Western New York set or approached new highs across several Covid-19 metrics in the first week of January, an abrupt and worrying end to what had looked like the beginning of a reprieve for the five-county region.
More than 840 people tested positive each day, on average, in the week ending Monday. Hospitalizations rebounded from a three-week low of 467 on Christmas to 546 10 days later. And on Monday, the region’s average positive test rate – the share of all Covid-19 tests that come back positive over a week-long period – spiked to 8.6%, the highest since the region rolled out widespread testing in early summer.
The renewed onslaught comes amidst growing frustration with both the vaccine rollout and protracted safety measures. A year after the novel coronavirus was first detected, and three weeks after the approval of two Covid-19 vaccines, many residents expected to now be readying for a gradual return to normal business and social activities.
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Instead, Covid-19 immunizations on both the federal and state level have lagged well behind projections. As of Monday, the federal government had allocated almost 900,000 doses to New York State, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and New York had administered less than a third of them. The CDC’s data may not be comprehensive, due to reporting lags.
These insights are part of a Buffalo News project to track and analyze critical Covid-19 metrics. The News is using data from the state and local county departments of health, as well as the state Department of Education and The New York Times’ national coronavirus database, to provide context and visuals to the still-unfolding story of Covid-19 in Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties.
Those data show that Western New York is still deep in the throes of the so-called second wave, despite recent speculation by Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz that the state might soon downgrade parts of the region to less restrictive “yellow zones” under its tiered shutdown system. New cases are up almost 10% from two weeks ago. The average positive rate has also risen by two percentage points over the same period, from 6.5% on Dec. 21 to 8.6% on Monday.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday said parts of Erie County will be subject to "yellow zone" restrictions, based on cluster-based cases of Covid-19 in the region.
All five counties have seen similar increases. Erie County, by far the largest in population, has consistently accounted for between 60% and 65% of all new cases over the past four weeks. But Niagara County has also seen its caseload grow, from roughly 150 new cases per day in the week ending Dec. 21 to 164, on average, in the week that ended Monday. Chautauqua County is also reporting an average of between 80 and 100 cases per day.
The situation is similar across New York State, which over the weekend topped more than 1 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic. Average daily cases are up 57% over the month and more than 25% over the past week, ranking the state’s per-capita spread in the last seven days the 16th-fastest in the nation, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
As of Dec. 23, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington had forecasted that new infections would trend down across the state over the next month. But that model, which has not yet been updated with more recent data, assumed both consistent social distancing over the winter holidays and a rapid deployment of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Since the beginning of 2020, more than 60,700 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Western New York, and 1,479 people have died. Almost half of those confirmed cases – and a third of those deaths – occurred since Dec. 1.
