Ted Remsnyder reports for Columbia-Greene Media that the unmasked masses at the Columbia County Fair last month may have contributed to an uptick in COVID-19 cases locally. The Columbia County Department of Health also says an outbreak at The Grand Rehabilitation & Nursing at Barnwell in Valatie is partially to blame. “I think this is likely driven by the very contagious Omicron and BA.5 variants of the virus that have worked their way into the facility,” Columbia County Department of Health Director Jack Mabb said in a statement. “Barnwell has been moving the positive cases into a separate wing and have been dealing with this in a positive fashion.” Columbia County reported 28 new positive cases on Sept. 19, and 72 active cases, with 12 county residents hospitalized and a pair in intensive care due to COVID-related illnesses as of Sept. 16. Four of those cases are of employees having worked the department’s booth at the county fair. “There’s no real science here because we don’t know exactly where they got it, but the timing was such that it’s a pretty fair chance that some of them got exposed working the booth,” Mabb said Sept. 19. “There are some events at the fair that can be natural spreaders. There’s the firemen’s parade, where they assemble afterwards in a tent and spend a couple of hours there. Our booth is in the main fair house, which is an old, beautiful building, but it has no real modern circulation of air and there’s an awful lot of people who pass through there.” Greene County officials reported another COVID-19 death Sept. 16, an unidentified woman was in her 70s who had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine at the time of her death. There are COVID vaccination clinics at the A.B. Shaw Fire Department in Claverack on Thursdays in September from 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Read more about this story at HudsonValley360.com.