Western New York’s Covid-19 case count literally spiked off the charts this week, rising so high beyond the previous upper bounds of the pandemic that The Buffalo News had to revise the vertical axis on its graph tracking new cases of Covid-19.
It’s difficult to overstate how drastically the regional situation has changed in the past month. New cases, measured as a seven-day average, are up 276% since Oct. 9 and are twice as high now than at Western New York’s previous high in April.
Hospitalizations, meanwhile, have almost doubled from a seven-day average of 53 a month ago to 105 on Monday. The number of patients in intensive care units, which hovered below 10 for much of the summer, increased to 23 on Monday.
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If there is one silver lining, it may be that deaths – while up moderately, especially in comparison to the summer – are not rising at the same rate. That phenomenon, which researchers and public health officials have observed around the world, is believed to spring largely from improvements in Covid-19 therapies.
Read the full story from News Staff Reporter Sandra Tan
These insights are part of an ongoing Buffalo News project to track and analyze critical Covid-19 metrics in almost-real time. 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 now show heightened caseloads across the region, though most of the new cases have been concentrated in Erie and Niagara counties. In Erie County, which accounted for three-quarters of all new cases over the past week, the hardest-hit ZIP codes for the week ending Sunday included 14075 in Hamburg, 14221 in Williamsville and 14215 in Cheektowaga and Buffalo’s East Side, according to data posted online by the Erie County Department of Health and archived by Buffalo resident Eric Oliverio.
All three areas fall within the “yellow zone” the state Department of Health declared on Monday, a precautionary designation that limits mass gatherings and restaurant dining and sets new testing requirements for in-person learning.
Meanwhile, the seven-day positive rate in Erie County – the average share of all tests that come back positive, which can foreshadow future hospitalizations and deaths – rose to 4.8% on Monday, fast-approaching the 5% safety threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. Western New York as a whole boasted only a slightly lower positive rate, at 4.2% – still the highest in New York.
But Western New York is not alone in its fall surge, a development officials have warned about for months. Every state in the country is seeing more cases now than it did two weeks ago, according to data analyzed by Covid Exit Strategy, a national coalition of public health and crisis response experts, and new daily cases are up 64% from two week ago, according to The New York Times’ national coronavirus project.
As in Western New York, deaths across the country have generally not risen in lockstep with new case numbers. While there are several possible reasons for that discrepancy, depending on local demographics and testing strategies, two separate, peer-reviewed studies published in late October found that mortality rates have dropped for all hospitalized Covid-19 patients, including the elderly, though mortality remains high compared to the flu and other infectious diseases.
Since Western New York recorded its first case of Covid-19 on March 14, more than 20,000 people have tested positive and 883 have died.
