Brett Dahlberg

Monroe County needs more coronavirus testing capacity to prepare for the start of the school year, county public health commissioner Dr. Michael Mendoza said on Friday.

Students who have any symptoms of COVID-19 either need a positive coronavirus test to start isolation until they're no longer contagious, or a negative test and a note from a health care provider after their symptoms resolve, to go back to school, according to the health department's instructions.

Mendoza said the number of tests required to meet those needs will likely exceed the current capacity of diagnostic laboratories in the county.

"Based on our estimates, we're going to need to have about 1,000 additional tests per day," he said.

Dr. Ann Falsey, one of the principal investigators of the vaccine treatment and evaluation unit at the University of Rochester, sees a consistent problem in her research.

“We’ll get a thousand people who want to be part of vaccine studies,” Falsey said. “Ninety-nine percent of them will be white people who live in the suburbs.”

The Monroe County public health department has stopped publishing county-level COVID-19 hospitalization statistics daily. The county health department said this week that it will instead report regional figures from the nine-county Finger Lakes region that New York state uses to assess reopening readiness. 

The health department had been receiving multiple census files from hospitals in the county and communicating directly with hospital staff to compile the local numbers in its daily reports. “We are no longer doing that,” said spokesperson Julie Philipp.

The number of people in intensive care units for COVID-19 treatment in Monroe County reached its highest point in almost two months on Thursday, according to figures from the county health department.

The county said there were 10 people with COVID-19 on ventilators for life support. It’s the first time in almost two months that ICU numbers have been in the double digits, but it’s still far below the peak of the local epidemic in April and May.

School districts in the Rochester area said Monday that they should not appear on a list, published by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office, of districts that have not submitted reopening plans.

The governor’s office published the list of 107 districts shortly after Cuomo held a briefing late Monday morning. “How they didn't submit a plan is beyond me,” he said.