ALBANY — The COVID-positive patient census jumped 7.5% in the Capital Region and 9% statewide from Saturday to Sunday.
Capital Region residents continue to account for a disproportionately small percentage of those severely ill with the virus once again surging through the state: Only 302 of 9,653 COVID patients statewide were being treated in Capital Region hospitals as of Sunday, the state Department of Health reported Monday.
Capital Region hospitals reported the following percentage of available beds and number of COVID patients Sunday:
- Albany Medical Center — 12% — 84
- Columbia Memorial — 14% — 24
- Ellis — 24% — 31
- Glens Falls — 29% — 23
- St. Peter’s — 12% — 62
- Samaritan — 11% — 38
- Saratoga — 17% — 40
In nearby areas of the Mohawk Valley, the numbers were:
- Cobleskill Regional — 6% — 4
- Little Falls — 6% — 3
- Nathan Littauer — 43% — 8
- St. Mary’s Healthcare — 16% — 22
With Sunday’s admissions, the state has now exceeded the hospitalization peak during last winter’s COVID surge: 9,273 on Jan. 19, 2021. But it remains far short of the all-time peak: 18,825 on April 12, 2020.
Gov. Kathy Hochul addressed the rapid rise in hospitalizations in a news conference Monday:
“That is a trend that is, again, troubling. We are looking at the percentages of each region. How many cases, as well as how many hospitalizations, we’re not where we were, but we’re not looking to break that record from April 12th. … And this is not that wave we saw last year. It kind of kept going up and up. This is straight up and I’d love to see it come straight down. We just don’t have a time on that, but we’re doing all we can.”
Medical and public health officials are optimistic that the variant of COVID currently racing through the United States, omicron, will be less likely than other variants to result in serious symptoms or death, and will play itself out faster because it spreads so quickly.
Meanwhile, other metrics of the COVID pandemic eased a bit Sunday: A total of 51,698 positive test results were reported statewide Sunday, which would have been a shockingly high number in early December but is noticeably lower than the one-day totals in late December.
“Unfortunately I’m going to say [this] is a result of the holiday weekend,” Hochul said Monday. “Those numbers are probably going to be much higher tomorrow. They didn’t go from nearly 90,000 to 51,000. That is simply a function of people not getting tested over the weekend.”
The following list shows the percentage of people testing positive and the number of new infections per 100,000 residents of the county or region, averaged over the previous seven days:
- Albany — 17.8% — 154.9
- Fulton — 13.9% — 93.3
- Montgomery — 12.5% — 121.9
- Rensselaer — 16.0% — 144.1
- Saratoga — 16.3% — 176.6
- Schenectady — 14.6% — 166.2%
- Schoharie — 13.9% — 96.0
- Capital Region — 16.1% — 155.1
- Mohawk Valley — 13.2% — 126.5
- New York City — 22.3% — 457.7
- New York State — 21.5% — 335.0
For the week ending Sunday, 11,777 positive tests were recorded in the eight-county Capital Region.
This included 3,331 in Albany County, 2,845 in Saratoga County and 1,807 in Schenectady County — a bit more than 1% of each county’s population.
