County records virus highs
Overnight COVID-19 cases hit 208, 98 are hospitalized
Albany County added a record 208 new coronavirus cases and now has 98 residents hospitalized, county officials said Thursday.
County Executive Dan Mccoy said the county also had two more people die from the disease. The victims are a man in his 70s and a woman in her 90s. The county ’s death toll is now 172 people. Schenectady County reported that two more residents also died: One was a woman in her 80s and the other was a woman in her 50s.
In Albany County, of the new cases, 173 did not have a clear source of transmission. Another 21 had close contact with a positive case and 14 were health care workers.
The new record in cases and hospitalizations are likely a result of increased transmission during the Thanksgiving holiday, Mccoy said.
“We’re at that peak where we thought we’d be,” he said.
Mccoy and Dr. Ferdinand Venditti,
Albany Medical Center Hospital’s executive vice president for system care delivery and its general director, discussed the potential vaccines for the disease, what rollout in the Capital Region might look like and where the region’s cases and hospitalizations are compared to earlier in the pandemic.
While the region’s cases and hospitalizations continue to grow, the area as a whole is better off than other parts of the state. Mccoy noted that the region’s number of hospitalizations per 100,000 people and hospital bed availability were in better shape than the state average.
Those metrics are two of the key points the state will be looking at as it rolls out its new microcluster strategy. Mccoy said the county has still not received that guidance from the state.
Venditti said that while Albany Med and other regional hospitals work together to ensure they ’re balancing the patient load, they ’re also keeping a close eye on the region’s numbers.
“We’re are prepared to provide the care the community needs. That doesn’t mean we’re not worried about what’s happening,” he said. “The numbers are troubling.”
Venditti noted that Albany Med is seeing a much broader range of hospitalizations than earlier in the pandemic but better outcomes thanks to a number of factors, including doctors knowing what works to treat the disease.
As of Thursday, Albany Med had 63 hospitalized COVID -19 patients, ranging from 17 to 96 years old, he said. But only two patients were on ventilators.
“That’s very different than what we saw back in the spring,” he said. “In the spring, those numbers would have been about double — about twice as many patients in the ICU and half of those patients in the ICU would have been on ventilators.”
The hospital has also been preparing for a potential vaccine rollout since September, examining issues such as consent, how it would be administered, how to track those who received the first shot of the vaccine and notify them for their second dose and how to get that information to state health officials.
Venditti said the hospital would not require its workers to get the vaccine but in a hospital survey, roughly 80 percent of them indicated they would take it.
The Federal Drug Administration recommended authorization for the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday.
Venditti said that while Albany Med does have a refrigerator cold enough to store the vaccine vials, which must be kept at ultra-cold temperatures, he did not yet know if it would be one of the 90 cold storage sites across the state designated to store doses.