The Local COVID Data Gap; 1,611 Westchester Resident Deaths – Monday, December 21, 2020

(PHOTO: Rye guy and Westchester County boss George Latimer during his December 21, 2020 press briefing.)

On Monday, Rye guy and Westchester County boss George Latimer addressed the vacuum of local city and town COVID data since the County suspended the release of the daily COVID map one week ago. “We are putting out information that is not accurate enough to satisfy us, and it is not complete enough, so I made the decision to pull the map,” said Latimer, who said the County was working on a map with better data that will be interactive with total and active cases.

It was not completely clear to this writer, but Latimer seemed to say the local data they have been providing somehow did not foot with data from the New York State tracker. That is more than a little confusing since all the COVID health data is collected by the State and then released back down to County level authorities. No data is collected directly by the County.

Latimer did say Westchester has asked the State in writing for local hospitalization and fatality data since the State now plans to use this data (versus active cases data) to determine Yellow / Orange / Red Zone designations. He was hopeful the local level data would resume publication by the end of this week. “I want to report complete information… I want all of us to have accurate data.”

If you want to see Latimer discuss this topic, watch his news conference from Monday afternoon. He hits on the topic a number of times – try minutes 13:20, 22:50, 23:40 and 28:50.

Just like everyone else, county executives look at the NY State COVID-19 tracker for county and state level statistics on the pandemic and at the NY State regional  monitoring dashboard to see our progress towards continued reopening.

The COVID-19 numbers:

Fatalities of Westchester residents: 1,611
Fatalities at Westchester nursing homes – The Osborn Home in Rye is reporting six (6) confirmed COVID-19 deaths and six (6) presumed COVID-19 deaths thru December 20th (that’s no new confirmed deaths since the prior update). There is no data from Rye Manor or Vienna Senior Housing.)
Fatalities in Westchester: 1,755
Numbers of persons tested: 1,317,137
Tested positive: 63,373
% Positive results: 4.8%
Persons tested today: 8,236
New positives today: 433