now has 33 confirmed cases of coronavirus, the vast majority of them linked to the cluster in Westchester County. Only five of those infected with the virus have been hospitalized, Cuomo said on Friday. All of their conditions have been improving.

About 4,000 people in the state have been asked to isolate themselves as a precaution, Cuomo said.

Forty-four people were placed under mandatory quarantine, including 33 people in Westchester County, nine in New York City, one in Nassau County on Long Island and one in Erie County upstate. Those people were supposed to receive a random, daily check-in from health officials to ensure they were complying.

As of Friday, the coronavirus outbreak has sickened more than 100,000 people across the world in at least 83 countries, and at least 3,000 people have died.

In the United States, more than 230 cases of the virus have been confirmed, and 14 people have died, according to a New York Times database.

Of the cases in New York state, 29 are believed to be linked to the Westchester County lawyer or a synagogue he attends. On Thursday night, Rabbi Reuven Fink of the synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, announced in an email to his congregation that he had also tested positive for the virus.

Public health officials had ordered the synagogue to halt services after learning that the Westchester man had attended services there last month. They also asked congregants who attended services, a bar mitzvah or a funeral there to isolate themselves.

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“The lesson to me on New Rochelle is how you can, in a gathering, a number of people can get affected, just like the flu,” Cuomo said.

Fink also teaches two classes at Yeshiva University, and his students there had been asked to isolate themselves, the school’s president said in a statement on Friday morning.

Noam Bramson, the mayor of New Rochelle, a city of around 80,000 people just north of New York City, said that he expected more cases would be reported there.

“It’s a moving target,” he said.

Fink was in self-quarantine before testing positive for the virus, he said in his email to synagogue members, adding that he was “doing reasonably well.”

So far, two people in New Jersey, both from suburban Bergen County, have tested positive for the coronavirus: a woman in her 30s and a 32-year-old man with an apartment in Fort Lee who also lives and works in New York City. Both were in stable condition, officials said.

On Friday, the New Jersey Department of Education ordered all school districts to develop a plan to teach students at home in the event that schools had to be closed for an extended number of days because of the outbreak.

Late Thursday, the principal of the Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, also in Bergen County, told parents and faculty members via email that 28 students were under self-quarantine for possible exposure to the virus.

The principal, Rabbi Eli Ciner, said in the email that the students in question had attended the bat mitzvah or services at Young Israel of New Rochelle.

One of the students had begun to show symptoms of the virus and was being tested, Ciner said. He also said the school would be closed until Tuesday so its building could be thoroughly cleaned.

Fink teaches his two Yeshiva University classes to undergraduates at the school’s campus in Washington Heights in Manhattan, according to the statement from the university’s president, Ari Berman.

The Westchester lawyer’s son, who tested positive for the virus, is also a student at Yeshiva, and is now in quarantine at home with his family. The school had previously canceled classes until March 10 as a precaution.

In a later statement Friday, Berman said Yeshiva University had learned that Fink was not showing symptoms of the virus but that the school contacted the rabbi’s students and recommended they speak to their doctors.

A group of people who had come in contact with the Westchester man and later attended the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington this week have also been asked by health officials to self-quarantine.

More than 2,770 people in New York City are currently in home isolation, according to the City Department of Health, which said it was monitoring the cases.

Most of the people in isolation are in self-quarantine and recently returned from the five countries where the outbreak has been most severe: China, Italy, Iran, South Korea and Japan. At least two New York City residents, a health care worker who had tested positive after visiting Iran and her husband, who tested negative, are under mandatory quarantine in their Manhattan home.

Two other New York City patients, a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s, were hospitalized after testing positive for the virus, officials said Thursday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .