Public health in a pandemic zoom meeting with Otsego County health officials

The idea behind the discussion was to continue educating the community on the coronavirus and let people know what Otsego County is doing to help prevent it.

With otsego county health officials.

News channel 2's caitlin irla joins us live here in the studio to tell us more about what was discussed.

Caitlin, good evening.

Good evening jason, the idea behind this disssion w to educate the community on the coronavirus and let people know what otsego county is doing to help prevent it following the outbreak at suny oneonta.

The health officer for the city of oneonta spoke about how the city has been monitoring the virus.

One way is wastewater testing, which has been used for decades to look at the prevalence of viral illnesses in populations and identify outbreaks.

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None .

None "in concept, this provides us with a tool of understanding how much virus, how much infection is present in a community without having to do individual testing."

This also helps target where testing needs to be done& and that's where pool testing comes in.

"if you have a group of a 100 or 200 hundred, what the pool testing allows you to do is group a number of tests, these are specifically saliva tests looking for the virus, so maybe 10 to 25 of these polled sampled are tested at once so that allows you to sample more tests more quickly."

The turnaround time for pool testing is a couple of days.

People did submit questions during the meeting.

A few people asked how important masks have been at containing the spread of the virus in the community, following the suny oneonta outbreak.

"its been generally shown that where masks are consistently wore, the number of secondary cases goes down."

And as the pandemic stretches into the fall... there are other benefits to wearing a mask.

"we're going to have flu season and covid together, that's quiet challenging so i think wearing masks is going to be very helpful at preventing influenza spread as well."

> jason, these health officials say it's important to keep the community updated during times like this because the circumstances surrounding this pandemic are always changing.

Back to you.

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