Onondaga County has 10,000 cases of the coronavirus. Almost half confirmed this month

Syracuse, NY – Onondaga County today surpassed 10,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus – and 46% of those were discovered this month, according to an analysis of county data by syracuse.com The post- standard.

The number of cases today was much lower than in previous days. Onondaga County Director Ryan McMahon has confirmed 136 more cases in the county. But they came after several days of confirming more than 200 new cases. There have been 10,026 confirmed cases.

Three other people have died, McMahon reported: a 75-year-old woman, a 92-year-old man and a resident of a nursing home where no details were available.

That’s 12 reported deaths in the county in the past four days.

And Onondaga County hit another record high number of hospitalizations today, with 132 patients in hospitals, McMahon said. Twenty-two of them are in intensive care units, he said.

In the first eight months of the coronavirus pandemic, Onondaga County has confirmed just over 5,400 cases of Covid-19, according to county data.

Then came November – and 4,606 other cases. That means 46% of the county’s Covid-19 cases have struck in just one month.

Onondaga County confirmed its first two cases of the coronavirus on March 16. They were a married couple, the woman in her sixties. They hadn’t traveled recently.

The news, McMahon explained at the time, meant the virus was here.

Over the following weeks, as businesses and schools close, cases of Covid-19 increased steadily but slowly. At the end of March, 31 cases. Most of April, there were 40-50 cases per day, syracuse.com analysis | The Post-Standard shows. In May, the daily workload spiked into the 1980s.

But by the end of the summer, the county was reporting a few dozen new cases per day. In September, those positive test results fell to single digits.

Even when schools and colleges reopened, cases didn’t increase right away. It was not until November that the number of cases started to exceed 200 per day on certain days.

This fall, the county went 24 days with no reported deaths, data showed.

To date, 238 people have died linked to Covid-19, according to the county.

There was good news, according to McMahon.

The number of active cases is down from 209 to 1,770, he reported. He also urged people to closely monitor testing rates over the next few days. Positive rates can fluctuate, he said, as testing during the holidays has fluctuated.

And of 227 tests most recently administered at the Oncenter, only one came back positive, McMahon said.

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