Coronavirus in N.Y.: Second Case Sets Off Search for Others Exposed

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Update Time : Wednesday, March 4, 2020
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The public health authorities descended on a hospital, telling some nurses and doctors they would need to be quarantined. They ordered a synagogue to halt all services, and told attendants at a recent bat mitzvah to stay at home for the rest of the week.

Disease detectives were monitoring lawyers at a small midtown law firm for signs of illness, and scrutinizing the risk of contagion at a university.

The discovery of a second case of the new coronavirus in New York on Tuesday — a man of about 50 who lives in Westchester County, just north of New York City — quickly touched off an intense search by health investigators across the region to determine whether he had infected others, and who might have infected him.

The inquiry stretched from a hospital in Bronxville, N.Y., to a synagogue in nearby New Rochelle, to a law firm and a college campus in Manhattan and to Florida, where the man had visited weeks ago.

These precautions provided one of the first glimpses in New York of the kind of comprehensive efforts that have been mounted to stem the spread of the coronavirus around the world — epidemiological detective work that was first conducted in China, where the disease seemed to arise.

Now, it is the reality officials across the United States will face as the epidemic spreads, including in Washington State, where the virus has killed several residents of a nursing home.

What these disease detectives find could well be unnerving, as the scope of the illness’s spread becomes clear.

“I think we have to assume this contagion will grow,” George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

On Sunday, the authorities announced the first confirmed case of the new coronavirus in New York: a health care worker who had been infected in Iran, where the illness is raging, and began exhibiting symptoms after returning home. But the health care worker had kept herself largely isolated, and the authorities expressed confidence they had the situation under control.

But the case announced on Tuesday was far more worrisome.

The authorities have little inkling of how the man, a lawyer who lives in New Rochelle but works in Manhattan, had been infected. He had traveled to Miami in February and regularly visited Israel, but had not been to any areas with widespread transmission.

Public health authorities were only beginning to tally the number of people he might have exposed to the illness.

The man became ill on Feb. 22 and was admitted to a hospital in Westchester on Feb. 27., according to Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, the deputy commissioner for disease control at New York City’s Department of Health.

The original diagnosis was pneumonia, according to a person who knows the patient well and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After testing negative for the flu, he was removed from isolation, the person said. Several people visited him.

But his health deteriorated, and after several days he was transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. “At that point, it was a bit of a medical mystery,” the person said.

He was tested for the new coronavirus on Monday and health authorities announced the result Tuesday morning. Officials did not specify why the man had not been tested for the virus earlier. He was in “severe condition” as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Health Department.