Erie County will expand its test-to-stay school program to keep students out of quarantine now that the pilot program in Grand Island is complete, and the state is making new guidance available for school districts that want to pursue it.
"We plan on expanding it in January to other school districts that are interested," County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Tuesday.
In addition, both Gov. Kathy Hochul and Poloncarz have announced that the state would provide more rapid tests to schools to move the test-to-stay program forward, as well providing them to counties to distribute to the general public.
It wasn't known how many tests the county would receive from the state, but more will be purchased locally, Poloncarz said.
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"Its success has been remarkable," said Tarja Parssinen, founder of Western New York Education Alliance. "Just think of all of those healthy students who have been needlessly quarantining."
To expand Covid testing and vaccination options, the county is:
- Making rapid molecular Covid tests, which are both fast and extremely accurate, available to all county residents on Dec. 23 and Dec. 27-30, while students are on break and Health Department employees are working. Normally, these tests are available to students only and results are more reliable than over-the-counter rapid tests available in pharmacies. Appointments can be made by calling the county's Covid-19 hotline, 716-858-2929.
- Offering new "multiplex" tests that can simultaneously test for Covid-19, RSV and the flu from a single sample, with results returned in one to three days.
- Distributing more free masks, including at future drive-thru sites, and making more vaccination clinics available through Jan. 28.
The additional at-home antigen tests are coming at a time when Erie County Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are falling here. But county officials don't expect this downward trendline to last because of holiday gatherings and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which is more contagious than all prior variants.
The number of confirmed Covid cases has fallen 20% week over week, the second week in a row that case numbers have declined after an initial post-Thanksgiving spike.
"These are great numbers for the last couple of weeks, with the decline," Poloncarz said, "but we're still afraid about what the future may bring."
Erie County's average positive test rate is 8.3%, compared with all other Western New York counties, which have seen positive rates between 10% and 12%. Poloncarz attributed this difference to Erie County's mask mandate, which has been in place for a month.
“I believe it's here,” University at Buffalo biochemist Jennifer Surtees said about Omicron in Western New York on Saturday, “and we just need to get the sequence data to back up that suspicion. We are anticipating another wave."
While the first local case involving the Omicron variant has not yet been officially detected, local officials believe the variant is already here and will soon be publicly identified. There is roughly a two-week lag in genetic testing of positive test samples to identify specific Covid variants, Poloncarz said, so the University at Buffalo is still analyzing samples from late November and early December.
Even though overall Covid-related hospitalizations aren't rising, Poloncarz expressed concern about how this may impact intensive care units, with all the ICUs in the Catholic Health system at capacity due to Covid and other illnesses, and Buffalo General Medical Center's ICU also being at capacity for the past several days. Two-thirds of Covid patients in ICU have not been fully vaccinated.
Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein praised the state for providing counties a new batch of rapid antigen tests for schools to use to diagnose potential Covid cases in school. In addition, the state will be providing counties even more of these rapid tests so that any local school districts that want to participate in the test-to-stay program after December can.
The county began distributing the state-provided rapid tests to schools this week. Rapid antigen tests are not as accurate as more advanced molecular tests like PCR tests, but communities have been increasingly relying on these tests to keep kids in school and identify sick adults who may not be willing to leave home to get tested.
Erie County lawmakers debated whether to purchase and distribute rapid at-home Covid tests, citing the cost and potential inaccuracy of the kits.
Poloncarz addressed criticism he's faced over the past week for not having the county Health Department order and distribute free, at-home rapid test kits for residents prior to Christmas and New Year's, unlike most other major cities and counties across the state.
Poloncarz said he was waiting for confirmation that all at-home antigen tests can detect the Omicron variant and not produce false negative results.
During a recent visit to the White House with other county leaders across the country, Poloncarz said he was aware that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were checking all Covid tests to confirm whether they could detect the Omicron variant and wanted to wait for those results before ordering the tests.
"We did not want to put a huge purchase order in for at-home test kits that might not be able to detect the Omicron variant," he said.
He said that information was only confirmed a few days ago.
The FDA had issued preliminary findings at the end of last month determining that all PCR and rapid antigen tests widely used in the United States "continue to work" in detecting the Omicron variant. What was less certain was whether other types of molecular Covid-19 tests would detect this variant.
The FDA much more recently identified several types of molecular tests, which are supposed to be more accurate than rapid antigen tests, that did not catch the Omicron variant. But those tests are not the types of at-home rapid tests being deployed across the state and in other communities across the country and in Canada.
