Like last week , case counts locally are falling substantially.
Statewide, the number of people in the hospital had leveled off in mid-August and now it seems to be more or less steadily falling. New York State ‘s peak for new cases found per 100,000 people in a week was 2,669 in the first week of 2022. The recent low was 12, in early July 2023. It is 34 now, a big drop from last week’s 51.
Here in Tompkins and its surrounding counties, our low was 6 per 100,000 in early July 2023, and we are now at 62, a significant drop from last week’s 84 . (Remember, current case counts do not include positive self-tests, reported or otherwise, so trend much further below the actual level of infection than they have in the past.)
The local county-by-county breakdown looks like:
per 100,000 people Case counts fell in every county, with Cortland County especially continuing its steep drop. For more detail on a specific county (including the unadjusted numbers of cases), click the county’s name for a full table. You can get a sense of how this region compares to the rest of New York State with this map . (The new dataset bounces around a bit more than the old one, with a few counties reporting an additional case or two in the previous week.)
This graph shows weekly new cases per 100,000 people for Tompkins County and the six counties surrounding it as a bar graph. The line is for New York State overall, as a comparison.
Case counts in Tompkins and surrounding counties, March to October
The New York State wastewater dashboard is down this week, so I have nothing to report there.
As of September 2023, New York State stopped reporting the total number of tests in each county. None of the reports include home tests, which are, of course, the vast majority of tests right now. I suspect that I’d need to multiply positive results by a factor of ten or more to really compare with previous years’ more PCR-based testing, but there’s no easy way to know exactly. I reported on overall percent positivity in September 2023 .
As noted earlier, and explained in depth previously , case counts haven’t ever necessarily been the best guide to where we are in the pandemic, especially when we know that many of these cases are in younger people who are at least less likely to suffer permanent harm. Hospitalizations and deaths are, alas, better though still incomplete guides to the level of damage done. Even before self-tests, which aren’t counted, were common, we missed many cases. The end of readily available testing makes that worse. The imperfect nature of testing means that there are false positives and negatives sprinkled in as well. Case counts remain the best data we have for how infection is spreading in a given area, and the earliest signal for when and where to take extra precautions, but it’s clear that they represent a far smaller share of actual overall cases than they did in previous years.
All the same data issues as always apply here. You can also explore this data as a page with clickable maps and sortable data tables , as well as county by county weekly history . If you want to see how cases have shifted over time, this animation shows weekly shifts since March 1, 2020 . I’m also still updating a week over week spreadsheet regularly .
Let’s keep these numbers dropping. Stay safe!
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Related: Coronavirus coverage in 14850 Today
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