Polio May Have Been Spreading in New York Since April - The New York Times

provides more details about a polio case detected in New York last month, and suggests the virus has been spreading elsewhere for a year.

A wastewater sample collected in April in Orange County, N.Y., tested positive for the virus, pushing back the earliest known detection in the area.

Officials had previously announced that the virus had been found in wastewater samples dating back to May in neighboring Rockland County.

The new study provides more details from a continuing investigation into a polio case detected in New York last month, when officials announced that a young adult in Rockland County had become paralyzed from polio.

The discovery of the Rockland case prompted health experts to begin testing wastewater samples collected in the region, including those that had previously been collected for coronavirus surveillance.

Officials had previously announced that they had found the virus in 20 wastewater samples collected in Rockland and Orange counties and that all had been genetically linked to the patient sample.

Two hundred and sixty wastewater samples from Rockland and Orange Counties had been tested as of Aug.

As of July 2020, just 67 percent of Rockland County children younger than 24 months had received three doses of the polio vaccine, a figure that fell to 60 percent by this month, according to the study