By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh
On Saturday, the positive-test rate for Coronavirus in New York State reached 2.35 percent — the highest level in over five months for the state. There were 145,642 tests reported performed in NYS on Saturday, and of those, 3,428 results were positive, or 2.35 percent, Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted. “Sadly, there were 18 COVID fatalities,” the governor added, reporting the Stats for Friday.
The rate seems to be edging upward. On Friday, the positivity rate was 2.2 percent and on Thursday it was at 2.0 percent. The state had not exceeded a positivity rate of 2.35 percent since June 1, when the number of positive tests reached 2.5 percent.
The positivity rate in the state’s micro-cluster hot zones, which include parts of Brooklyn and Queens, was at 4.2 percent on Friday. Overall, however, the NYS positivity rate beat that in the city. New York City’s Covid-19 positivity rate was 1.8 percent, with Staten Island showing the highest positivity rate at 3 percent.
“A higher percent positive suggests higher transmission and that there are likely more people with coronavirus in the community who haven’t been tested yet,” according to epidemiology professors Dr. David Dowdy and Gypsyamber D’Souza at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The percent positive is a critical measure because it gives us an indication how widespread infection is in the area where the testing is occurring—and whether levels of testing are keeping up with levels of disease transmission,” the professors wrote.
In NYS, there was a one-day increase of 44 people hospitalized for COVID-19 on Friday. The total number of COVID-19 hospitalizations reached 1,321 — with 285 people in ICUs, and 129 of those patients on ventilators.
The U.S. has had record-high new COVID-19 case numbers each day for the past two weeks, as per Riverhead Local. On Friday, in the United States 126,480 new confirmed cases were reported, as well as 1,146 deaths, as per Johns Hopkins University. All in all, since the pandemic first began, there here have been close to 9.5 million confirmed cases in the country.
“As a matter of context, we are obviously in a different phase with COVID, and we’ve been talking about it for weeks, but we have to fully acknowledge it,” Cuomo said during a press call on Friday. “You’re seeing global and national surges that are dramatic, and that’s the new reality of COVID”. “The challenge for our state, like other states, is managing the increase,” Cuomo added.
