BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) – All visitors and employees at any Erie County building must wear a mask at all times, regardless of vaccination status, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said as the CDC updated its masking guidelines on Tuesday.
Previously, county employees who received a COVID-19 vaccine were not required to wear a mask, though all visitors to county buildings still had to.
There has been a notable rise of COVID-19 cases in Erie County over the last month. In the week ending June 19, there were 45 new cases reported in all of Erie County. Last week, 298 people were diagnosed with COVID-19. Still, the current numbers pale in comparison to statistics from early-April, where more than 3,000 people tested positive for each week ending on April 3, April 10, and April 17.
"Overall hospitalizations have tripled in the last ten days or have nearly triple," Poloncarz said. "But they're still very low."
The new cases are predominantly of the delta strain, which is the most prevalent strain in all of the United States.
From April 1 to July 22, there were 190 people in Erie County who died from COVID-19. Poloncarz said of those who died 182 were not fully vaccinated prior to their infection. Of the 25 people who died in that span from June through July, only two were fully vaccinated.
"If you haven't been vaccinated and you're hemming and hawing about it, please get vaccinated," Poloncarz said. "The numbers are very clear. We just saw data released by Alabama and Louisiana. About 96% of their deaths are of people who are not vaccinated. We see the same percentage here."
