NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – New York's coronavirus hospitalizations continued to decline Sunday as the state reached its lowest number of intensive care patients in nearly four months. However, daily cases topped 9,300 and New York is now among the U.S. states with the highest rates of infection per capita.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the number of patients in ICUs declined by 19 to 877—the lowest number since Dec. 6.
Cuomo said there has been a 46% decline in ICU patients since the "post-holiday peak" in early January, when cases and hospitalizations were surging.
The number of intubated patients also fell by 22 to 530, the lowest number since Dec. 8 and a 49% decline from the January peak.
Overall hospitalizations statewide fell by 49 patients to 4,529 on Sunday, Cuomo said.
The state reported another 9,395 new cases, the most since March 17, when there were 8,976 new cases. The last time the daily case load was over 9,000 was on March 12, when 9,299 cases were reported.
The state's single-day positivity rate was 3.52%, up from 3.15% on Saturday. The state's seven-day positivity rate was 3.45%, a slight increase from Saturday's 3.41%.
It comes as New York and New Jersey are back atop the list of U.S. states with the highest rates of infection.
Even as the vaccination campaign has ramped up, the number of new infections in New Jersey has crept up by 37% in a little more than a month, to about 23,600 every seven days. About 54,600 people in New York tested positive for the virus in the last week, a number that has begun to inch up recently.
New York and New Jersey now rank No. 1 and 2 in new infections per capita among U.S. states. New Jersey has been reporting about 647 new cases for every 100,000 residents over the past 14 days. New York has averaged 548.
The situation in New York and New Jersey mirrors a national trend that has seen case numbers inch up in recent days. The U.S. is averaging nearly 62,000 cases a day, up from 54,000 two weeks ago.
Neither New York nor New Jersey is experiencing anything like what they saw last spring, when hospitals — and morgues — were overflowing. And like the rest of the country, both are in a much better place than in January, at the peak of the pandemic's winter spike.
But the lack of improvement or even backsliding in recent weeks has raised concerns that the states are opening too quickly and people are letting down their guard too much, just as potentially more contagious variants of the virus are circulating more widely.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
