Onondaga County surpasses 20K COVID-19 cases since start of pandemic

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon on Wednesday reported 336 new coronavirus cases, bringing the county’s case total since the pandemic started, to above the 20,000 mark, at 20,006.

“That’s certainly a number that we probably never thought we would’ve gotten to, but we’re here,” McMahon said in his remarks at the Oncenter.

In addition to the case count, McMahon also reported 10 people have died from the disease in the last day, including six people who passed away in a nursing home. Onondaga County’s death total toll now stands at 429.

McMahon went on to note that Onondaga County recorded 10,000 COVID-19 cases between the start of the pandemic locally in mid-March and Nov. 28, a span of eight months. The county recorded the next 10,000 cases between Nov. 29 and Dec. 30, a span of just 31 days.

“I think there’s a lot of reasons that we can all reflect on and see where we are — one being that, certainly this season is much more favorable grounds for the virus to transmit as people are indoors,” McMahon said. “Certainly, we’ve seen a lot of living-room spread.”

The county executive also reported 309 people with COVID-19 are currently in local hospitals, which is down from 315 on Tuesday and 336 Monday. The figure includes 46 people in an intensive-care unit, which is down two from Tuesday.

With New Year’s Eve on Thursday, McMahon is also asking the public to celebrate in their homes and not in gatherings.

“We cannot mess around right now. We’ve seen what happened at Thanksgiving. We don’t know what’s going to happen with a surge in cases from Christmas, and now we got New Year’s Eve. We can control New Year’s Eve. We can control what we do. … We are very close [to] having staffing problems with our hospitals,” said McMahon.

Regarding the vaccination process, McMahon tweeted, “Our Vaccination Pod is vaccinating Phase 1a of the NYS Vaccination Plan. We are making progress each day with increased capacity.”