On Sept. 17, the “2020 Virtual Healthy New York Summit,” took place. The aim of the summit was to examine the ways in which COVID-19 has and will affect New York State’s health care policies, innovation, and future.

 

During the three-hour summit, health care decision-makers, politicians, and policy experts examined obstacles encountered to date in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, while also discussing solutions and suggested improvements to health care policy.

 

Jon Lentz, editor-in-chief of City & State New York, opened the annual summit, emphasizing how the topic of health care policy is ever present, before introducing Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the New York State Health Commissioner.

 

Zucker outlined how New York State went from having the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the country to the lowest by implementing the world’s most extensive COVID-19 testing operation per capita, mandating the wearing of face masks, and creating a nationally replicable contact-tracing program with Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We know that each of us must keep on modifying our behaviors to stop COVID-19 infections” he said.

 

Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, who recently replaced Dr. Oxiris Barbot as the Health Commissioner of New York City, spoke next. As reported by Norwood News, Barbot left the position in August, expressing her “deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis, the [City’s] health department’s incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been.”

 

For his part, Chokshi highlighted ways in which New Yorkers can continue to interrupt transmission as we enter the colder season and spend more time indoors. He said individual proactive measures like wearing a mask and social distancing need be continued, and supplemented with community and city-level actions.

 

He added that being data-driven, not being complacent, and making sure that our COVID-19 efforts are hyper local was key. Chokshi reiterated that everyone had a responsibility to protect one another by wearing a mask and by getting the flu vaccine, adding that he hoped more New Yorkers would get vaccinated this year than ever before.

 

Zucker said that, currently, in New York State, manual contact tracers are actively contacting those who have been in contact with people who have tested positive for COVID-19.

 

Next, Dr. Michael McConnell, the clinical lead of the Mobile Health & Devices division at Google Health, gave a presentation on Apple’s COVID-19 exposure notifications, which form part of a supplemental digital contact-tracing program.

 

Exposure notifications utilize non-identifiable Bluetooth signals which show a person’s proximity to those who have COVID-19, alerting them that they have come into contact with an infected person.

 

According to an Oxford study, even a 15 percent increase in the adoption of the use of such exposure notifications, along with manual contact-tracing could reduce infections by 15 percent. “The more adoption, the even greater impact that one can have,” McConnell said.

 

During the first panel discussion, health care reporter for POLITICO New York, Amanda Eisenberg, asked about contact tracing, safety net hospitals, and what lessons were learned since the first COVID-19 wave hit.

 

Sen. Gustavo Rivera responded referencing Senate Bill S84450C, which he sponsored, and which restricts the sharing of patient information between public health agencies, police, and immigration enforcement.

 

Rivera explained that New York would not be able to enter normalcy until there was a robust contact-tracing program in place. In this context, he said the government needed to guarantee that patient information for undocumented residents would be kept completely private. “Particularly with this administration in D.C., they have a fear of sharing any of their information,” Rivera said, referring to the State’s undocumented residents.

 

The senator added that even for those who are documented, the history of police intervention in the U.S. had made people wary of sharing personal information out of fear of how it might be used.

 

Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, chairperson of the health committee at the State Assembly, spoke about HIV testing and a prior confidentiality law that had been passed to protect the privacy of people with HIV, drawing similarities between that law and the new Contact Tracing Data Privacy Bill.

 

“Certainly, in this day and age of concern about the police and immigration, people need solid legal documentation that their contact tracing information is going to be kept under lock and key,” he said.

 

Louise Cohen is chief executive officer at Primary Care Development Corporation and asked about the primary care role during the crisis, and the dramatic increase in NYC Health + Hospitals telehealth visits.

 

Cohen said there had been no messaging at the State or local level about how to engage with primary care providers during the crisis. She said she spoke to one nurse who told her that 100 percent of the adult patients she had been seeing had elevated hypertension.

 

“They couldn’t manage that elevated hypertension because it was a mass pass-through testing site,” she said. She added that such a delay in care created a second pandemic or shadow pandemic, which resulted in untreated and undiagnosed chronic diseases. Cohen urged the utilization of primary care going forward as the pandemic continues.

 

Dr. Ted Long, executive director of Test & Trace Corps at New York City Health + Hospitals, explained that they had used the pandemic to get people who never had primary care physicians enrolled at mass testing sites. “We’re able to leverage this as an opportunity to bring people into the primary care world for the rest of their lives, and we start with telehealth,” he said.

 

Rivera concluded by acknowledging that the crisis hadn’t changed the health system, and emphasized that there was an obligation on public representatives to alter it. “The reimagining of our healthcare system has to be done in a way where we have people at its center,” he said.