Chris McKenna

cmckenna@th-record.com

KIRYAS JOEL - Village leaders have closed all synagogues and other gathering places to halt the spread of coronavirus in this densely populated community, where nine cases of COVID-19 reportedly were confirmed on Wednesday.

The positive cases were announced in a widely circulated Facebook video by a local doctor, who said tests had come back positive for nine of 14 patients from Kiryas Joel. He also made an alarming projection about a rampant spread in Kiryas Joel that the Orange County health commissioner said was unsubstantiated and irresponsible for him to make.

County officials, who haven’t been disclosing the towns in which patients with COVID-19 live because of federal privacy laws, wouldn’t confirm that nine of the 68 confirmed cases in the county as of Thursday morning were from Kiryas Joel. But Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin said he was told of about 14 confirmed cases in the village during a conference call with health officials Thursday afternoon.

“We discussed ideas to strengthen even more the social distancing, testing, and prevention methods,” Szegedin said.

Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus said Thursday that he has asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to declare Kiryas Joel a containment zone, similar to what the governor had done in New Rochelle to limit exposure once that Westchester County city emerged as a hot spot.

Doing so would allow the state to concentrate resources and take further action in Kiryas Joel, such as opening a drive-up coronavirus testing site, he said.

Neuhaus said a rapid spread in Kiryas Joel “would be a major problem for us right now,” with only about 40 percent of the county’s hospital beds available.

Kiryas Joel officials had announced Wednesday night that all private schools and the one public school in the Hasidic community had now closed in compliance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statewide shutdown of schools in response to the outbreak.

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They said they also ordered the closure of all synagogues, ritual baths, prayer centers, libraries and study halls, noting that it was the first time the village had shut its religious sites since its founding 43 years ago.

“The actions taken today by our leaders, even beyond the demands of the State government, will hopefully contribute to the overall health of the community,” Szegedin said then in a statement.

He added that “far more aggressive action may be needed and is under consideration.“

Hasidic schools in and around Kiryas Joel had stayed open on Monday and Tuesday in spite of Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus' closure order, since the Hasidic schools in Rockland County and Brooklyn had not yet been made to close. Village officials had protested that only the state could issue such an order. Cuomo did so on Monday by ordering all New York schools to close for two weeks, starting on Wednesday.

The video about COVID-19 cases in Kiryas Joel was posted by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a family doctor with offices in Monroe and Monsey. Zelenko said in the recording that the 14 Kiryas Joel patients had been tested for COVID-19 two days earlier, and that the lab had just called him with the results.

“Probably by now, if not by now in the next day or two, 90 percent of the population in Kiryas Joel will have the coronavirus,” Zelenko said in the video, warning that elderly and sick residents must be watched closely.

He didn’t return calls for comment on Thursday. How he made that 90 percent projection and put the potential number of cases at 35,000 is unclear. The Census Bureau’s most recent population estimate for Kiryas Joel was 25,000 as of July 2018.

Dr. Irina Gelman, the Orange County health commissioner, said in response on Thursday that it was “highly irresponsible” for Zelenko to draw that conclusion from only 14 tests of sick people. Applying that positive rate - which is actually 64 percent - to the entire village population made no sense in mathematical or statistical terms.

Gelman confirmed that a high number of people have reported illness in Kiryas Joel, and said the village’s population density raises concern about the coronavirus spreading. But she said it was "very early to even begin to estimate” the extent of the cases.

cmkenna@th-record.com

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