Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - As COVID-19 concerns continue with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, Erie County officials updated COVID-19 response for the county on Tuesday as the Christmas holiday approaches this weekend.
"There's a lot of questions. 'Is Omicron here in our region?' We assume it is, though we do not have definitive proof yet," said Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz at the beginning of Tuesday's briefing. "The Erie County Department of Health, as well as others have been working with the [University at Buffalo Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics Institute], which does the sequencing of COVID-19 positive samples, and there's a two-week lag or so. So they're just getting the cases that were sent to them at the end of November, early December. We, as of right now, have received no confirmation that Omicron is here, but we expect it to be here, considering what we're seeing elsewhere."
The good news for Erie County over the last two weeks is there has been a decline in the both the number of COVID-19 cases and the positivity rate. Poloncarz has attributed that to the number of people doing their due diligence by wearing masks and being responsible to protect themselves and others.
While the county is happy to see those numbers going down, Poloncarz says they're not certain how long that will remain the case with the Omicron variant coming.
"Omicron appears to be much more transmissible than Delta and the prior alpha, original variant of COVID-19. Three-to-four times more transmissible," Poloncarz said. "We do expect the case numbers in Erie County to continue to, hopefully, go down, but we do expect them over time, especially with the Christmas holiday coming up, to go up, because Omicron is that much more transmissible. These are great numbers for the last couple of weeks with the decline, but we're still afraid about what the future may bring."
When it comes to hospital numbers over the last two weeks, Poloncarz says there has been a nice little decrease, but many local hospitals are still near-capacity for in-patient and ICU beds. According to Poloncarz, all ICU beds at the hospitals in the Catholic Health System were occupied as of Dec. 19, as has been the case with Buffalo General Medical Center. Millard Fillmore is currently around 90% capacity for ICU beds, while Poloncarz also mentioned that ECMC has seen a decline in capacity of their ICU beds.
It has been one month since Erie County implemented its current mask mandate, and Poloncarz believes it has made a difference with trying to obtain its goal.
"The goal was to prevent the hospitals from being overrun," Poloncarz said. "We saw what was happening, you look back basically a month at where we were and how that hospitalization number was peaking. Then we implemented the mask mandate, and it's gone down.
"Other nearby regions are not decreasing, and in fact, some are still growing. I think this is important to note, because Erie County has had a mask mandate now for one month. Others did not have a mask mandate until the Governor [Kathy Hochul] instituted, with the New York Health Commissioner, the mask mandate about 10 days ago or so. ... We are the only region really in Upstate New York, in this area that we consider our peer areas that's going down in hospitalizations. And we believe it's because of the mask mandate. It's had an impact."
The Erie County Department of Health will not be doing testing or holding vaccine clinics for both Christmas Eve this Friday and Christmas Day on Saturday. They will also be closed for the New Year holiday on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
You can listen to Tuesday's entire briefing below:
