BUFFALO, N.Y. — Erie County legislators got to question the county's health commissioner for the first time in two months regarding COVID-19 on Tuesday.
Dr. Gale Burstein appeared at a virtual meeting of the legislature's Health and Human Services Committee.
Burstein reported that COVID cases in Erie County are their lowest rate since last august and that numbers continue to drop rapidly after a seasonal surge which peaked in early January.
She also reported that 75% of the county's populace has been fully vaccinated, including two thirds of teenagers.
According to the NYS Department of Health, The number of COVID hospitalizations in the Western New York region currently stands at 171, which is down from a peak of 701 on January 18, and are at their lowest number since September 11, 2021.
Meanwhile, the numbers laid out by the county executive for lifting a remaining mask mandate for county owned buildings are close to being met.
Burstein was also asked by more than one lawmaker why the county continues its outlier status of maintaining a declared state of emergency which, as long as it exists, she is eligible to continue to receive overtime on top of her more than $200,000 per year salary.
Despite being the county's chief public health officer Burstein indicated that the decision to lift it rests with the County Executive.
Queried regarding her stance on the continued masking of children in schools, Burstein noted the decision on that is being handled by the state, but added that in her mind they are an effective means of stemming transmission.
A growing number of states, however, are waiving the mask requirements for children in schools citing evidence that suggests children in states without mask mandates face no greater risk from COVID.
More recently, The World Health Organization recommended that children under 6 years old should not be masked, and there has been an increasing amount of studies which have outlined the potentially deleterious effects of masks on learning and psychosocial development.
All the while, science and data show that children remain the least likely among the age groups to suffer serious effects from COVID, and that most of the adults they may encounter while in school are vaccinated.
Still, since the start of the pandemic nearly two years ago, Oishei Children's Hospital in Buffalo has admitted 360 patients under the age of 21 with symptoms and/or conditions associated with COVID. Of those, 83 of them (23%) required intensive care. According to Oishei, none of the patients died. According to the hospital, it currently has four COVID patients.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has indicated she will reassess the mask mandate for children while in school in early March, after their return from winter break, based in part on an expected plethora of data to be gleaned from the testing kits being issued to parents which she hopes they will use on their children.