As of Sunday afternoon, March 8, 2020, Tompkins County has a person under investigation (PUI) for COVID-19. The individual is currently isolated, and samples have been collected and sent to a laboratory for testing. Further updates, if available, will be provided at tomorrow's press conference.
- What: Press Conference regarding developments of COVID-19 and community preparedness and response
- When: Monday, March 9, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.
- Where: Tompkins County Health Department, Rice Conference Room (55 Brown Rd., Ithaca, NY)
- Who: Jason Molino, Tompkins County Administrator; Frank Kruppa, Tompkins County Public Health Director; Dr. Martin Stallone, CEO Cayuga Health System
Background:
The health and well-being of our community is our top priority. Tompkins County Health Department is working closely with community partners to prevent and respond to the evolving novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. As of March 1, 2020, there are confirmed cases of COVID-19 in New York State; the most updated numbers are on the NYS Department of Health website. There are currently no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Tompkins County and the risk to the community remains low.
The best ways to protect yourself and slow the spread of illness are to take everyday actions - stay home if you are sick, cover your cough and sneeze with a tissue or elbow, and wash your hands well and often.
Tompkins County Health Department (TCHD) continues to monitor and respond with guidance from NYS Department of Health (NYSDOH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public health response is focused on containment of the virus and preparation for community response.
For the past several weeks, TCHD Community Health Nurses have been monitoring individuals who are healthy and asymptomatic in quarantine. As of March 9, 12:00 p.m., 47 people in Tompkins County have been quarantined, 8 were released without symptoms following the 14 day quarantine period, and 39 are still being monitored. To date, none of those in quarantine have developed symptoms.
- Quarantine means separating a healthy person or group of healthy people who have been exposed to a contagious disease away from others.
- Quarantine occurs in a specific designated location (i.e. home) for the purpose of observing and monitoring for the development of symptoms consistent with COVID-19.
- Basic essential daily living items like food, water, and prescribed medications will be supplied to the person throughout the duration of the quarantine order.
- The person must stay quarantined in the specific designated location until the health department releases the individual. The person cannot leave the location to go to work, school, play, or other public places.
- Tompkins County Health Department nurses monitor health status for the 14-day period daily by phone asking for temperature once a day and other health questions. If a person in quarantine develops symptoms, the nurse will determine if the person should seek medical attention and will inform the individual of any precautions to protect others.
In response to a communicable disease, sick individuals are isolated from others to prevent spread of disease. The Health Department uses isolation measures routinely for communicable disease that are passed person-to-person (eg. measles, mumps, and Tuberculosis). If an individual develops symptoms while in quarantine, a community health nurse will determine if the person should seek medical attention and will inform everyone involved of any precautions to be taken.
How to Protect Yourself:
- Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
- ဟးဆှဲးတၢ်ဖီၣ်ဘၣ်နမဲာ်ချံ,နါစ့ၤဒီးကိာ်ပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ.
- အိၣ်ဆိးလၢဟံၣ်ဖဲနဆူးဆါအခါတက့ၢ်.
- ကျၢၢ်ဘၢနတၢ်ကူးမ့တမ့ၢ်တၢ်ကဆဲဃုာ်ဒီးထံးရှူတဘ့ၣ်တက့ၢ်,မ့ၢ်၀ံၤစူးကွံာ်ထံးရှူလၢတၢ်ကမှံၤအဒၢပူၤတက့ၢ်.ဖဲထံးရှူမ့ၢ်တအိၣ်အခါ,ကျၢၢ်ဘၢနတၢ်ကူးဒီးတၢ်ကဆဲဒီးနစုနၢၣ်ခံတက့ၢ်.
- သ့ကဆှီဒီးမၤသံကွံာ်တၢ်ပီးတၢ်လီဒီးတၢ်အမဲာ်ဖံးခိၣ်လၢတၢ်ဖီၣ်အီၤခဲအံၤခဲအံၤတဖၣ်ခီဖျိတၢ်သူညီနုၢ်ဟံၣ်ဃီအပီးအလီတၢ်မၤကဆှီအတၢ်ဖှံမ့တမ့ၢ်တၢ်ထွါတၢ်တဖၣ်န့ၣ်တက့ၢ်.
- ဟးဆှဲးတၢ်ဟံးစုကွၢ်မဲာ်ဒီးတၢ်ဖိးဟုလိာ်သးတဖၣ်,သူဘၣ်စုနၢၣ်ခံတၢ်ထိးလိာ်တဖၣ်လၢတၢ်သ့ၣ်တဖၣ်အံၤအလီၢ်တက့ၢ်
- သ့ကဆှီနစုတဖၣ်ခဲအံၤခဲအံၤဃုာ်ဒီးဆးပၠၣ်ဒီးထံလၢအစှၤကတၢၢ် 20 စဲးကီး,လီၤဆီဒၣ်တၢ်ဖဲလဲၤဆူတၢ်ဟးလီၢ်၀ံၤအလီၢ်ခံ,တချုးအီၣ်တၢ်ဒီးဖဲဆှံနနါစ့ၤ၀ံၤအလီၢ်ခံ,ကူးဒီးကဆဲ၀ံၤအလီၢ်ခံန့ၣ်လီၤ.
- ဖဲထံဒီးဆးပၠၣ်မ့ၢ်တအိၣ်ဘၣ်အခါ,သူဘၣ်သံးအဂာ်တၢ်ဒံးဒူးထွါစုလၢအစှၤကတၢၢ်သံးအဂာ်အိၣ် 60% တက့ၢ်. ထီဘိန့ၣ်သ့ကဆှီဘၣ်စုတဖၣ်ဃုာ်ဒီးဆးပၠၣ်ဒီးထံဖဲမ့ၢ်ထံၣ်လၢစုအိၣ်ဖျါဘၣ်အၢဘၣ်သီအခါန့ၣ်တက့ၢ်.
- For information about handwashing, see CDC's Handwashing website
As always, if you develop symptoms of illness including fever, cough, or trouble breathing, contact your healthcare provider. Call ahead to explain your symptoms and any recent travel history.
As this situation evolves, TCHD will continue to send out updates.
Stay informed. Get updated information on COVID-19 at:
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- NYS Department of Health
- World Health Organization
- Tompkins County Health Department (Tompkins County တၢ်အိၣ်ဆူၣ်အိၣ်ချ့အ၀ဲၤကျိၤ)
- Visit the CDC's Traveler's Health webpage for the latest travel health notices
- A hotline is available for New Yorkers to call for information about COVID-19: 1-888-364-3065.
The Tompkins County Health Department is your partner for a healthy community. Find us online at TompkinsCountyNY.gov/health, and follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/TompkinsPublicHealth and on Twitter at @TompkinsHealth.
