Grim record

Hospitalizations from virus reach a record high

Six died overnight from coronavirus in Albany County./

Six people died overnight from coronavirus, as Albany County saw 61 people hospitalized — another grim record in what has already been a deadly and dangerous month, County Executive Dan McCoy said in a briefing on Saturday.

Five of the six did not live at a group setting or a nursing home, Mccoy said.

The deaths — one woman in her 50s; one woman in her 60s; a man and woman in their 70s; and a man and a woman in their 80s — bring the number of people who’ve died from COVID-19 in the county to 157. The one person who lived at a congregate setting was not from the county-owner Shaker Place Rehabilitation and Nursing Center.

Last week alone, the virus killed nine county residents.

Rensselaer County meanwhile saw two deaths, both residents at the Eddy Heritage House in Troy. The county had a total of 40 new positives reported Saturday.

“I hope people are waking up and realizing that COVID-19 is here. We have to be more vigilant now than we’ve ever been,” Mccoy said. “We’re setting records for the month of November, and I don’t like the records we’re setting.”

The last time six people died in a single day from COVID-19 was May 4, Mccoy said.

“I think when we look back on November and the numbers that we’ve seen, we are recognizing that November was a dark month,” said County Health Commissioner

Elizabeth Whalen. “It has positioned us, unfortunately, very poorly for the upcoming holiday season.”

The county recorded 67 new positive cases overnight, Mccoy said. Of those, 15 had close contact with an infected person and one is a health care worker. Fifty-one people reported no clear source of infection, continuing a troubling trend of residents possibly not being upfront about their recent outings, which Mccoy and Whalen have repeatedly said is irresponsible.

Whalen said the county has recently worked with local hospitals on improving systems of data collection around hospitalizations. Whalen said they’ve started to get data from those improved systems this week, and they’ve detected an uptick in hospitalizations.

Whalen said the numbers are concerning because it means the people who have coronavirus are “becoming more ill.”

When there are more hospitalizations, Whalen said, there is a concern about “the capacity of our hospitals to be able to take care of people.”

“We see incidences of surge capacity affecting patient care in other parts of the country,” Whalen said. “We do not want that to happen here in Albany County.”

The 61 people hospitalized is up from the 43 reported on Friday. The previous record for hospitalizations, set Nov. 20, was 45.

Six patients were in the intensive care unit on Saturday, down from 10 on Friday.

Whalen also urged people to get their flu shots.

The share of people testing positive for coronavirus in the county over a seven-day average, which is the metric being used to determine microcluster zones, has topped 3 percent for the last seven days, according to the most recent state data available on Saturday morning.

Microcluster zones could be as small as a Zip code, census tract or neighborhood.

And to determine what will be designated as a microcluster, the state can also look at average daily cases, cases per 100,000 residents and hospital admission trends.

On Friday, 140 new cases were confirmed overnight — the second-highest one-day total for the county to date.

Statewide, 42 people were reported to have died of the illness Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said Saturday.

In other key figures, there were 3,287 patient hospitalizations, with 654 in intensive care units. The statewide positive test rate was just a shade under 4 percent.