New York Suburb to Declare Measles Emergency, Barring Unvaccinated Children From Public

The declaration will take effect at midnight Tuesday and expires in 30 days.

The county executive, Ed Day, is expected to discuss the details of the state of emergency in a news conference at 2 p.m.

Rockland County, which has a population of more than 300,000 people, has had 153 confirmed cases of measles since October, a county spokesman, John G. Lyon, said. Of those, 48 have come in 2019.

The emergency order is the most aggressive step taken in the state since the measles outbreak began last fall. So far, the outbreak has mostly affected ultra-Orthodox communities in Rockland County and New York City, where vaccination rates tend to be lower and anti-vaccination literature has spread, public health officials have said.

In December, Rockland County issued exclusion orders barring unvaccinated children from schools with low vaccination rates.

In New York City, health officials also issued an emergency health measure ordering that schools in certain ZIP codes bar unvaccinated students from attending classes.

Measles, an extremely contagious virus, can live for up to two hours in the airspace where an infected person breathed, coughed or sneezed.

The disease is so contagious that up to 90 percent of nonimmunized people close to an infected person will also become infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but a handful of outbreaks have occurred in recent years. Through March 21 of this year, there have been 314 confirmed measles cases in the United States, according to the CDC.

In addition to New York, there have also been measles outbreaks in Washington state, Texas, Illinois and California, the CDC said.

In January, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, also declared a state of emergency to help public health officials respond to and contain the outbreak there. His proclamation did not restrict the movement of unvaccinated individuals.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.