Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Tuesday that he expects some form of Covid-19 to be around forever – but not the pandemic restrictions.
If current trends continue, he said, the county's indoor mask mandate may be lifted next month.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Tuesday that the latest county data confirms what he believed to be true last week: The latest Covid-19 surge is finally past its peak and trending downward.
"We all want to get back to what we consider normal life," Poloncarz said. "I believe Covid is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, in some form. That doesn't mean we're going to be following the same mask rules and things like that in the future."
He pointed to improved hospital capacity and lower positive test rates as signs the mask mandate's time may be numbered. New weekly cases for Covid-19 fell 47% last week, compared with the previous week, the second consecutive week of falling case numbers.
"If things continue in this trend, there's a possibility we'll be able to lift the mask requirement in February, but we're just not there yet," he said.
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The county executive offered his optimistic view as he reinforced his position that Erie County's mask mandate still applies to all public, indoor spaces, regardless of state court decisions challenging the legality of Gov. Kathy Hochul's indoor mask mandate.
On Monday, a State Supreme Court judge on Long Island struck down the state's indoor mask mandate, which the state quickly appealed. That mask mandate is distinct from Erie County's mask mandate, which was derived under a different section of law than the statewide mandate.
The Appellate Division issued a stay of the Long Island ruling Tuesday afternoon. That keeps the state's mask mandate in effect, in addition to the Erie County mandate.
Regardless of how the courts resolve the state mask mandate issue, the county's mandate remains unaffected, Poloncarz said.
Poloncarz recounted that Erie County's mask mandate was put in place in November because of cases and hospitalizations expected to rise over the holiday season amid the Delta variant, and then the Omicron variant arrived.
In recent days, new data has been shared indicating that while many more patients are testing positive for Covid-19, that doesn't mean that they are hospitalized because they have Covid-19.
In the past two weeks, 105 people have died of a Covid-19-related illness, he said. Of those, 58% were not fully vaccinated prior to infection.
He also pointed out that six county residents under the age of 40 have died of Covid-19 so far in January – the highest number in that age group for a single month since the health crisis began. Five of the six were not fully vaccinated.
As the numbers decline and more hospital beds open up, however, the county will reassess its restrictions.
"If we believe it's now safe to lift the mask mandate, we will do so," Poloncarz said. "We do not want to keep it on forever."
As the Covid-19 virus becomes "endemic," a more regular but less severe part of everyday life, the restrictions will become unnecessary, he said.
A total of 161 Erie County deaths last month were attributed to Covid-19, according to the county Health Department. That is the highest number of monthly deaths since last January, when 269 people died.
"I just ask everyone to bear with us here," Poloncarz said. "The mask mandate was not put in place to make people's lives miserable. It was to prevent our hospitals from drowning in Covid-19 patients. It worked during the Delta wave. We brought the numbers down, and then Omicron hit and we saw ridiculous numbers of new cases."
Gov. Kathy Hochul noted Tuesday that upstate infection rates remain higher than downstate levels.
At a news conference at the State Fairgrounds near Syracuse, Hochul said the trend shows that upstate is lagging behind the downstate area when it comes to decreasing cases of the virus across the state. But overall, new Covid-19 cases have fallen by 86% since Jan. 7 statewide.
Statewide hospitalizations have also fallen from 13,000 to 9,800.
"We're still dropping, thank God, from the peak we were at two weeks ago," Hochul said.
In Erie County, hospitalizations have generally been falling since the middle of last week. While county hospitals were recently at or near capacity, that capacity level has dropped to about 87%, which is better, but still high. Hospital leaders were the ones urging the county to impose a mask mandate, Poloncarz said.
The county executive declined to lay out specific benchmarks that would need to be met in order for the mask mandate to be lifted, but continued to state that hospital capacity would be a key factor.
"It's not just one thing," he said. "Everyone's looking and thinking there's a bright line test, and once we hit this particular number, that matters. If you look at the hospitalization statistics ... you will know that there are different rates of hospitalization in different hospitals."
Staff reporter Harold McNeil contributed to this story.
