Syracuse, N.Y. -- Two large Western New York counties have imposed new emergency orders in the past 10 days to slow the spread of Covid-19, but Onondaga County has so far resisted.
That’s because Onondaga County’s rates of hospitalizations and new infections remain well below those of Erie and Monroe counties, said County Executive Ryan McMahon, and he is reluctant to issue new mandates on a pandemic-weary public unless absolutely necessary.
Central New York’s rate of Covid-19 hospitalizations is about a third less than those in Erie and Monroe counties, according to state data.
McMahon said he said he spoke Tuesday with top officials at all three Syracuse hospitals, who assured him they had adequate bed space now to care for patients. He noted that the number of newly confirmed Covid-19 cases here fell over the past week.
But that could change, he said.
“If there’s a sustained period where it looks like transmission rates are very, very high and that it’s going to eventually impact hospitals, then we have to look at potential mitigation,” he said.
Erie County last week required everybody over the age of 2 to wear masks in public. On Tuesday, Monroe County Executive Adam Bello issued a state of emergency, ramping up testing, requiring masks in county buildings and urging private businesses and other governments to also impose mask mandates.
Bello said increasing numbers of Covid-19 patients in area hospitals drove his decision.
“The trigger for this state of emergency is not the number of new COVID infections, but rather the dramatic rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations, the increasing number of occupied ICU beds and the resulting impact on the ability of our hospitals to treat non-COVID-related acute care and emergency cases,” Bello said in a statement.
According to state Department of Health Data, the Finger Lakes region, which includes Monroe County, has a Covid-19 hospitalization rate of 34.7 patients per 100,000 population. That’s more than double the rate at the end of October.
Western New York, which includes Erie County, has a rate of nearly 34 hospitalized Covid-19 patients per 100,000.
The rate in Central New York, which includes Onondaga County, is 22 per 100,000. The other Central New York counties are Cayuga, Cortland, Madison and Oswego.
In Onondaga County alone, the number of Covid-19 patients in the hospital rose sharply in November, from an average of 91 the first week of the month to 125 in the last week. In the last five days of the month, however, hospitalizations were lower than they were in the same period of 2020.
Onondaga County remains under the original state of emergency declared at the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020. This summer, McMahon imposed mask requirements on daycares and senior living centers, and those restrictions remain in effect.
McMahon said last week he would not impose any new Covid-19 orders until the county was seeing 70 new cases each day per 100,000 population, or about 334 cases a day. The daily average for the past seven days is about 187 cases.
Onondaga County’s current daily rate is 41 new cases per 100,000, according to state data. Monroe’s is nearly 51, and Erie County’s is 64 per 100,000.
McMahon said new mandates would also kick in if it appeared hospitals were in danger of being overwhelmed. He said he discussed with hospital officials what that threshold might be, but said it hasn’t been determined yet. The first, and so far only, step McMahon said he would take is to impose mask-or-test policies for large indoor gathering.
He said the number of new cases are an indicator of hospitalizations about three weeks later, McMahon said. Cases over the past week fell 20% from the previous week.
That’s not a perfect comparison, however, because the past week included the Thanksgiving holiday. The county did confirm fewer cases during the past week than the same week the year before, the first time that has happened in months.
In the seven days ending Monday, the county confirmed 1,331 new cases. For the same time period in 2020, which also included Thanksgiving, there were 1,451 new cases.