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2 categories continue to hold up Western New York reopening

Hospitalization rates and deaths in hospitals fail to fall to satisfactory level for Governor Cuomo's guidelines on reopening.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — There are seven benchmarks that need to be met before a region in New York State can even consider reopening.

While four regions in the state have met all seven, Western New York has only five.

"We're headed in the wrong direction," Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said glumly during a Wednesday afternoon news briefing.

Poloncarz was referring to the two metrics the so-called Western Region, as designated by the state, has yet to meet to be allowed to reopen, and which have to do with hospitalizations and hospital deaths.

The region includes Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties.

The fates of each county within the region are all tied together, allowing none of them to open, even though individually they might meet all the state's criteria.

One category requires a 14-day decline in net hospitalizations (the Western region currently stands at 0), or having less than 15 new hospitalizations on average over three days, and right now our average is 28.

The other metric we're not meeting is a 14-day decline in hospital deaths (we've only four days right now), or fewer than five hospital deaths on average over three days, and right now we average nine deaths per day.

Dr. Thomas Russo, the chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo, said that to lower infection rates and hospitalization numbers, people must continue to abide by public health measures.

"Hand hygiene, social distancing, all of the things we have been talking about: Russo said. "If we all do this and I know the majority of people have, but we really need to get everyone to do this so we can really get those new infections down and therefore achieve the metrics needed to reopen the Western New York region."

The number of COVID-19 related deaths continues to rise in Erie County. 

According to the county's COVID-19 map, there are now 400 COVID-19 related deaths in Erie County.

Erie County has 4,579 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday. That's up from 4,484 on May 11. At this time, Erie County has conducted 27,864 coronavirus tests.

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