Erie County's weekly Covid-19 press briefing on Wednesday was akin to a train unloading one bad piece of information after another.
Deaths are up. Infections among school students and staff are up. Confirmed cases of Covid-19 are up – by a lot.
"Do we face the chance of getting shut down like we did in March?" Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said during a Wednesday press event. "I'd say the answer's yes. Not that we want that."
The county registered 11 Covid-19-related deaths for the past week, which is higher than normal, and six of them died in a hospital.
County Executive Mark Poloncarz and Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said it's been months since they saw so many deaths in a seven-day period, although death data tracked by The Buffalo News showed a similar number of deaths reported earlier last month, and prior to that in July.
A total of 728 people have now died.
Meanwhile, Burstein expressed serious concern about the uptick in school-related cases. She pointed out that of all the students, teachers and staff in pre-kindergarten through high school who have tested positive for Covid-19, more than a third of all positive tests came from teachers and staff.
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That's disproportionately high, she said, given that students constitute the majority of people in school buildings.
"Just in October, we had this explosion of the number of cases that we have seen in schools," Burstein said. "In September, we only saw about 10 cases in schools, and since the beginning of October, we've seen 215 cases in schools, so it's really escalated."
Buffalo News data shows that positive case numbers fall by more than a third when excluding students learning remotely, but the high percentage of teachers and staff testing positive is similar.
Overall, positive Covid-19 cases rose nearly 80% last week, compared with either of the preceding two weeks. Previously, weekly positive case numbers hovered in the 300s. But last week, the number reached 711 cases. And Tuesday's number of 167 confirmed cases sent the county's one-day positive test rate soaring to 5%.
"Not good at all," Poloncarz said.
A weekly review of ZIP codes with the highest percentages of positive cases continued to show the 14212 ZIP code leading the pack. That area encompasses Buffalo's Broadway-Fillmore district between Sycamore and Peckham Streets and includes the Village of Sloan in Cheektowaga.
This marks the second week in a row that the 14212 area had a positive test rate exceeding 6%.
Now that the state has begun targeting "microclusters" of Covid-19 outbreaks at the neighborhood and ZIP code level, Erie County has started to also track that information.
However, based on a complex state formula, Burstein said none of Erie County's top 10 ZIP codes meet the state threshold for declaring these communities as yellow, orange or red zones, where a Covid-19 outbreak warrants the potential shutdowns of schools and businesses, or other rollbacks to the state's reopening provisions. In many cases, she said, the outbreaks can be traced back to specific families, schools or events.
Burstein and Poloncarz again admonished residents to take the coronavirus seriously, practice safe social distancing and avoid unnecessary travel to thwart health expert predictions of a high infection rate during the cold weather months.
"It's going to be a difficult winter," Burstein said. "And it's up to us to try and change that course."
Poloncarz added that all the latest data flies in the face of people who deny that Covid-19 isn't a serious problem, or even a real problem at all.
"Science is based on the facts," he said. "So for those who go out there and say, 'Oh, this is all – you've heard – a plandemic.' There's no plan here. You think I really wanted to be dealing with this for nine months now? You think Dr. Burstein wanted to be dealing with this for all these months now? None of us wanted to be dealing with this."
View Poloncarz's Wednesday media briefing here:
