How a tourist destination held off the pandemic
Essex County Supervisors Chair Shaun Gillilland can smile about it now, though it is not a wide smile.
On the 23rd day of March, 2020, he penned an emphatic letter to the hundreds of thousands of hikers, vacationers and second-home owners who are driven to the mountainous and sparsely populated county each year in search of fun and relaxation.
Last year they were being driven by something else: fear of their neighbors in the crowded cities to the south that were being ravaged by disease.
Rather than stay put, urbanites would flee to the mountains, setting down the equivalent of a small city in a county where there were scant medical services or, for that matter, services of any kind. It wasn’t just that Gillilland was worried about how people would find a ventilator. He was worried about how they would find a gallon of milk.
“As a vaccine does not exist, we have no capacity to test, our hospitals are small and incapable of handling additional influx and our stores and infrastructure are incapable of providing supplies to a larger population, we are asking that you respect the integrity of our hospitals and infrastructure and not travel to Essex County from any area at this time,” Gillilland wrote then.
He may as well have ordered the Ausable River to flow back up the shoulders of Mount Marcy. Somehow, though, through a sustained public health campaign and a responsive local population, the tourism epicenter of the Adirondack Park would go on to record the lowest rate of infections of any county in the park.
This June, more than a year into the emergency, its rate of 4,242 infections per 100,000 people was second-best in the
