Case counts leapt over last week’s numbers, both statewide and locally, but Tompkins County itself is tied as the county in New York State reporting the lowest number of cases per person. Surrounding counties are not as lucky, as this map suggests.
Case counts by county per person, December 2nd, 2023
Though Tompkins County case counts may be lower than our neighbors, our wastewater data continues to rise. Cayuga Heights Wastewater Plant kept climbing in the New York State wastewater dashboard, though as usual there’s been a fair amount of bouncing. Ithaca wastewater testing (which reports on five times as many customers) also climbed. (Their reporting ends last week, so is a little behind.)
Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Plant data, May 2022 to November 2023
Cayuga Heights Wastewater Treatment Plant data, February 2022 to November 2023
Tompkins County hospitalization counts had been at eight on February 24th, and bottomed out at two on August 25th. They were at seven last week, and stayed there this week. The number of people in the hospital statewide continued its upward march. (The Tompkins County COVID-19 Dashboard had shown 107 deaths, with the most recent resident death the week of September 8th, but they are no longer reporting deaths because New York State is no longer providing the information.)
New York State‘s pre-Omicron peak for new cases found per 100,000 people in a week had been 562, in the week ending January 9th, 2021. The highest peak overall was 2,669 in the first week of 2022. The recent low was 12, in early July 2023. It is 95 now, up from last week’s 67. Here in Tompkins and its surrounding counties, our low was 6 per 100,000 in early July, and we are now at 103, way up from last week’s 56. (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:
| County | to 11/18/2023 | to 11/25/2023 | to 12/2/2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tompkins | 42 | 26 | 42 |
| Tioga | 73 | 48 | 156 |
| Seneca | 85 | 115 | 97 |
| Schuyler | 50 | 45 | 164 |
| Cortland | 97 | 41 | 119 |
| Chemung | 117 | 84 | 138 |
| Cayuga | 58 | 57 | 94 |
Tioga, Schuyler, and Cortland counties saw the largest increases. Tompkins is still reporting fewer cases per person than surrounding counties. 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.
New cases reported in Tompkins and surrounding counties, May to November
As of the data for August 31st, New York State stopped reporting the number of tests in each county. There is still a data set reporting the number of positive tests, splitting out PCR and antigen tests, but it doesn’t include home tests, which are, of course, the vast majority of tests right now. I suspect that I 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 the September 20th article.
As noted earlier, and explained in depth previously, case counts have never 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 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 updating a week over week spreadsheet more occasionally.
Last week’s downward trend now looks like it was a holiday blip. Stay safe!
For more, follow 14850.com on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or subscribe to the 14850 Magazine Daily newsletter.
Related: Coronavirus coverage in 14850 Today
