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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

28 Dec, 10 tweets, 2 min read

@NYCSchools

Today’s “Stay Safe, Stay Open” plan for @NYCSchools reaffirms our dual mission to keep schools safe and prioritize in-person learning in the new year – even as we make some adjustments due to #Omicron. 🧵

What we know from our data over the school year so far is that schools remain among the safest settings in our communities. For any case identified in an NYC public school between October to December, only 1 in 120 close contacts developed COVID-19 – that’s 0.83%.

When compared to the rate outside of schools, about 1 in 7 contacts in a household develop COVID-19, or over 14%. This marked reduction in risk is the result of layered prevention measures: vaccination, testing, ventilation, distancing, and kids staying home if they’re ill.

Even if the rates were to become somewhat higher due to Omicron becoming dominant, we estimate that, in schools, about 98% of close contacts do not end up developing COVID-19.

The “Stay Safe, Stay Open” plan revolves around more quickly identifying the cases – the 2% – and ensuring they are isolating, while keeping the other 98% of kids in school. We will do this by significantly scaling up our testing while adjusting our classroom quarantine policies.

✅ We will double our surveillance testing overall and include vaccinated people in that testing.
✅ We will distribute rapid test kits at a mass scale, both around cases identified in classrooms, as well as to staff.

✅ We will encourage wide testing of students and staff ahead of the first day of school through our community sites.

Meanwhile, the Situation Room will shift from its current contact tracing protocols to supporting school leaders with these ramped-up testing efforts.

Our “disease detectives” will continue to investigate when there is evidence of widespread in-school transmission – like when there is an unusually high number of cases within a classroom or sports team.

We will continue to strengthen our prevention measures at every opportunity – from distributing high-quality masks to further improving ventilation – with a particular emphasis on vaccination, especially for 5-11-year-olds, as well as boosters for anyone 16 and older.

Remote learning is not just detrimental educationally – it also exacerbates health inequities and has worsened youth mental health. Schools nourish our children’s brains and their bodies – that’s why we are so committed to keeping them safe, and keeping them open.

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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

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28 Dec

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, @nycHealthy had to develop new ways to understand the impact of the pandemic on physical health, mental health, and social determinants of health – so we pivoted and adapted our survey tools to better fill this need: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJ…

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@nycHealthy conducts routine surveys to understand the health of NYC residents. When COVID-19 hit, we adjusted our strategies and developed new surveys that gave us actionable insights into the pandemic and NYC’s health and explicitly incorporated measures of racial inequities.

Our Community Health Survey was adapted to ask questions about COVID-19 and recruit respondents for a population-based serosurvey. This let us measure the percentage of the population who had symptoms of COVID-19 even if they did not seek care or testing.

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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

@NYCHealthCommr

16 Dec

Omicron is here in NYC and spreading quickly. We’re seeing a surge of #COVID19 cases ahead of the holidays – the 7-day average for new cases has tripled in the last month. All boroughs remain in high transmission. 🧵

In response to the increase in #COVID19 cases, I am updating my November Commissioner’s Advisory to call on New Yorkers to take additional steps to protect themselves and each other: on.nyc.gov/3dVZ2B9

✅ New Yorkers are still advised to wear face masks in all indoor public settings. Higher quality masks, like KN95s, KF94s, or N95s, offer better protection than cloth face masks.

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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

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15 Dec

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The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented interest in public health data. Early in the pandemic, we knew it was crucial to share data in useful ways. Our team recently published our strategy and approach to sharing data in @AJPH: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJ… 🧵

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When @nycHealthy began publishing COVID-19 data webpages, we wanted to do so in ways that made the data accessible and useful to everyone — policymakers, journalists, researchers and all New Yorkers. Since April 2020, our data pages have been viewed over 20 million times.

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We wanted our visualizations to be clear and easy to understand, so we used @Datawrapper to create interactive data visualizations we could easily embed into our pages. We optimized our visualizations to be accessible to people who use assistive technology to access the internet.

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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

@NYCHealthCommr

29 Nov

Update on the omicron variant: There are currently NO confirmed cases of the omicron variant in NYC. Delta remains the dominant strain – about 98% of sequenced specimens. We do anticipate detecting omicron in the coming days, based on what we know about its global spread.🧵

A lot is still unknown about omicron, because it’s so early, but studies are underway, and we will know more about the variant in the coming weeks. Here is a breakdown of what we currently know in terms of transmissibility, severity and immunity:

Transmissibility: We don’t have reliable evidence yet about omicron’s speed of spread compared to delta. But it does have similar mutations to other transmissible variants, and there are some reports from South Africa indicating potentially rapid spread.

Read 12 tweets

Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

@NYCHealthCommr

4 Oct

@nycHealthy

At @nycHealthy, our recommendations for New Yorkers are grounded in science. That’s why we have been recommending ALL New Yorkers get vaccinated against #COVID19, even if you’ve been infected before or have antibodies. 🧵

We've received several questions from people who ask why vaccination is necessary if they’ve already had COVID-19 — aren’t they protected due to “natural immunity”? The bottom line is clear: your best protection is vaccination. The evidence ⬇

Although people who have recovered from #COVID19 may have some level of protection, there are many factors that influence just how much protection this affords.

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Commissioner Dave A. Chokshi, MD

@NYCHealthCommr

1 Oct

https://twitter.com/nycHealthy/status/1443685846448758785

👇🏾 Even more evidence that #VaccinesWork — with delta circulating, it's much riskier to remain unvaccinated. The vaccines are offering significant protection against infection AND hospitalization.

Explore all of the numbers, in detail, at: nyc.gov/coviddata 🧵

https://twitter.com/nycHealthy/status/1443685846448758785

All of our key indicators are decreasing, but we still have work to do. Many of these cases, hospitalizations and deaths could be avoided with vaccination.