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Westchester County Executive George Latimer said Monday afternoon, July 6, that there have now been 27 COVID-19 cases tied to the Horace Greeley High School graduation in Chappaqua on Saturday, June 20.
In his latest daily COVID-19 briefing, Latimer said that of the 27 cases, most were in young adults who attended the ceremony and subsequent parties.
Of the cases, 21 were reported in Chappaqua, three in Mount Kisco, two in Bedford, and one in Pleasantville.
There have been no new cases traced back to the graduation ceremony in the past two days, Latimer noted, saying that he believes the county has “flattened out.”
Latimer, who planned to cease hosting daily COVID-19 briefings as of Monday when the Hudson Valley enters Phase 4 of reopening the economy, said that due to the uptick, he will continue to hold weekly briefings on Monday afternoons.
“With the recent uptick in cases - while not accompanied yet with an uptick in hospitalizations or fatalities - encourages me to provide at least a once-a-week update,” he said.
“We would like to leave the crisis mode we’ve been in since March, and focus on the wide range of issues at hand but we need to maintain some constant communication since we're not out of the woods yet.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the state is still in the process of doing contract tracing from those in attendance at the graduation in an attempt to keep the spread of COVID-19 as contained as possible.
“We have an elaborate tracing system, so when we find a positive case, we can trace it back, and it has proven effective,” he said. “We were able to trace back several clusters of cases, including (the) Westchester graduation, where a young man came up from Florida and attended a graduation and led to (multiple cases,” he added. “But this is good news. This means the system works.
In Westchester, 291,583 residents - nearly a third of the population - have been tested for COVID-19 with 35,084 (12 percent) testing positive. There have been 1,427 COVID-19-related deaths in Westchester since the pandemic struck in mid-March.
Statewide, 4,288,131 New Yorkers have been tested for COVID-19, most in the world per capita, according to Cuomo. There have been 397,649 positive tests for the virus, which resulted in 24,913 fatalities.
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