BUFFALO (WBEN) - Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz and Commissioner of Health Dr. Gale Burstein expressed sincere concern in the upward trend of COVID-19 cases in the county during a Thursday afternoon press conference, even warning of potential shutdowns.
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As of Thursday afternoon, there are 126 people who are hospitalized in Western New York, including 84 in Erie County. Of those in an Erie County hospital, 17 people are in intensive care. The county executive expects the hospital numbers to increase, noting that there have been three times as many positives cases as of November 7 than there were the previous month.
"We are quickly inching our way up to the steep slope where we're going to see an exponential explosion of hospital admissions if we don't take action now," said Burstein.
Dr. Peter Winkelstein serves as the executive director of the Institute for Healthcare Informatics at the University at Buffalo, and the goal of his team is to try to understand the number of patients that are likely to be in the hospital systems, and they then inform the hospital systems as well as the Erie County Department of Health on how to best prepare for impending waves.
"We look primarily at the hospital census numbers - how many patients are in the hospital in Erie County - and we also look at the testing results - how many patients are testing positive, what fraction of tests are positive, the so-called positivity rate, and we use that data to try to help us get a handle on what might be coming to the hospitals," said Winkelstein.
Below are some of the analytics findings from their November 9 report:
"One of the issues that's of concern to me is that positivity rate appears to be continuing to climb, and if that's the case, that means that at least over the next few weeks, the number of patients in the hospital will continue to climb," said Winkelstein.
As of now, Winkelstein said the healthcare systems are doing okay, but obviously officials want to avoid some of the problems going on in other parts of the country where hospitals are overwhelmed with cases. He also added that the Erie County hospital system is better equipped to handle a surge in cases due to the acquisition of PPE equipment.
"Every health system has a finite capacity, and so the danger is that the number of cases at some point would be higher than the capacity that we can handle," he said. "The only thing that is going to really control that is community behavior."
