In his first public briefing of the new year, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon said there has been what he called a “decoupling” of the ratio of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations from this point last year.
The county has seen record numbers of new daily cases in the last week or so, likely spurred by the more contagious omicron variant of the virus. Health officials have maintained that omicron appears to spread easier, but is milder, leading to fewer people in the hospital.
“We have 6,263 active cases,” McMahon said. “Throughout the pandemic, we saw essentially about 8% of those active cases would turn into hospitalizations. If that was the case today, we’d have over 500 residents in the hospital.”
McMahon said there are currently 157 people in the hospital, with 845 new cases reported in the last 24 hours.
“You look at the increased cases we’ve been dealing with, the number [of hospitalizations] is still much lower,” McMahon said.
McMahon said the number of hospitalizations will likely still increase due to the recent case surge, but not to levels seen last winter. After a record 2,070 new cases were reported on New Year’s Eve, McMahon said the county expects to see a few more days of elevated caseloads.
“We anticipate to have high case levels for another two weeks,” McMahon said. “Some days being probably being very high, some days probably coming back down to numbers that are higher than what we’re used to, but, you know, 400s, 500s on the low end, 2,000 on the high end.”
There were no new deaths reported Tuesday.
