The holiday season is expected to bring bad tidings when it comes to the rapid spread of Covid-19.
In recognition, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's newly announced "winter plan" will no longer focus primarily on Covid-19 case numbers, which he and health experts agree are destined to continue climbing in the coming weeks.
Instead, the goal now becomes to keep hospital staff and bed capacity from becoming swamped by the rising numbers.
To that end, Cuomo announced Monday that all elective surgeries in Erie County must be suspended, starting this Friday.
"Erie County has the most critical hospital situation in the state," Cuomo said at his Monday briefing, noting that the Catholic Health System had already temporarily suspended elective procedures. "It's now mandatory. They must all stop elective surgery as of Friday. Let's start to free up those hospital beds."
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Erie County was the only municipality singled out Monday to have its elective surgeries discontinued, though Cuomo warned this mandate might be extended to other communities in the future.
The governor's winter plan also focuses heavily on trying to return special education, elementary and middle school students back to the classroom. Even though confirmed cases are going up, Cuomo said schools are not a major source of viral transmission.
In acknowledgement of school and government leaders' concerns about high testing hurdles for school districts, Cuomo significantly relaxed the testing requirements that schools must meet.
Despite cases of Covid-19 spiking across Erie County, the state has opened the door for schools to resume in-person instruction sooner than anticipated, at least for some students.
Instead of weekly testing requirements for between 20% and 100% of students and staff, schools in an orange zone must now meet a 20% monthly testing requirement, and schools in the red zone must meet a 30% monthly testing requirement to remain open.
County Executive Mark Poloncarz thanked the governor and his staff for listening to local concerns and making the adjustment at a time when school-related outbreaks are "few and far between."
Meanwhile, at the county level, Poloncarz announced more confirmed cases and hospitalizations, higher positive test rates and more deaths. That includes 11 people who died in hospitals Saturday, though Poloncarz said the county is still trying to determine how many of those deaths were county residents.
The county's positive test rate for Sunday rose to 9.2%, with a seven-day average of 7.3%, Poloncarz said.
The state's rates for Sunday's testing included an overall statewide positive test rate of 4.57%. A total of 54 New Yorkers died that day.
Cuomo blamed the overall increase in Covid-19 cases on small gatherings, which he said now account for 65% of all new cases. The state is bracing for another surge in cases due to Thanksgiving Day gatherings, though that surge could be two weeks away, he said.
"This is where the spread is coming from," Cuomo said, noting that the state will be starting a public education campaign around it. "We need to communicate this to people like we communicated masks."
The winter plan
The governor's winter plan includes five strategies. Four of these strategies include making more testing available to the community, discouraging small gatherings, working to keep schools open and preparing a vaccination distribution plan.
The fifth strategy involving hospitalization capacity focuses on multiple areas:
• Identifying retired doctors and nurses who can assist with a caseload surge. Cuomo said the lack of staffing and the tiredness of existing staff was his biggest concern.
• Balancing the number of patients across hospitals within the same network so no one hospital is overwhelmed. Hospital systems that don't do this may face a "malpractice" finding by state investigators, he said, if one hospital does become swamped.
• Prepare to staff emergency field hospitals, which in the case of Western New York would be the Buffalo-Niagara Convention Center. Poloncarz has said he doesn't know how such staffing could be accomplished right now.
• Confirm hospital stockpiles of protective equipment and added bed capacity.
"We're not going to live through the nightmare of overwhelmed hospitals again," Cuomo said.
Kaleida Health released a statement saying that hospitalizations are currently manageable, "but continued increases will strain our staffing levels."
New hospitalization threshold requirements for orange and red zones will affect Erie County and the rest of the state, but it's unclear how because the state is still developing these new standards.
"We don't have all the parameters yet as to when a region goes from yellow to orange, or orange to red," Poloncarz said. "I expect to get more information from New York State with regards to some of these changes to the cluster model in the next 24 hours."
Any area deemed a "red zone" would close nonessential businesses and prohibit gatherings of any kind.
Cuomo said he wants to wait a while until he gets a better sense as to what the post-Thanksgiving surge in infections looks like across the state before making more determinations about zone designations.
Both he and Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul invoked war-like language to describe the coronavirus battle. Hochul likened the winter campaign to World War II.
"Think the Battle of the Bulge," she said, "where American forces in the middle of winter were surrounded by the enemy, but fought back and won."
Erie County developments
In light of the state's relaxed testing requirements for schools, Poloncarz said Monday afternoon that the county will be assisting some "small" school districts with Covid-19 testing, though the county executive declined to elaborate on what that help entails and who will be receiving it. He said districts would be notified by the health department in the next 24 hours.
County Covid-19 hospitalization data shows that every age group from age 20 on up has seen an increase in hospitalizations over the past three weeks. As of this past week, the 65-74 age group had the highest number of people hospitalized at 80 patients.
Poloncarz also announced that West Seneca, Hamburg and Lancaster ZIP codes led Erie County in the number of new Covid-19 cases over the past week. West Seneca is the latest addition to the suburban communities showing a surge in cases.
These communities, which led in raw numbers of new cases, also had among the highest Covid-19 rates when adjusted for population, according to county Department of Health figures.
The 14224 ZIP code, which covers West Seneca, had 236 new cases for the week ending Monday. That accounts for nearly 85 new daily cases per 100,000 residents, based on a seven-day average.
Under New York state's new "microcluster strategy," orange zone hot spots would have to adhere to the following restrictions.
Niagara County
Niagara County's "yellow zone," which consists of North Tonawanda and the southern portion of Wheatfield, has an average positive test rate of 7.35% through Saturday, a jump from its Nov. 15-21 rate of 4.44%.
The state has had different parameters for areas due to population; Niagara County's current threshold for reaching a yellow zone has been 3% for 10 days, moving to orange at 4% for 10 days and red at 5% for 10 days.
State data has Niagara County's yellow zone with an average positive test rate above 4% for 10 straight days. However, the new winter plan may change if and when parts of the county may move into a different zone designation.
News staff reporter Harold McNeil contributed to this story.
