Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon is asking the state Department of Health to allow nursing home residents to recover in a designated facility rather than at the hospital while they await a negative COVID-19 test. An Executive Order by the Governor requires nursing home residents to test negative for COVID-19 before returning to their home.
McMahon said it can sometimes take weeks to test negative after contracting the virus. This means there are people currently in the hospital who no longer need care, but are occupying beds.
“This issue today is 20 beds. But we’ve seen a constant flow from nursing home cases to hospitalizations to ICUs,” said McMahon. “So, there is a pipeline of cases, and this is going to continue. So, this will be a bigger problem if we don’t head it off, but we’ve got to plan.”
Onondaga County made a similar proposal at the end of May, but never got approval by the state. McMahon said the current situation is different than a few months ago.
“This number was being held up, held against us for restart. So, the pressure was to get your economy open. Now these are folks again we need them out of the hospital because we need those beds for other sick people. So, it just shows you how the same issue has come up, but for very different reasons.”
There was a total of 248 people in the hospital from the virus, as of Thursday. McMahon said area hospitals are about 70% full and working to create 25% additional capacity. The current hospital numbers and persistently high daily caseloads have some community members calling for more economic restrictions. But McMahon says the activity driving up to 80% of current cases is social gatherings in private residences.
“So I understand the anxiety. If there were an easy fix, we would be doing it. There’s not an easy fix at this point,” said McMahon. “These are peak conditions for any virus in the covid family to spread. This is where we are. We need to do the things that we can control as a community, and that is making good decisions related to your social gatherings.”
McMahon said it is near impossible to impose and enforce restrictions on these personal choices. Thursday recorded 293 new cases of the coronavirus and 6 additional deaths. McMahon expects the number of cases Friday to set another single day record for most cases in a day.
