Niagara County Public Health Director Daniel J. Stapleton issued a statement this morning on the rising COVID numbers in Niagara County. It follows below in its entirety.
“The surge in positive COVID-19 cases brought on by the omicron variant, the changes in testing protocols with the wide distribution of at-home test kits and the need to prioritize our resources in a manner that best serves the public health care needs of Niagara County has led us to make significant changes in our weekly update starting today and going forward.
“We do not make these changes lightly, as we recognize that many in the public seek as much information as possible. But between the surge and other changes, the demands on staff are overwhelming and we do not want there to be any question about the accuracy of our data.
“Therefore, we are going to rely on information tracked by New York State in regards to Niagara County and the Western New York region, which is very extensive and provides many different data points beyond what we have traditionally put in our report. We will report once a week on the latest data from the state, but any member of the public can visit the state site at https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-data-new-york for daily updates. Along with that change, we will be no longer be updating the county heat maps that showed COVID-19 cases by locality.”
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The Niagara County Department of Health issued the following weekly update on positive COVID-19 cases in Niagara County based on data from https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-data-new-york for the last week.
Current Report Previous Report
- New positive cases, last 7 days 2916 952
- Total Cases (from start of pandemic) 36,113 33,197
- Deaths (from start of pandemic) 477* 477
- Residents with one at least one vaccine dose 143,878 143,023
- Daily new cases per 100K residents, 7-day avg. 209 72
- % Hospital Beds Available, 7-day avg.
- Eastern Niagara Hospital 39% N/A
- Niagara Falls Memorial 21% N/A
- Mt. St. Mary’s 7% N/A
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* With the switch from county to state data for the tally of Niagara County fatalities, we believe there may be a lag in state reporting, thus showing no deaths in the last week which may not be accurate. If there were indeed deaths in the last week, they will be included in next week’s report.
