Syracuse, N.Y. — Onondaga County recorded more new Covid-19 cases today than any day since late January.
County Executive Ryan McMahon said the county received 449 positive test results, including 144 at-home tests reported by residents.
The last time the county saw this many new cases was Jan. 30, when there were 518 as the first surge of omicron was winding down. That day, 77 of the tests were at-home results.
The number of Covid-19 patients in the hospital ticked up to 54 today, the highest in 10 days. There were no new deaths, McMahon said.
For weeks, Central New York has had the highest rates of Covid in New York, sometimes as much as three times the state average. Those numbers dropped a bit on Thursday, when the county stopped reporting at-home test results to Albany.
Even so, CNY was still more than double the state average.
The state Department of Health said this week it is “closely monitoring” the rise in cases and hospitalizations in Central New York, although has not taken or proposed any new actions to the control the increase.
Experts remain unsure why numbers are still higher here than other places in New York. It could be the removal of mask mandates in schools and businesses, the waning of vaccines, the rise of the highly infectious omicron version called BA.2, or some combination.
BA.2, which can evade vaccines and reinfect people who had Covid even a couple of months ago, accounts for two-thirds of Covid-19 cases in Onondaga County.
“BA-2 is the dominant strain and certainly people with higher risk should utilize mitigation,” McMahon said today.
Transmission of the novel coronavirus is high enough that people should be wearing masks in public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today. Onondaga, Cayuga and Cortland counties are among just 17 in the nation to warrant that caution, the CDC said.
McMahon has been including at-home tests in his statements to the public since Jan. 1. Onondaga County was the only county in New York that was uploading those at-home tests to the state database used to compare counties and regions. McMahon said today the county is no longer reporting the at-home tests to the database, which is designed to serve only laboratories.
