Nearly A Half Million Long Islanders May Have Had Coronavirus, Study Finds

Sixteen percent of Long Islanders — more than 450,000 residents of Nassau and Suffolk counties — may have contracted and recovered from coronavirus in the past month, a New York State study found.

The state Department of Health made the findings after recently testing for COVID-19 antibodies in people at a grocery store in Nassau and other locations statewide, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday.

”This basically quantifies what we’ve been seeing anecdotally and what we have known, but it puts numbers to it,” the governor said.

The state did 3,000 surveys in about 40 localities across the state. The survey found 14 percent of 19 million New Yorkers statewide appear to have recovered from coronavirus. The highest concentrations were 21 percent of those tested in New York City, followed by nearly 17 percent on LI, 11 percent in Westchester and Rockland, and four percent upstate.

”Long Island, 16.7, so it’s not that far behind New York City and it is significantly worse than Westchester, Rockland,” Cuomo said. “We’ve been talking about Westchester, Rockland and Nassau, Suffolk basically as one. But there is a variation with the Long Island numbers.”

The statistics are significantly higher than the confirmed number of coronavirus cases, which account for about 2 percent of the population. 

As of Thursday, there were 61,691 confirmed COVID-19 cases on LI —32,124 in Nassau and 29,567 in Suffolk. There were 263,460 statewide, 867,459 nationwide, and 2.7 million worldwide.

COVID-19 fatalities rose to 2,430 on LI — 1,471 in Nassau and 959 in Suffolk — 15,740 statewide, 49,804 nationwide, and 190,549 worldwide.

But Cuomo noted that the number of coronavirus deaths in New York only includes hospital and nursing home deaths but home deaths have not yet been added statewide.