Erie County officials say COVID hospitalization rates have stabilized for now, but are concerned about the numbers to come in the next few days. Earlier in the day, the nation's top infectious disease expert appeared during Gov. Andrew Cuomo's COVID briefing to suggest that without sincere mitigation, the state - and others - will see a dark period in mid-January.
As of a Monday afternoon COVID briefing, Erie County's positivity rate was 7.7%. On Saturday, Dec. 5, there were 470 COVID patients hospitalized throughout the five counties of the state's Western New York region, including 396 in Erie County. Among the county's patients, 76 were in intensive care units.
Poloncarz spoke about infections per 100,000 people, and ranked suburbs as continued problem spots.
"Lancaster is leading in that category, which means it's the worst of these cases that you see here, with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population," he said. "West Seneca and Hamburg are pretty high in the 80s, while Amherst, Williamsville and Clarence are fourth with new cases. They are lower with regards to population per 100,000, though in fifth place is Cheektowaga, and they had a very high population per 100,000.”
Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein, meanwhile, offered some numbers regarding COVID testing during the previous week.
"We've had the most number of cases reported than we've ever had, 4,305 cases, which gives us 7.6% of all the tests done were positive," she said. Burstein added that among the tests conducted on symptomatic individuals, 25% were yielding positive test results.
Shortly after the Monday afternoon briefing, Poloncarz tweeted numbers that had just come in for Sunday, Dec. 6.
New COVID-19 Case Report for Dec. 6: 248 new cases were confirmed by @ECDOH out of 5,704 diagnostic reports received for a daily positivity rate of 4.3%.
— Mark Poloncarz (@markpoloncarz) December 7, 2020
The 7-day positivity rate average is 7.2%.
Total cases through Dec. 6 are now 29,579. pic.twitter.com/WLnxkI0z8m
While numbers appeared to stabilize within the county and Western New York region, county and state officials are concerned for the numbers to come later in the week. That's when they believe they'll see the impact of Thanksgiving gatherings and what Cuomo has referred to as "living room spread."
Also expressing his concern for the impact of the holiday is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, who appeared remotely during Cuomo's Monday morning briefing. Fauci suggested just as health officials grasp the Thanksgiving numbers, the next round of holiday spread will only be getting started.
"The problem is, that's going to come right up to the beginning of the Christmas and Hanukkah potential surge," Fauci said. "So you have a surge upon a surge, and then before you can handle that, more people are going to travel over Christmas. They're going to have more of those family and friend gatherings that you accurately said are an issue. So if those two things happen and we don't mitigate well and we don't listen to the public health measures that we need to follow, then we could start the seeing things get really get bad in the middle of January."
Back in Erie County, Poloncarz announced that Jonathan Dandes will lead the county's COVID vaccination distribution, calling that effort one of the largest undertakings ever for the region. Dandes is best known as a longtime executive with Rich Products and the Buffalo Bisons. His other business and community involvements include chairing the board of directors for Erie County Medical Center.
Additionally, Robert Rich III of ROAR Logistics has offered assistance with local vaccination efforts.
"I think it's very important that while we are excellent in many of the things that we do, we understand that this is going to be one of the largest logistical operations this community has ever seen," Poloncarz said. "If you think about it, we want to vaccinate every person in Erie County and, for that matter, Western New York. Most of these vaccines are going to require multiple doses, two at least. And therefore, we're going to be talking about millions of doses that have to be administered across Western New York, and keeping track of those doses, and how the doses are delivered, and so on."
Poloncarz also stated that the county is fully stocked with personal protective equipment for the coming months, including more than nine million pairs of Nitrile gloves, nearly 11 million procedure masks, 2.6 million N-95 masks and hundreds of thousands of pieces of other equipment including goggles, face shields, gowns and swab testing kits.
The county is also identifying sources to provide cold storage of the COVID vaccine for several counties.
"We are going under the assumption - and conversations I've had with other county leaders indicates, as well as the state - that Erie County is going to be a focal distribution point for much of the vaccine for Western New York, especially with regards to the storage of this vaccine until such time as it can be delivered to the general public, or our partners who will be administering it to the general public," Poloncarz said.
