Erie County / YouTube
The long fight against COVID is more and more becoming a debate about when to wear or not wear a mask.
New York State has now joined the Centers for Disease Control recommendations to ease mask requirements, indoors and outdoors. But that s where it starts getting complicated. Erie County officials spent their Tuesday briefing trying to clarify the current requirements.
Credit Erie County Department of Health
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said anyone visiting a county building has to wear a mask. Some county workers have to wear masks all the time if they interact with the public and others have to wear masks some of the time.
Erie County Department of Health
Erie County is showing sign of having the same problems getting young people vaccinated against COVID-19 as with older groups.
The statistics show a problem with COVID among young people, although it may be easing. In a briefing Tuesday, county officials said the numbers are down slightly, but there were 222 cases last week in the 18-22 age group, for which there is a vaccine. We re seeing a lot more clusters, said County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein. We re seeing clusters and cases in child care centers, youth sports teams. Sports teams, where we are seeing the most, it s football, cheerleading and volleyball. We are also now seeing outbreaks, transmission in K-12 classrooms.
Office of the Governor
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is allowing more fans to go inside museums, movie theaters and big indoor sports arenas, as the latest data suggests the state s massive vaccination campaign is curbing COVID-19 infection levels.
The state recorded 43,000 new cases in the week that ended Saturday. That s the lowest number in a seven-day period since Thanksgiving. The numbers are stable and going down, so we can start to open up more economic activity, Cuomo said Monday.
Hospitalizations are also slowly dropping. Hospitals in New York reported 3,754 patients with COVID-19 as of Saturday, down 14% from two weeks prior.
New York has recorded among the nation s highest levels of infections and hospitalizations in recent months, as cases surged across upstate in the winter and then throughout New York City and its surrounding suburbs in the early spring.
Erie Cou
Erie County health officials are seeing a surge in COVID infections among students.
In an afternoon briefing Tuesday, County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said there were 421 reported cases last week, when almost all schools were on break, and 87 cases already Tuesday before the briefing began. We were expecting for last week a very small number of school-related case reports because the schools weren’t obligated to report, Burstein said. However, despite that, we still saw a significant number of school reports, actually the second highest number when the first highest was the week before.
Earlier in the pandemic, common belief was that kids couldn’t get COVID. The health commissioner said it is now clear that isn’t true and they can get very sick.
Right now, the cutoff is age 16 for the vaccine, while research continues. Pfizer is also doing a different study for kids 5-11 and Moderna has clinical trials underway for similar age groups. Any of them would require FDA approval for widespread vaccinations. An application from Pfizer is expected soon.
Oishei Children’s Hospital infections specialist Dr. Karl Yu said adolescents are hospitalized there with bad cases of COVID. Of the ones who do get admitted, they are as sick. Many of them need oxygen. Many of them need to be intubated. The ones who get this MIS-C illness, it gets really complicated, in which we have multiple sub-specialties treating the patient at the same time because we are putting out multiple fires in multiple different burners, if you will, for that one kid, Yu said.