ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo provided a COVID-19 update Tuesday morning during a conference call with reporters.
With Christmas only a few days away, Cuomo is asking New Yorkers to be smart and to stop shutdowns from happening. The governor says he's expecting the number of COVID-19 cases to go up following the holidays.
"It's been a long year. Celebrate. I'm going to celebrate, but celebrate smart and stop shutdowns," Cuomo said.
The governor says New York State is "keeping a fine eye" on its hospital capacity. Currently, the state has a metric monitoring the percentage of people hospitalized in each region of the state. Cuomo says if a hospital is 21 days from reaching 85 percent hospital capacity, they must alert the state.
"That would effectively give us a month before notice, before you run into a real hospital situation," Cuomo said.
Cuomo says no hospitals in New York State have reached 85 percent capacity at this time, and this includes hospitals in New York City.
During the call, the governor addressed the most recent percent positive rates in regions across the state. Currently, Mohawk Valley has the highest percent positive rate (8.54 percent), followed by the Finger Lakes (8.39 percent).
The Western New York region's percent positive rate saw an increase from Saturday to Monday, going from 6.37 percent, to 6.42 percent and landing at 6.49 percent. The governor called the increase a "big turnaround" for the region, which had previously been seeing a decline.
Statewide, 164,868 COVID-19 tests were reported on Monday, with 9,716 coming back positive for a percent positive rate of 5.89 percent.
The state reports, 6,661 people are currently hospitalized across New York; with 1,126 in the ICU and 614 needing a ventilator.
At this time, 490 people are currently in Western New York hospitals with COVID-19, which is .04 percent of the region's population. The state estimates that 30 percent of hospital beds are available in the region.
Of those hospitalized, 326 are in the ICU. Currently, 42 percent of the region's ICU beds are available.
The governor also announced that Wadsworth Laboratory, in Albany, has started testing for the new COVID-19 strain that has been discovered in the United Kingdom. So far more than 3,700 virus sequences have been identified in New York State, but the new strain was not present in any of the samples.
In addition, Wadsworth and the New York State Department of Health have created agreements with six other hospitals, located across the state, to obtain additional samples. The governor's office says more arrangements are being made with other hospitals, including one here in Western New York.
The governor says the health department is reaching out to ECMC on Tuesday to test for the variant.
"We want to test for the variant. If it's here, we want to know it, we want to isolate it immediately. But let's learn from the spring. Dr. Fauci says he thinks it's here. If it's here, where? Where is it?" Cuomo said.