“Sadly we have three additional deaths we’re announcing this afternoon,” Broome County Executive Jason Garnar said at his daily coronavirus briefing. “This is a terrible virus.”
The three victims were a woman over 100 years old, a man in his 90s, and a woman in her 60s.
The county has reported seven COVID-19 deaths in the last seven days.
As of 2 p.m. Thursday, Broome County had 244 total coronavirus infections. It had 86 recoveries, 143 active cases, and the 15 deaths. The county said 12 people are currently in the hospital with COVID-19, while the other 131 active positives are recovering at home.
Broome County has tested 1,699 people so far with 1,423 negative, 244 positive, and 32 pending test results.
The county is now testing more people with mild coronavirus symptoms than it had earlier in the COVID-19 fight. The county’s two hospitals — UHS and Lourdes — on Tuesday started testing residents with low-level indications of the bug if their health-care provider recommends that they should be tested. The two hospitals had about 9,000 tests on hand as of that day.