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Six people have died overnight from coronavirus, as Albany County has seen 61 people hospitalized – another grim record in what has already been a deadly and dangerous month, the county director said Dan McCoy at a briefing on Saturday.
Five of the six were not residing in a group home. The dead – a woman in her fifties; a woman in her sixties; a man and a woman in their sixties; and a man and woman in their 80s – bringing the number of people who have died from COVID-19 in the county to 157. The only death in the community was not from the county-owned Shaker Place nursing and rehabilitation center.
This week alone, the virus has killed nine county residents.
Rensselaer County, meanwhile, reported two deaths and 40 topical cases on Saturday evening.
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“I hope people wake up and realize that COVID-19 is here. We need to be more vigilant now than we ever have been, ”said McCoy. “We are setting records for the month of November, and I don’t like the records we are setting.”
The last time six people died in a single day from COVID-19 was May 4, McCoy said.
“I think when we look back on November and the numbers we’ve seen, we recognize that November has been a dark month,” County Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen said. “He has unfortunately positioned us very poorly for the holiday season ahead.”
The county recorded 67 new positive cases overnight, McCoy said. Of these, 15 have had close contact with an infected person and one is a health worker. Fifty-one people have not reported any clear source of infection, continuing a disturbing trend that residents may not be upfront about their recent outings, which McCoy and Whalen have repeatedly said to be irresponsible.
Whalen said the county recently worked with local hospitals to improve systems for collecting hospitalization data. Whalen said he started getting data from these improved systems this week and detected an increase in hospitalizations.
Whalen said the numbers are concerning because it means people with coronavirus “are getting sicker and sicker.”
When there are more hospitalizations, Whalen said, there is concern about “the ability of our hospitals to be able to take care of people.”
“We are seeing surge capacity impacts affecting patient care in other parts of the country,” Whalen said. “We don’t want that to happen here in Albany County.”
The 61 people hospitalized are up from the 43 reported on Friday. The previous record for hospitalizations, set on November 20, was 45.
Six patients were in the intensive care unit on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday.
Whalen also urged people to get the flu shot.
The share of people who tested positive for the coronavirus in the county over a seven-day average, which is the metric used to determine micro-cluster areas, has exceeded 3% in the past seven days, state data shows the most recent available on Saturday morning. .
Micro-cluster areas can be as small as a postal code, census tract, or neighborhood. And to determine what will be referred to as a microcluster, the state may also look at average daily cases, cases per 100,000 residents, and trends in hospital admissions.
140 new cases were confirmed overnight as of Friday – the second-highest one-day total for the county to date.
The capital region experienced its 400th coronavirus death on Friday, and more than a third of them are from Albany County.
Rensselaer County
Forty new cases have been confirmed to the Rensselaer County Health Department, officials said on Saturday.
In its Facebook post, the county said its last two deaths were residents of the Eddy Heritage House in Troy. The deaths of the 86-year-old woman and the 83-year-old woman are the 56th and 57th deaths of county residents from COVID-19 to date, officials said.
The county also announced two new cases involving workers at the county-run Van Rensselaer Manor nursing home. The two cases are the county’s 31st and 32nd cases involving VRM employees. There have been 23 cases involving residents there.
The county is also seeing an increase in the number of students, teachers, healthcare workers and residents of adult care facilities.
New York State Update
Forty-two people are believed to have died from the disease on Friday, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said on Saturday.
In other key figures, there were 3,287 hospitalizations of patients, including 654 in intensive care. The statewide positive test rate was just a shade of less than 4 percent.
Message from Cuomo for Saturday:
“We are entering a difficult period of the sustained spread of COVID-19 in this state. It’s up to you, your neighborhood, and your community to slow the spread. Our micro-cluster strategy can target very small areas with restrictions. we are taking and the actions our neighbors are taking may seem small, but they make a big difference. “
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