Western New York’s Covid-19 numbers were worse this week, on several critical measures, than they have been at almost any other point in the pandemic.
In the past 10 days alone, Western New York’s average daily cases – the number of people who test positive for Covid-19, smoothed for outside factors such as reporting delays – climbed 76%, from 100 daily cases on Oct. 25 to 176 on Tuesday.
More than 100 Western New Yorkers have tested positive for the virus in each of the past eight days, doubling the region’s average daily case counts from just a month ago.
Meanwhile, the positive rate – the share of diagnostic tests that come back positive – rose to an average of 2.6% over the past week, after six months between roughly 1% and 1.5%.
In Erie County, the daily positive rate spiked to 5% on Tuesday, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said, exceeding any prior one-day number since the region scaled testing to its current levels. The World Health Organization recommends local jurisdictions maintain a positive rate below 5%.
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For context, the region’s numbers are far worse now than they were when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared Western New York a “hotspot” in early October, or when the state first deployed a rapid-testing “SWAT team” to the region in late August. They raise the specter of localized shutdowns under the state's new "microcluster" containment strategy, though no Erie County ZIP code yet meets those criteria.
"Do we face the chance of getting shut down like we did in March?" Poloncarz said during a Wednesday press event. "I'd say the answer's yes. Not that we want that."
These insights are part of a Buffalo News project to track and analyze critical Covid-19 metrics. 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, The News visualizes and puts into context the still-unfolding story of Covid-19 in Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties.
Those data bear out a fear that epidemiologists and public health officials had warned about for months: With colder weather, more activities and social gatherings return indoors – increasing the risks of Covid-19 transmission.
There is no single source for the new cases in Erie County, which was responsible for two-thirds of the region's cases last week, Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said. Instead, county health officials blamed a combination of out-of-state travel, spread among school-age children and young adults, and transmission within households and at social events.
In Chautauqua County, which accounted for one-tenth of new Covid-19 cases last week, officials blamed a "private event" for 21 cases, on top of a cluster at a local fire hall. Meanwhile, administrators at local schools that saw recent outbreaks have attributed them largely to off-campus transmission, including an unspecified hockey event involving students at Hamburg's St. Francis High School.
The upswing follows similar shifts across the state and the country. Every state but Vermont has seen case counts trend up over the past 14 days, according to data analyzed by Covid Exit Strategy, a national coalition of public health and crisis response experts. In New York State, new cases have trended up since late September and now average more than 2,000 per day – still a fraction of their peak in April, but more than double New York’s stable summer rates.
Nationally, there have been an average of 88,168 new cases per day over the past week, according to the New York Times’ coronavirus database, a 46% increase from two weeks earlier.
Since Western New York recorded its first case of Covid-19 on March 14, nearly 18,000 people have tested positive and 866 have died. As of Nov. 3, 92 Covid-19 patients in Western New York were hospitalized.
