BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) – Erie County is continuing to monitor a rising number of positive coronavirus cases in some zip codes.
In a Wednesday news conference, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the 14212 zip code, which represents Buffalo's East Side and the Village of Sloan, had a positivity rate of 6.6 percent last week. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been 233 confirmed cases of coronavirus in that community.
Other communities that have seen a rising number of cases include the zip codes 14222, 14228, 14051, 14213, and 14059. Those zip codes include, respectively, Elmwood Village, Getzville, East Amherst, Buffalo's West Side, and Elma. All of those areas had a positivity rate of greater than two percent last week. Elmwood Village saw a 4.8 percent rate.
"We are really watching zip codes as a result of New York State's cluster initiative to determine where the hot spots are," Poloncarz said.
The high positivity rate in the Village of Sloan does not mean there were many people who tested positive. Poloncarz said several of the cases were family-related.
"We've actually spoken to the New York State Department of Health and we know New York State is monitoring those zip code areas to determine if we start falling into the yellow, orange, or red cluster zones as New York State has determined," he said. "Thankfully, we have not had huge numbers like we have in other places. We were very concerned about the 14213 zip code not too long ago. It's numbers have gone down, thankfully."
The state's cluster initiative is intended to mitigate areas where coronavirus is rampant in the community. Several areas in and around New York City were deemed hotspots, though Broome County was also considered a hot spot by the state.
Poloncarz said if the large percentage of positive cases in the Sloan community was due to community spread, it's likely the state would have declared a cluster.
"More than half of those cases are associated with just a few households, individual households," Erie County Health Commissioner Gale Burstein said. "We really think there are just a few families that had bad luck and they were larger families…These are just zip codes, so the denominator is very small. A small change in the number of positive tests will greatly increase or decrease the proportion of positive tests."
