Westchester loses 61 residents to COVID in a week and active cases climb

Rockland/Westchester Journal News

Westchester County lost 61 residents to COVID-19 in the past week, the number of active cases climbed but hospitalizations declined, County Executive George Latimer said on Tuesday.

Westchester's 11,658 active cases are up from 11,146 a week before. Two weeks ago, there were 9,389.

"That number of active cases is as high as it has been since the very first week in April," Latimer said at his daily briefing.

Vials of the COVID-19 vaccine at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx, N.Y. Dec. 21, 2020. The home, which began vaccinating their residents on Monday, received enough doses of the Pfizer vaccine to vaccinate all 600 of its residents, which it plans to do over the next three days.

The county's peak for active cases was slightly more than 12,000 in March.

"We had posited that Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve would be times when people would get together informally; they would not get together in a public setting but they would in a private setting, and that would potentially expand the number of cases," Latimer said. "And that has proven to be true so far."

As of Sunday, 513 Westchester residents were hospitalized, down from last week's high of 554.

"We're hoping that what we're watching is the beginning of a down slope in hospitalizations," said Latimer.

Westchester has lost 1,797 residents to COVID since the pandemic began.

Rockland

Rockland County saw four more residents die due to COVID since the figures that were released on Friday. The county has lost 810 people during the pandemic.

Some 823 more residents tested positive for COVID-19 since Friday's numbers, for a total of 31,884 during the pandemic.

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There were 2,811 active cases as of Tuesday, up from 2,786 reported on Friday.

Rockland had 98 hospitalizations, up by nine from Friday.

Rockland zip codes with the most active cases Tuesday were Spring Valley's 10977 with 383 cases, New City's 10956 with 288, Monsey's 10952 with 254, Suffern's 10901 with 241, and Nanuet's 10954 with 191.

Michael P. McKinney is a breaking-news reporter for the Journal News, Poughkeepsie Journal, and the Times Herald-Record.