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A cluster of coronavirus cases has expanded in Winooski after a round of 200 tests were done at a pop-up site.
Department of Health Commissioner Mark Levine said Wednesday his department was still compiling the data, but that it appeared there were 10-20 new cases.
On Monday, the department said the cluster stood at 7 people and that city-wide testing was being offered.
“As you know, we’ve greatly expanded our testing throughout the state. And we fully expected this effort to reveal more cases,” he said.
Levine said as with all Covid-19 cases, the department was also performing contact tracing on positive tests to ensure anyone with exposure is informed.
“We will expect to find more cases,” he said. “But with contact tracing, coordination with the community, careful isolation and quarantine, this outbreak can and will be managed.”
Gov. Phil Scott said he wasn’t ready to reconsider reopening measures yet based on the Winooski outbreak. “The simple answer is we just don’t know at this point in time, we don’t know the extent of this,” he said.
“It’s my hope if this is an isolated outbreak, because we think and believe it is, then I see no reason we couldn’t announce on Friday,” Scott said. The governor is expected to announce guidelines Friday for the partial reopening of indoor restaurant dining as he “turns the spigot” on the economy.
“We don’t control the virus, the virus is controlling us,” the governor said at a press conference. “All we can do is mitigate it the best we can until there’s a vaccine in place.”
The governor said if there were “numerous” outbreaks he would get concerned that “maybe we were going to quickly.”
“But sporadic outbreaks are something that I think we have to get used to and accustomed to,” Scott said.
The news about this evolving cluster comes on the heels of heightened concerns about social distancing during recent protests across the state for racial justice after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
At the press conference on Monday, Levine said he urged protesters to follow what public health measures they could, including wearing masks and keeping a distance away from others.
“In addressing and attempting to address the great ills in our society — systemic racism, historic injustice, mistreatment by authorities, and severe health inequities — we do not want to create a greater threat to public health by accelerating the spread of Covid,” Levine said.
He reiterated the sentiment Wednesday in response to a question about protests that had more than 25 people or were not following social distancing guidelines.
“Trying to protest in a way that is Covid-responsive, if you will, is really the message I’d like to continue to get out there,” he said.
It’s too early to say whether the protests would register in the case loads across the country, he said.
“But obviously we all know that within one to two weeks of such close contact, if there were people who were in an asymptomatic state, but able to transmit the virus, we will begin to see outbreaks occur,” he said.
Levine said the state wouldn’t be able to “model for an outbreak related to a certain protest here, or protest there,” but could anticipate that those behaviors might generally lead to increased risk of an outbreak.
Anyone with a positive test is asked if they had attended a mass gathering — not just large ones like protests, but something like a restaurant — as part of tracking down their possible exposure.
He said early indicators from the state showed a relatively low risk of uncaught cases. Tests have a low positivity rate, and few people have been admitted to health care providers with Covid-like symptoms, he said.
Scott said he would continue to slowly reopen the state based on the best available data and science.
“This has been a long, long three months and for those again who are impacted by this, that are on the brink of disaster in their businesses, and still unemployed, and have had their lives turned upside down. My heart goes out to them,” he said. “But we’re doing the best we can to make sure that we’re not putting ourselves in a position that would do harm to people in this state.”
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