Covid-19 hospitalizations continued to tick downward Sunday for the 13th straight day, even as the number of confirmed virus cases climbed yet again in Suffolk County.
There are now 813 people in hospitals across the county, down from a peak of 1,658 on April 11. That also brings the county closer to a 30-percent buffer in overall hospital capacity; national and state health agencies have said regions need to experience at least 14 days of continual declines in hospitalizations plus achieve hospital capacity of 70 percent in order to move forward with phased-in plans to restart the local economy.
However, there were 889 new Covid-19 cases reported by Sunday as of 3 p.m.; now included in new-case statistics are people who did not take diagnostic tests but rather had antibody tests that turned up positive results. There were 37,071 cases across the county as of that time. The previous day, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone reported that confirmed positives were up by 805, again including results of new antibody tests.
He called the continually rising new-case number a "wake-up call."
"We don't have a lot of room to spare in these numbers," he said, referring to the downward trends and the threshold for reopening the economy.
Suffolk's rate of transmission, as reported to county officials by New York State, is .75, meaning that for every four people infected with Covid-19, the virus is transmitted to three more people. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Friday that New York State's overall rate of transmission is on the decline, but must not reach 1.1. That, he has said, is the marker of uncontrollable spread.
When asked how Suffolk County's rate of transmission has been faring, Dr. Gregson Pigott, the commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, said, "that's not a publicly available number." He said the state calculates the information and provides a rate to each county. "There is no mechanism for us to track that at this time," Dr. Pigott said.